In many ways 2020 probably hasn't turned out quite as David Sedaris imagined it in the early 2000s, his father still being alive--going on 96 and living an assisted living home last I heard--being the most positive aspect. Get over it and enjoy the ride, is my approach. The ride includes experiences of being gay and coming out (horrible and hilarious!), portraits of various family members that bring the people as vividly alive as any long-running sitcom is capable, and living on his own for the first time, which includes apartment living in general and specifically the trials of low-income housing. I'm currently doing a rereading project to see what holds up and what doesn't and so far, David Sedaris is hitting it out of the park. If you enjoy humorous collections of autobiographical essays, I think you'll really enjoy Sedaris's writings. He's not very PC and sometimes he says things that are actually pretty offensive, but it helps that he doesn't spare himself when unleashing his cruel wit. He lets us see him at his best-- and also, at his worst.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique: I wasn’t going to buy Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim in print, but I saw the audio version, read by Sedaris himself, on sale at CompUSA when they were going out of business and selling their entire inventory for cheap. I couldn’t resist even though I much prefer to read books rather than to listen to them. I did nothing with it for more than a year until I decided I should listen to it while going for walks around my neighborhood.He demanded and received an extended lifetime warranty on the refrigerator, meaning, I guessed, that should it leak in the year 2020, he'd return from the grave and trade it in." Repeat After Me" - Sedaris' visit to his sister Lisa, and his family's feelings about being the subject of his essays

But I like it, the mini humor tales are perfect for in between, whenever one doesn´t want to exhaust oneself with reading something more complex or of high quality with full focus on enjoying the art, the perfect stopgap. I would really like to know how much of it is authentic and what just exaggerated or fictional, because I could truly imagine super sized families acting in a Malcolm in the Middle or Married with kids style or whatever sitcoms taught us about it. Sedaris is a master at autobiographical essays. These short form pieces about his life read like carnival folklore, so seemingly unreal at times it feels surreal. is hilarious. A perfect description of the struggle of being gay and finding identity in a sadly still intolerant and homophobic world too.This essay was written in direct response to the mistreatment of gay men and women in America. Sedaris reflects on the mistreatment he has suffered just for being gay. Well, OK. Maybe just a little bit. Because, for the first time, in this collection, we see clear indications that Sedaris is bumping up against his limitations. How so? I think (and make no claim for the originality of this analysis) it's because Sedaris is at his best when he writes from the point of view of slightly marginalized outsider. In his earlier stuff, he was poor, he's gay and he managed to achieve a tone of bemusement in reporting what went on around him that was completely hilarious. In the face of increasing commercial success, the edge that was conferred by his being poor became harder to maintain. But he and his boyfriend moved to France, thereby achieving automatic outsider status, and Sedaris was able to mine this for comedy gold (his accounts of misadventures while learning French are truly funny, and credit must be given for the way in which he makes the comedy seem so effortless). But that's his previous book Me Talk Pretty One Day.