The Nature of Things

David Sedaris is a misanthrope and I'm okay with that; I am sympathetic to the impulse.  At the same time, Sedaris is fascinated by people even as he is repelled by them. They are, after all, the stuff out of which he has constructed his living. His stories of his interactions with quirky people, many of them members of his own family, have now filled the pages of nine essay collections and made him a very wealthy man. Sedaris is a master at making us laugh out loud at some of the crazy antics he and his family get up to, as well as his interactions with people that he meets at his book signings and on publicity tours around the country and the world. He does it again in Calypso . My daughter and I listened to the book, narrated by the author, on our recent road trip and at times we laughed out loud until tears rolled down our cheeks. But this book also contains some poignant tales, particularly those featuring his mother, who died of cancer, and his sister, Tiffany, who committed ...

If you are planning a road trip this summer and need an audio book to entertain you along the way, I can strongly recommend David Sedaris' latest. It is a compilation of excerpts from diaries that he has kept for twenty-five years, from 1977-2002. In his introduction to the book, Sedaris outlines the difference between the kind of diary that a person imagines s/he will keep and the kind that a person actually keeps. One imagines, he says, that one will address topics of great import, such as political and social injustice, but what one ends up writing about is petty things - "questioning fondue or describing those ferrets you couldn't afford." The Sedaris diaries are very personal. The only political or national issue included in them is the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11/01, an event which he watched on TV in Paris. Other than that, he regales us with tales of his experiences with hitchhiking around the country and about his relationships with his various ...