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David Sedaris’ social commentary is built on a solid and reliable strategy.
He invites the reader to recognise their own lives, as mirrored in his complaints, reflections and confessions. There is, he realised many moons ago, an audience that finds reassurance and entertainment in having their shared beefs roasted.
Sedaris can do this at fan-force, or gentle defrost.
Essayist David Sedaris can operate at fan-force or gentle defrost.Adam De Tour
However he serves it up, it’s always tasty, and this latest collection of essays hits the spot.
“Oh, yeah, I’ve been there…” is an inevitable response to a Sedaris rant, and the beauty of the bloke’s writing is that it doesn’t matter if he’s talking about finally realising that he was gay (or was it discovering that he wasn’t straight?), or the annoying lingo of hospitality staff. He thinks aloud about life, and rings bells.
Readers of every carnal inclination will see their own uncomfortable teenage transitions in his wry and gentle observations. But there is much more to The Land and its People collection than clumsy adolescent forays into sexuality.
These sudden flashes of bereavement bamboozle Sedaris at unexpected moments, as they do everyone over 50.
Sedaris is not tactful, but he is sufficiently amusing to get away with dragging his closest friends into hilarious character sketches without fear of offending. I can only guess that this is because they’re used to it, or simply enjoy their roles in his relentless comedy of manners.
He describes Dawn, allegedly still his best friend from shared university days, as “dressing like a Swiss person. That is to say, she looks at all times as if she is headed to the airport, where she will fly business class.”
I doubt that Sedaris ever looked Swiss in his younger days – his drug-and-booze-addled recollections of the late 20th century are sketchy, but refreshingly self-deprecating. He gets his inevitable, intergenerational comeuppance when asking the next generation of shitfaced teens, listening to deafening heavy metal in an allegedly “quiet” British Rail carriage, to shut the f— up.
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Being nearly 70, and sober for 25 years, surely had something to do with the humiliating aftermath.
Sedaris is my age, so it was bittersweet to read him leaping from complaints about loud louts on public transport to the friends we made when we were their age, and watching as so many of them, inevitably, fall off the twig.
I too have stopped myself from deleting the contact details of dead friends from my phone and email lists. I’ll never use them again, but, hey … These sudden flashes of bereavement bamboozle Sedaris at unexpected moments, as they do everyone over 50.
“When I’m travelling, for instance, and am at breakfast alone in a hotel dining room, wondering whom I might send a postcard to.”
Sedaris won me over once more with that sentence, and not only because I’ve shared the same pangs of nostalgia. It was his correct use of the word “whom”, and his quixotic impulse to write a postcard for a dead friend. Not an email, but a postcard.
I love sending postcards. And everybody I know gets a kick out of receiving one. This guy speaks, and writes, my language.
But it’s not what Sedaris and I have in common that warmed me once more to his writing. We are utterly different people. I don’t live in New York with my husband, and while I reckon I could do a pretty good job describing the ups and downs of my own domestic arrangements, it’d be more than my life is worth.
Then again, I’m glad that Sedaris has people he loves who tolerate being subjected to his forensic scrutiny in print. They are part of who he is. He is clearly grateful for their existence, and the joys and frustrations of sharing his life with them underlie every word in this fine compilation.
Well, not every word.
The essay My Cousin Melville is a scathing and merciless demolition of AI, and the lazy use of ChatGPT to write correspondence and fiction.
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Horrified by an AI-generated piece about said Melville’s unfortunate experience in a public convenience, allegedly “written” to mimic his own style, he powers up his wrecking ball and rewrites it, all the while pointing out the ghastly flaws in the algorithm that churned out the not-so-original guff in the first place.
Sedaris is an inveterate traveller, proudly adding destinations to a very long list, and accumulating passport stamps as a form of peripatetic philately. Australia is one of the scores of nations he’s visited, and he’s seen more of the country than most locals. He far prefers our restaurant and hotel staff to America’s.
“In Australia the service people had real personalities. They asked real questions, ones that engaged you, and led to brief but interesting conversations.”
Then again, there are limits.
When his husband suggested moving here, he hesitated.
“I’d start losing it over ‘no worries’. Or ‘arvo’, which is how they abbreviate ‘afternoon’.”
But hey, if David Sedaris wasn’t complaining, what would he be for?
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