Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Starred review from July 5, 2004
Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day
, etc.) perfects his written essays by going on the road and reading them aloud, so it's no surprise that his new collection is even more hilarious and haunting as an audiobook. All 22 of the book's essays are here, and it's a treasury of riches matched by Sedaris's slightly nasal but enthralling delivery. Sedaris's material has always walked a razor's edge between hilarious and heartbreaking, and never more so than here. Although Sedaris pokes fun at his family, he mixes the laughs with empathy. When he tries to make sense out of his sister's squalid living conditions in "Put a Lid on It," his deadpan descriptions and hyper reactions are hysterically funny, but it's clear that his sister is a complex person, not just a punch line. Likewise, his late mother, previously seen as a chain-smoking, tart-talking dame, gains more depth in the downright spooky "The Girl Next Store." In "The End of the Affair," he and boyfriend Hugh disagree over a romantic movie and he concludes, "Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings." Still, Sedaris hasn't lost his irreverence; in "Possession," he tours Anne Frank's annex and imagines how he'd redecorate it. Simultaneous release with Little, Brown hardcover (Forecasts, May 24).

Starred review from May 24, 2004
In his latest collection, Sedaris has found his heart. This is not to suggest that the author of Me Talk Pretty One Day
and other bestselling books has lost his edge. The 27 essays here (many previously published in Esquire
, G.Q
. or the New Yorker
, or broadcast on NPR's This American Life
) include his best and funniest writing yet. Here is Sedaris's family in all its odd glory. Here is his father dragging his mortified son over to the home of one of the most popular boys in school, a boy possessed of "an uncanny ability to please people," demanding that the boy's parents pay for the root canal that Sedaris underwent after the boy hit him in the mouth with a rock. Here is his oldest sister, Lisa, imploring him to keep her beloved Amazon parrot out of a proposed movie based on his writing. (" 'Will I have to be fat in the movie?' she asked.") Here is his mother, his muse, locking the kids out of the house after one snow day too many, playing the wry, brilliant commentator on his life until her untimely death from cancer. His mother emerges as one of the most poignant and original female characters in contemporary literature. She balances bitter and sweet, tart and rich—and so does Sedaris, because this is what life is like. "You should look at yourself," his mother says in one piece, as young Sedaris crams Halloween candy into his mouth rather than share it. He does what she says and then some, and what emerges is the deepest kind of humor, the human comedy. Author tour.

David Sedaris's latest collection of essays is his most intimate, made even more so by his keen delivery. They reflect a writing maturity: His insecurities and compulsions are more apparent than ever, which just makes the stories of awkward childhood, awkward adolescence, and awkward adulthood that much more eminently relatable. Which is not to say that you won't be laughing out loud at his impression of his redneck brother in "Rooster at the Hitchin' Post" or any of the other small absurdities of life that he captures so memorably. One of Sedaris's gifts is that he can be hilarious and heartrending (but never maudlin) in the same sentence. Three of the live performances, including "Six to Eight Black Men," will be familiar from last year's LIVE AT CARNEGIE HALL, but they're no less funny on second listening. Sedaris's essays are written to be heard, so listen up--he just keeps getting better. J.M.D. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award 2005 Audie Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine