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. 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.
But 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. To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. He vacuums his apartment twice a day, fails to hoard anything, and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine.
As the world gradually settles into a new reality, Sedaris too finds himself changed. His offer to fix a stranger's teeth rebuffed, he straightens his own, and ventures into the world with new confidence. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone's son. 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. Trump 2024. Black Lives Matter.
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. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.
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. 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.
But 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. To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. He vacuums his apartment twice a day, fails to hoard anything, and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine.
As the world gradually settles into a new reality, Sedaris too finds himself changed. His offer to fix a stranger's teeth rebuffed, he straightens his own, and ventures into the world with new confidence. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone's son. 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. Trump 2024. Black Lives Matter.
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. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.
Critiques-
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April 1, 2022
Sedaris remains stubbornly irreverent even in the face of pandemic lockdowns and social upheaval. In his previous collection of original essays, Calypso (2018), the author was unusually downbeat, fixated on aging and the deaths of his mother and sister. There's bad news in this book, too--most notably, the death of his problematic and seemingly indestructible father at 96--but Sedaris generally carries himself more lightly. On a trip to a gun range, he's puzzled by boxer shorts with a holster feature, which he wishes were called "gunderpants." He plays along with nursing-home staffers who, hearing a funnyman named David is on the premises, think he's Dave Chappelle. He's bemused by his sister Amy's landing a new apartment to escape her territorial pet rabbit. On tour, he collects sheaves of off-color jokes and tales of sexual self-gratification gone wrong. His relationship with his partner, Hugh, remains contentious, but it's mellowing. ("After thirty years, sleeping is the new having sex.") Even more serious stuff rolls off him. Of Covid-19, he writes that "more than eight hundred thousand people have died to date, and I didn't get to choose a one of them." The author's support of Black Lives Matter is tempered by his interest in the earnest conscientiousness of organizers ensuring everyone is fed and hydrated. (He refers to one such person as a "snacktivist.") Such impolitic material, though, puts serious essays in sharper, more powerful relief. He recalls fending off the flirtations of a 12-year-old boy in France, frustrated by the language barrier and other factors that kept him from supporting a young gay man. His father's death unlocks a crushing piece about dad's inappropriate, sexualizing treatment of his children. For years--chronicled in many books--Sedaris labored to elude his father's criticism. Even in death, though, it proves hard to escape or laugh off. A sweet-and-sour set of pieces on loss, absurdity, and places they intersect.COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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April 11, 2022
Unrest, plague, and death give rise to mordant comedy in this intimate collection from Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day). The author covers rude service workers, difficulties in his own life, and goings-on in “Eastern Europe countries no one wants to immigrate to” where “hugs guard parked BMWs and stray dogs roam the streets.... There are cats too, grease-covered from skulking beneath cars, one eye or sometimes both glued shut with pus.” He faces mask sticklers in a Target checkout line, sees a drunken mask scofflaw on a flight, and communes with BLM protesters while deploring their “lazy” slogans. Much of the book has a dark edge, as it recounts the decline and death of his 98-year-old father; Sedaris voices still rankling resentments—”s long as my father had power, he used it to hurt me”—and recounts his sister’s accusations that their father sexually abused her. As always, Sedaris has a knack for finding where the blithe and innocent intersect with the tawdry and lurid: “His voice had an old-fashioned quality... like a boy’s in a radio serial,” he writes of a Nintendo-obsessed 11-year-old; “ ‘Gee willikers!’ you could imagine him saying, if that were the name of a video game in which things blew up and women got shot in the back of the head.” Sedaris’s tragicomedy is gloomier than usual, but it’s as rich and rewarding as ever. -
Sedaris's latest update on his family and society brings the funny. Still, there's growing depth and empathy in his writing and delivery. Sure, shooting guns with his sister and visiting his nonagenarian father bring laugh-out-loud moments. But profound reflections also pepper his writing as his tone and delivery match his heartrending observations. Sedaris chronicles the Covid-19 pandemic and all the absurdities of reactions to precautions. His voice matches the frustration and bewilderment of lockdown and life behind a mask. Listening is the best way to experience Sedaris's new memoir. While fans will find themselves chuckling at times, there are other times when they will shake their heads and say to themselves, "That's exactly the way it is." R.O. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
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Starred review from May 6, 2022
The first new original collection from Sedaris in four years (after Calypso) contains essays that range far and wide in subject matter, from the 2020 presidential election to the protests surrounding the killing of George Floyd, and the pandemic lockdowns. Sedaris ponders many deep themes here: politics, racial inequality, and even natural disasters, but always adds his irreverent take on life's most solemn moments. Lou, the Sedaris patriarch, looms large in these pages. In "Unbuttoned," Sedaris rushes back from Europe to see his father on what everyone assumes is his deathbed even while dealing with health issues of his own. Lou surprises everyone by living a couple more years and even survives a bout of COVID, but he finally succumbs in 2021. Readers can get more clarity on the rocky relationship between father and son. Sedaris's many fans will be reassured that he has not lost his humor or his understated pathos. VERDICT This is Sedaris at his best, provocative and hysterical. Readers will feel like laughing even when it may feel inappropriate, much like the Sedaris family at their father's actual deathbed. Recommended for all public libraries.--Kristen Stewart
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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August 1, 2022
Essayist Sedaris (Calypso) manages to wring humor from a problematic parent's death and a worldwide pandemic. His writing style is masterfully crafted to take the ordinary moment and make it exquisite, to arrange it on a pedestal so that we can examine its beauty or its ridiculousness. Sedaris's self-deprecating style helps people laugh at themselves and the absurdity of society by pulling back the curtain to expose baseless foundations. Life is never all perfect or all catastrophic; there are horrendous moments and moments of grace in its entirety. Sedaris's writing is finely honed, so precisely put together that his narration is the best way to take it in. Readers who are not fully integrated into the material will miss the fullness of the experience: the pause, the innuendo, the tone. Some of the audio is pulled from live shows, and as Sedaris points out about his one Zoom show, audience response is critical. He calls audiences "unpaid editors" who help hone his craft and delivery. VERDICT Listeners will laugh until their sides ache.--Laura Trombley
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from April 15, 2022
Although a best-of collection and the second volume of his diaries have appeared, it has been four years since Sedaris' last collection of new essays, Calypso (2018)--an eternity to fans who rely on his sardonic observations to help them discern what their own eyes fail to register. Much happened in the interim as the world locked down with COVID-19, communities erupted in protests over police murders, and people recoiled from political machinations. What occurs on the world stage is magnified thousands-fold on the local level, and luckily for readers, Sedaris' neighborhoods range from coastal North Carolina to Normandy, Manhattan's Upper East Side to West Sussex, England, and are populated by his comforting cast of recurring characters: his husband, father, and siblings. Death comes for the Sedaris family once more, this time for his 98-year-old father, Lou. In the title essay, the clan is gathered in the nursing home, contemplating the finality of the visit yet "laughing so loudly" they fear they'll be asked to leave. "Because really, isn't that what we're known for?" Yes, they are, thankfully, and though his tone is more poignant than pointed, the essential Sedaris humor reassuringly endures. Amid the barbed quips, there is genuine sorrow, an empathy born of arduous experience and persistent aspiration.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Sedaris fans will fill reserve lists for a fresh infusion of his unique candor and comedy.COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
