Sedaris’s essay collection no toss-off greatest-hits package

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This article was published 06/02/2021 (2050 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When American humorist David Sedaris visited Winnipeg on the book tour for his 2010 collection Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, he told the audience he loved jokes, the dirtier the better, and regaled the crowd with some of his favourites.

The lineup for the book signing afterward was long, snaking through the stacks at McNally Robinson Booksellers, and particularly slow-moving. That’s because Sedaris was asking every person in line to tell him their favourite joke; if they didn’t have one, he would engage them in conversation nonetheless, asking enough questions to give them a personalized inscription in their copy of his book.

This exercise may have been purely mercenary. If you’ve read Theft By Finding, his recent excerpted diaries, you’ll know that the author’s daily life is filled with encounters that provide him with future essay fodder; the more famous you get, the more difficult they must be to come by naturally. We might merely have been sources for more material, but his interest in each person he spoke to seemed utterly unfeigned and even enthusiastic.

That magpie sensibility and genuine fascination with the human condition, along with a keen eye for folly, a bent for the bizarre and a healthy sense of self-deprecation, have always been a hallmark of Sedaris’s more observational pieces.

He’s always willing to say what we might think but never say aloud. “I should be used to the way Americans dress when travelling yet it still manages to amaze me,” he writes. “It’s as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge saying, “F— this, I’m going to Los Angeles.”

This collection of 46 essays, culled from the breadth of the writer’s career (from 1994’s Barrel Fever to 2018’s Calypso) features what the publisher calls “his funniest and most memorable work.” That’s subjective, obviously. Is your favourite included here? Possibly not, but there are some that could be called classics, including the title essay from Me Talk Pretty One Day and the unforgettable Six to Eight Black Men.

Most greatest-hits collections are aimed at dabblers and newbies, but The Best of Me is kind of like Bob Marley’s album Legend, in that it feels less like a highlights reel and more like a cohesive journey. Even longtime fans, those who feel as if they know Sedaris intimately from years of reading his semi-autobiographical material, will enjoy seeing it as part of his evolution as a writer.

For instance, so much attention is lavished on the unvarnished way he writes about his own life — especially his partner Hugh, his domineering Greek parents and his eccentric five siblings (who include actor Amy Sedaris) — that you might forget that he also excels at wholly fictional hilarity, where he can be particularly withering. Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol gives us a theatre critic who’s panning elementary school Christmas pageants (“in the role of Mary, six-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin”). It’s the perfect takedown of the sour, joyless critic’s mien.

Some of his early work has a caustic edge that is mildly shocking when read anew. There’s a meanness to it, bordering on bitchy, that could be off-putting if it weren’t for the way he almost always turns the tables on himself. The book title’s double meaning is particularly apt, reminding the reader that even when he’s writing his own history, Sedaris’s circumstances often get the best of him.

There’s no doubt that his later work has more rounded edges (when you’re living in relative domestic bliss in France or the English countryside with your longtime partner, you’re probably less likely to hitchhike across the country with a quadraplegic roommate, as he does in his college years, documented in The Incomplete Quad), but what it sacrifices in outré events, it makes up for in depth of feeling and consummate narrative skill.

In the earlier work, his family’s foibles are played purely for laughs, but as he ages, his relationships feel less fraught, if no less unorthodox. Two of the most heartbreaking (but neither maudlin or nor sentimental) pieces have to do with his late mother’s alcoholism and his youngest sister’s death by suicide — not topics one might imagine in the pages of a humor collection, and both notable for his unique ability to combine bluntness with empathy, absurdity with grief.

Jill Wilson is a Free Press copy editor who told David Sedaris a joke about a pirate with a steering wheel down the front of his pants.