Years ago I asked my friend Marcus what percentage of individual days of his life he thought he could remember. He looked up at the ceiling for a moment and came back with “75%.” 75? Not a chance in hell. Listen I understand the instinct. We want to believe our lives were lived in service of something, and that we savored each day of our all too brief time here. We’d all like to be able to look our maker square in the face and swear we only spent the whole day smoking weed and watching The Simpsons one time. A couple of times. But 75%? It’s like 10, maybe less.
I remember exactly two days from all of junior high school: the day I got sent to the principal’s office for pretending to scratch my eye but actually giving the middle finger to a line of passing 6th graders, and the day I fed crickets to Mr. Dowell’s tarantula. That’s it. Go even further back and it gets worse. My only memory from childhood is the arms of the glasses my brother wore that wrapped around the backs of his ears and made it look like he was wearing little silver earrings. The rest is just the opening credits from The Wonder Years.
So call me skeptical when I opened 2005’s Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and found yet another collection of brilliant, hilarious stories from David Sedaris’s life. I just find it hard to believe anyone has this much gold lying around in the attic. Much like the ability to recall birthdays seems superhuman to the abuser of the belated, I raise an eyebrow at the volume of consistently excellent tales Sedaris delivers in his books.
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is, as you might expect, mostly about his family. The best chapters are intimate and unflinching portraits of his siblings. Sedaris posses an unequaled mastery of the anecdote, revealing personal, and often unflattering details about his loved ones, but doing so with kindness, sincerity, and obvious affection. The task becomes trickier after you have a couple of best-sellers under your belt. He writes,
“She’s afraid to tell me anything important, knowing I’ll only turn around and write about it. In my mind, I’m like a friendly junkman, building things from the little pieces of scrap I find here and there, but my family’s started to see things differently. Their personal lives are the so-called pieces of scrap I so casually pick up, and they’re sick of it. More and more often their stories begin with the line. ‘You have to swear you will never repeat this.’ I always promise, but it’s generally understood that my word means nothing.”
Nevertheless, he continues to sift nuggets from the river of everyday life and deliver them polished into our waiting hands. Naked is still his funniest book. Barrel Fever is second on the strength of the Santaland Diaries alone, to this day one of the funniest things I’ve ever read, but I would put Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim at a strong third. I laughed a lot. The one about the boy and the hot chocolates is my favorite.
Section 2.2 of David Sedaris’s Wikipedia page is entitled “Truth of nonfiction work” so someone else has asked this question before. I can’t bring myself to read it. Despite all my doubting, I don’t want them to be made up. I want to believe it’s all real. I want to think that somehow the perfect person was born into this crazy, fascinating family and wrote it all down for us. And more than anything, I want him to keep doing it.
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