Story and essay collections
Barrel fever : stories and essays. Boston: Little, Brown. 1994. On audio, I read it
Holidays on ice. 1997. (eaudio book from library) I read it
Naked. Boston: Little, Brown. 1997 – Kindle I read it (I also have it on Google Play I found)
Me talk pretty one day. 2000. On audio
Dress your family in corduroy and denim. 2004. On audio
When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008) on audio
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary (2010)
Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls (April 2013) Kindle I read it
Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) (May 2017) on audio, I read it
Calypso (May 2018) on audio, I listened to it
Happy-Go-Lucky 2023
Barrel Fever
- Parade
- Music for Lovers
- The Last You’ll Hear from Me
- My Manuscript
- Firestone
- We Get Along
- Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 2
- Don’s Story
- Season’s Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!
- Jamboree
- After Malison
- Barrel Fever
- Diary of a Smoker
- Giantess
- The Curly Kind
- SantaLand Diaries
“The Last You’ll Hear from Me” is Trish Moody’s suicide note, which she wants read at her funeral, excoriating an unfaithful boyfriend, a disloyal friend and an unfeeling mother.
“Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter, Vol. 3, No. 2” chronicles its title character’s perceived harassment after trying unsuccessfully to seduce a clerk at the local convenience store.
“Don’s Story” is the acceptance speech for the third Oscar that Hollywood neophyte Don wins for an autobiographical film in which his father and mother are played by, respectively, Charles Bronson and Don Rickles.
“Santaland Diaries” recounts Sedaris’s seamy experiences working as an elf in Macy’s Santa Land.
The narrator of “Parade” discusses his homosexual relationships with stars whose straightness has never been questioned (Bruce Springsteen, Mike Tyson, and Peter Jennings), using the same matter-of-fact tone to describe the torrid affair of Elizabeth Dole and Pat Buckley.
In “We Get Along,” Dale lives with his mother, who is full of anger against her deceased, womanizing husband and every night spitefully calls a woman she suspects had an affair with him. Distancing himself from both parents, Dale tries not to rock the boat while keeping some secrets to himself.
“Diary of a Smoker” is also an account of persecution (by nonsmokers);
“Giantess” relates Sedaris’s experiences with a magazine of erotica about enormous women.
“After Malison,” which tells the story of a young woman obsessed with an obscure contemporary author, featured a character with a distinct voice who was so delightfully hipster (before there even were hipsters) that I couldn’t help but love it, especially at the end when she gets her comeuppance.
The titular story, “Barrel Fever,” revolves around the alcoholic son of a racist woman who named him, of all things, Adolph.
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls
The twenty-six pieces range from contemporary politics (gay marriage; universal healthcare) to daily absurdities in life (colonoscopies that end up being fun; peculiar parental habits; airline behavior; people who take forever to order coffee).
The story “Memory Laps” focuses on Sedaris winning the approval of his father. The author says that when he was fifty, he intended to get into opera. Instead, he took up swimming. Sedaris looks at both his current practice of swimming and the lessons he took back when he was ten. As a boy, he wasn’t good at swimming; most of his ribbons were for “good sportsmanship.” Sedaris looks at his mother’s humorous insistence that he continue to swim, as well as his father’s ribald praise of another Greek boy, Greg Sakas; unlike David, Greg is a talented swimmer, and his father doesn’t hide his praise. Along with his father drawing comparisons between Donny Osmond (a famous child singer-danger) and David, the author begins to feel like a failure. Even when he has a book reach the number one spot on The New York Times Best Seller list, his father doesn’t heap praise on him. Sedaris concludes this is a sign of his love.
Several stories and essays are about Sedaris’s time abroad. “A Cold Case” is a satire on the exhausting experience of getting another passport when the original was lost. In another travel story, “Easy Tiger,” the author discusses the challenges of learning a new language for business. Flying to Beijing, Sedaris realizes he “forgot” to learn Mandarin. He spends the trip thinking about the Pimsleur videos (name of a language learning company) he usually watches in preparation for visiting a foreign country. The videos tend to be awkward and the phrases he learns are too general to be used in his daily life. Sedaris pokes fun at the sexual and dating phrases, such as “I never want to see you again” and “I don’t think it’s working.” When visiting a foreign country, he asks, when would you ever use these phrases? Sedaris flashes back to 1999 when he traveled to Germany with his partner, Hugh. Though he practiced some German phrases, he found most speakers were eager to practice their perfect English on him. He then talks about the Japanese videos from Pimsleur that often emphasize complimentary expressions. He concludes that one can never master traveling around the world; the mystery that occurs in each country is beneficial to the individual.
“#2 to go” is about Sedaris’s experience of Chinese cultures. This begins in his early twenties when a Chinese restaurant comes to his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. When he finally travels to China, he’s amazed by how different the food is compared to American-style Chinese food. The hygiene standards are also far laxer. A woman tells him most Chinese people believe that it’s best to just cough up phlegm in the middle of the street rather than hold it in until one is in private. Another woman reports that she once saw a boy pull down his pants and defecate in the “Chengdu Walmart.” He also discusses a restaurant that was shut down for serving cat meatballs. He concludes with the thought that it’s a thrill in China to constantly wonder where your meal came from.
Satire is most apparent in the fictional selections “A Quick Email” and “Mind the Gap.” Of these, “I Break for Traditional Marriage” is one of the most trenchant. In the piece, a straight, white, middle-aged man named Randolph becomes enraged after gay marriage is legalized in the United States. He now believes that the world has gone mad, and he can do anything he wants. He starts by shooting his daughter, Bonita, in the head. He shoots his wife, and then he shoots his crippled mother-in-law who has moved into their garage and “taken over” his space. He goes for a drive and listens to conservative radio. Many of the callers are drawing insane comparisons between gay marriage and marriage with inanimate objects. Feeling justified in his views and that he doesn’t have to obey any law, Randolph drives through a school bus stop signal, killing a child. He spends the rest of his life in jail, where he dallies in kissing his cellmate, Diego Rodríguez.
In “Day In, Day Out,” Sedaris discusses his daily habit of keeping a diary. In it, he transcribes quirky observations from life, such as an English newspaper with the headline “Dangerous Olives Could Be on Sale.” These diary entries show up in Sedaris’s 2017 work, Theft by Finding.
Me Talk Pretty One Day
Me Talk Pretty One Day is a collection of essays about the everyday life of the author, David Sedaris. The book’s first essays detail his upbringing in North Carolina. As a child, he lives with his father, mother, and sisters. The opening essay recounts the time he’s forced to see a speech therapist in the fifth grade. Every Thursday, Miss Samson (the therapist) takes him out of class and brings him to her office, where she tries to train him to banish the lisp he has when saying the letter s. Sedaris hates this, partially because he’s one of the few boys in school who needs speech therapy. This, he believes, aligns him with a group of children who are unpopular, and he senses that the teachers might as well refer to them as the “future homosexuals of America.” Thinking this way, he wonders if his teachers are also capable of identifying the future alcoholics or “depressives” in their classrooms. Defying Miss Samson, he starts avoiding all s-words, using elaborate synonyms. A strict woman, Miss Samson dislikes this, but nothing she does gets Sedaris to stop. At the end of the year, she opens up to him and speaks emotionally about her failure as a speech therapist and about her depressing life. Seeing this, Sedaris tells her that he’s sorry, and she starts laughing, triumphantly informing him that she tricked him into using an s.
At another point in his childhood—as outlined in “Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities”—Sedaris goes with his family to a jazz concert. His father, Lou, is obsessed with jazz, always forcing him and his sisters to listen to his record collection. In another life, Sedaris thinks, his father would have made a good musician. Because he never pursued this dream, though, he decides after the jazz concert that Sedaris and his sisters should start a family band. None of them are interested, but Lou signs them up for lessons. Forced to learn the guitar, Sedaris finds himself sitting in a small room with an instructor named Mr. Mancini. Mr. Mancini is a little person, though Sedaris refers to him using the pejorative, politically incorrect term “midget.” Sedaris makes no effort to learn guitar, finding himself more fascinated by Mr. Mancini than by the instrument. When Mr. Mancini advises him to give his guitar a name, he decides on Oliver, but Mancini says it has to be a woman’s name. Eventually, he decides to show Mr. Mancini a routine he has developed on his own, which involves singing commercial jingles he’s heard on TV. In response, Mr. Mancini thinks Sedaris is coming on to him and asks him to leave, saying he doesn’t “swing that way.” After this, Sedaris tells his father that Mr. Mancini said his fingers are too small to play guitar, and he never returns for another lesson.
Sedaris’s relationship with his father is a thread that runs throughout Me Talk Pretty One Day, as Sedaris outlines his father’s idiosyncrasies in essays like “Genetic Engineering,” in which he describes his father’s obsession with mathematics and technology. As an engineer at IBM, his father often speaks at length about the future of computers or about other topics that bore Sedaris. He even pursues these conversations with Sedaris when they’re on vacation in a beach town, where his lecture about how estimating the number of grains of sand in the world attracts nearby fishermen who ironically ask him to calculate the cost of land they had to give up when rich families came to the beach town and turned it into a vacation destination. Failing to register their facetious tone, Lou diligently sets to work trying to answer the question.
Later, Sedaris goes to college and decides to be an art major because he wants to be as artistically talented as his older sister Gretchen. However, he shows little talent, so he transfers to another school and tries a different discipline within the arts. When this doesn’t prove successful, he drops out and moves into an apartment in Raleigh, where he develops a taste for meth and conceptual art. Falling in with a group of experimental artists, he scoffs at art that isn’t avant-garde, claiming to be anti-establishment when, in reality, he and his friends are mostly interested in taking drugs and making things that even they don’t understand. Surprisingly, his work is accepted by a local museum, but this embarrasses him because his friends resent his success, claiming he sold out. As time passes, he develops an interest in bizarre performance art. During one of his final shows, an audience member heckles him, poking fun at the loftiness of his absurd display. Sedaris realizes the voice belongs to his father. By the end of the show, everyone thinks his father is part of the performance, and they compliment him on his wit. This frustrates Sedaris, and when he later runs out of drugs because his dealer goes to rehab, he gives up performance art.
Lou Sedaris has unique relationships with his children, always holding them to high standards and getting disappointed when they show no interest in the things he values. In “You Can’t Kill The Rooster,” Sedaris describes the beautiful relationship his father has with Sedaris’s youngest brother, who calls himself The Rooster. Lou has high hopes for The Rooster because none of his other children have fulfilled his dreams. The Rooster, however, has no intention of following his father’s plans, and his personality is in direct opposition to Lou’s. And yet, this doesn’t bother Lou; when The Rooster calls his father “bitch,” for instance, the old man simply smiles. Observing this relationship, Sedaris and his sisters are baffled that the two men get along so well, but Sedaris recognizes a tenderness running between them—a tenderness that transcends the fact that The Rooster doesn’t live the life Lou originally wanted for him.
In terms of accomplishments, Sedaris interrogates his own working life in “Learning Curve,” in which he’s hired as a writing professor despite his lack of experience. At first, he focuses on nothing but what he’ll wear, but he soon realizes that he also needs to think about how to fill up class time, so he starts watching soap operas with the students under the pretense that this will help them learn to write. When an older student furiously asks why he’s qualified to critique one of her essays, he finds himself at a loss for words. After a moment, though, he realizes what he needs to say: “I am the only one who is paid to be in this room.” This seems to work, but then the student asks how much he earns, and when he answers, the students unite with each other for the first time all semester, loudly laughing in unison.
Later in life, Sedaris moves to New York City and lives in a small apartment. He strolls through the city in the evenings and peers into the windows of townhouses, wishing he could live in such beautiful buildings. When he gets hired as a personal assistant to a rich woman named Valencia, he’s delighted that he can spend several days a week in her house, but the job soon gets old because Valencia annoys him by pretending to be poor. She haggles over prices and tries to underpay people who need the money more than she does. In keeping with this, Sedaris’s wage is much less than it should be, but he puts up with her because he doesn’t feel like finding a new job. When a group of movers comes to move some furniture from her townhouse to a friend’s apartment, though, they offer Sedaris a job, and he accepts it. Riding away with them in their truck, he realizes that this is where he belongs—in a crowded vehicle with kind people, not in a beautiful townhouse with meanspirited rich people.
While living in New York City, Sedaris meets Hugh, a man who lives in a nice apartment and owns a small house in Normandy, France. This intrigues Sedaris, who starts dating him and eventually visits France for the first time without knowing the language. On that first visit—outlined in “See You Again Yesterday”—he only knows how to say “bottleneck,” and he says it whenever he meets somebody. The next time, though, he tries to acquire a few more words, and his process continues on each subsequent visit. At this point in the essay collection, Sedaris devotes himself to chronicling what it’s like to live in France as an American, especially when he and Hugh move to Paris for several years. During this time, he struggles to learn French under the tutelage of a frightening and rude teacher, walks around the city listening to a French audiobook for medical doctors trying to learn clinical phrases, considers the way French people view Americans, and tries unsuccessfully to remember which French words are masculine and which are feminine—a practice he finds frustrating and ridiculous. Sedaris pays close attention to the various assumptions and stereotypes that come along with national identity, especially in “Picka Pocketoni,” in which an American couple riding the metro in Paris mistakes Sedaris for a French pickpocket and says rude things about him because they assume he can’t speak English. This makes Sedaris hate them, though he also recognizes that part of his anger has to do with his own pretentiousness. This realization only makes him hate them even more.
In addition to examining cultural identity, Sedaris thinks about the ways in which intelligence impacts his sense of self. In the essays “21 Down” and “Smart Guy,” he reveals his fear that he’s unintelligent, making it clear that he wants to be seen as a genius who can easily complete crossword puzzles and has a high IQ. Unfortunately for him, though, he isn’t particularly gifted at crossword puzzles, and when he and Hugh take an IQ test, he discovers that he’s “practically an idiot.” Hugh, on the other hand, has an incredibly high IQ, a fact that makes Sedaris feel even worse about himself. Trying to console him, Hugh tells him not to take his score to heart, adding that Sedaris is perfectly good at a number of things, including vacuuming and naming stuffed animals. There might be other things Sedaris is good at, Hugh offers, saying that he needs time to think of what, exactly, these things are.
To drive this point home, he ends the collection with a story about his father’s approach to storing food. This topic might not sound all that interesting, but Sedaris manages to emphasize the humor of his father’s strange behavior. When Lou visits him in Paris, he explains that he found a small brown object in his suitcase and tried to eat it. This is because Lou never wastes food and has no problem eating things that look spoiled. Placing the object in his mouth, he chewed it for five minutes before realizing it was a disintegrated piece of his hat. Hearing this, Sedaris knows his father will now store the hat with the rest of his rotting food, saving it for a time when he has nothing else to eat. And instead of criticizing Lou for this, Sedaris simply appreciates the humor inherent in his beloved father’s odd behavior.
NAked. wiki summaries
1 Contents
1.1 Chipped Beef
1.2 A Plague of Tics
1.3 Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out!
1.4 Next of Kin
1.5 Cyclops
1.6 The Women’s Open
1.7 True Detective
1.8 Dix Hill
1.9 I Like Guys
1.10 The Drama Bug
1.11 Dinah, the Christmas Whore
1.12 Planet of the Apes
1.13 The Incomplete Quad
1.14 C.O.G.
1.15 Something for Everyone
1.16 Ashes
1.17 Naked
2 External Links
Contents
Chipped Beef
The first essay of Naked. This essay is about the narrator’s (David Sedaris) early life, and his hopes to one day be rich and famous. Later in this essay, the reader discovers that David Sedaris’ family is basically middle class
A Plague of Tics
This essay describes David Sedaris’ obsessive-compulsive and Tourettic tendencies as a child. The tendencies included the likes of licking light switches and kissing newspapers. He frequently gets into trouble with teachers as a result. He later gives up these tendencies when he takes up smoking in college.
Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out!
This essay is an account of David Sedaris’ elderly (and slightly senile.) grandmother, known as Ya-Ya. Ya-Ya is injured and forced to live with his family, resulting in painful experience for all. Eventually Ya-Ya is put into a low grade nursing home. And when she dies only his father seems to mourn.
Next of Kin
This essay is about a literary pornography book David Sedaris finds when he is a child. He and his siblings each pass it down to one another. The book is eventually confiscated by his mother, who in turn reads it.
Cyclops
This essay is named after a boy named “Cyclops” whom David Sedaris’ father allegedly accidentally blinded in one eye. This essay centers on cautionary tales passed down among family members.
The Women’s Open
This essay is an account of David Sedaris’ sister’s first menstruation, which takes place at a golf championship.
True Detective
This essay is about David Sedaris’ interest in detective shows such as The Fugitive. He also describes his exploits as an amateur detective.
Dix Hill
This essay is a recollection of David Sedaris’ first job at a mental institution named Dix Hill. The residents at Dix Hill range from violent to submissive.
I Like Guys
This essay is based on the author’s discovery of his homosexual nature. He discovers that he is gay when at a summer camp in Greece in his teens, where he develops a crush on another young male there.
The Drama Bug
After an actor’s classroom visit introduces him to Shakespeare, Sedaris attempts acting. He finds that the florid Elizabethan language appeals to him, and uses it in regular conversation.
Dinah, the Christmas Whore
Sedaris details his job at a cafeteria. One night, a strange phone call sends David and his sister Lisa on a mission to extract Lisa’s coworker from a domestic disturbance.
Planet of the Apes
Sedaris recalls his experiences of hitchhiking, beginning with his first time after seeing the film Planet of the Apes.
The Incomplete Quad
This essay is a recount of the author taking a job living in a college dormitory for handicapped students. He befriends a quadriplegic female student. The two go on a cross-country trip, conning their way as a newlywed husband and wife in need of medical treatment.
C.O.G.
In this chapter, Sedaris–after much hitch hiking–lands a job cutting stone into clocks shaped like the state of Oregon. The two travel and (unsuccessfully) sell their stones at local craft fairs. The man David works with introduces himself as a “C.O.G.” (Child of God) and is somewhat of a missionary with a split personality.
Something for Everyone
Getting a job stripping paint in an apartment, with Dupont who later comes back wanting money.
Ashes
This essay is a dual account about the marriage of the author’s sister and the impending death of his mother from cancer.
Naked
The final essay of the book. It describes the author’s visit to a nudist colony.