Seeing Hugh’s sorrow, though, is “When you realize you’d give anything to make that other person stop hurting, if only so he can tear your head off again.” Sedaris, raised in hurricane country, isn’t much surprised. But it turns poignant when the Sea Section, the vacation home on Emerald Isle, North Carolina, they all share, is destroyed by Hurricane Florence. The first part of “Hurricane Season” is a funny account of his relationship with Hugh and the bickering between Hugh and the Sedaris family. He writes about other kinds of loss as well. Lou was a character, Sedaris realizes, but that’s what created the tight bond among his children - having to deal with him. They have to tackle the condition of their childhood home, where Lou has been hoarding for several decades - his clothes, some so old they’re rotting, “filled seven large closets, one of them a walk-in, and hung off the shower-curtain rods in all three bathrooms.” If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.Some of the essays reveal less than wonderful details about Lou, like his sometimes cruel or creepy behavior toward his kids. In Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. And back on the road, he discovers a battle-scarred America: people weary, storefronts empty or festooned with Help Wanted signs, walls painted with graffiti reflecting the contradictory messages of our time: Eat the Rich. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone’s son.
His offer to fix a stranger’s teeth rebuffed, he straightens his own, and ventures into the world with new confidence. He vacuums his apartment twice a day, fails to hoard anything, and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine.Īs the world gradually settles into a new reality, Sedaris too finds himself changed.
To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. As Happy-Go-Lucky opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes.īut then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he’s stuck in lockdown, unable to tour and read for audiences, the part of his work he loves most. David Sedaris, the “champion storyteller,” ( Los Angeles Times) returns with his first new collection of personal essays since the bestselling Calypso Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask-or not-was a decision made mostly on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things.
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