2007 marks the ten-year anniversary of what I have always regarded as David Sedaris’s best book, ‘Naked.’ I read the book a decade ago after discovering Sedaris on one of the public radio programs he frequents. I may have owned ‘Holidays on Ice’ before I read ‘Naked’ but I remember them as being equally funny. I guess ten years will do that to a person. They aren’t equally funny, ‘Holidays’ is a laugh out loud masterpiece, ‘Naked’ is a raw take on the life of a writer before he was a writer.
Sedaris goes through his childhood with no mercy for anyone, especially for himself. Every family member or chance encounter is fodder for him. Does a Greek grandmother from the old country deserve special treatment? Not in Sedaris’s universe where he describes her home environment, “It was difficult to imagine her raising a child of her own, and chilling to realize that she had.” How about the quadriplegic he roomed with in college? Honestly, he wasn’t that bad and he builds her up as wiser than himself, but in the middle…when they were hitch hiking across part of the country…and they told people who picked them up on the side of the highway that they were a newlywed couple when a deliberating disease struck the bride…yeah, that part made me nervous …but I still laughed. Of course, classic Sedaris strikes when he goes into delicious detail of all the nervous tics he had as a child, which prompts a teacher to meet with his mother at their home. Instead of discussing David’s issues in terms of curing him, he discovers the two women sipping martinis and his teacher laughing because his mother is doing a spot on imitation of her son.
These were the stories I remembered from 1997, what I forgotten is that the book is titled ‘Naked’ for a reason which has little to do with the last chapter where Sedaris ends up in a nudist colony.
In between his life of leaving his family of origin and later becoming a writer of recognition (his latter books have dealt with his success and/also living in France) there were aimless years of literally taking his life into his hands and hitch hiking across America. He ends up in Oregon where he takes numerous jobs picking apples, working in a factory that processes recently picked apples, and then working for a man with both legs amputated below his knees who thinks he is going to make a killing selling jade clocks made in the shape of Oregon (I’ll save you the suspense, his clocks do not sell). In between he is befriended by another man that he didn’t peg as having homosexual leanings (hello, when gay men have bad gaydar what hope is there for the rest of us?) who wants a little somethin’ somethin’ from Sedaris, of which he is unwilling to give.
There is a melancholy to these stories that the last ten years have clouded in my perception. In ‘Naked’ Sedaris is searching for something but doesn’t quite know what that something is. If I had a time machine, I would go back and reread this book a few months earlier before Sedaris stopped in my city for an author’s tour. There was a question and answer period that seemed wasted because no one had come prepared to ask any really interesting questions. Now that I have reread, what I still think is his best book to date, I would have asked him detailed questions about the characters that have filtered in an out of his life. What happened to Dinah the Christmas Whore? What does his father think of Sedaris’s portrayal of him as a cheap a$$ as his wife is dying of cancer and they are staying at an Econolodge because he doesn’t want to spend the money for a hotel with a prettier view? Maybe his father hasn’t read his stories, which would probably be for the best. Has he ever reencountered some of the people he met along the way? The Oregon neighbors who felt it was their Christian duty to bring him Thanksgiving dinner? Hey, what about Dante, the black dude that seemed to think talking as if he was a plantation slave would score him a work promotion? And, if he has seen some of these individuals from back in the day, the ones who knew him on the brink of permanently sleeping under a bridge, how did the conversations go?
All of this I would ask him now but he is probably back on Parisian time and if he blows through my neck of the woods again, I probably won’t remember anything I have written above.
So it goes, a decade lapse from reading a truly touching book and then rereading it again. I suppose I should be grateful that I am the type of person who remembers the laughter over the tears, but it was the heart rendering that makes this book such a good friend. It is the unexpected commonality that I find I have with Sedaris (something that is probably universal, but feels more intimate between a writer and a reader) that made this book such a treasure. Many of the same feelings he expresses in uncomfortable moments are exactly how I have felt, although I am the last person who would hitch hike across the country or go to a nudist colony on a whim. I suppose the contentment I find since finishing this book for the second time isn’t so much that I reconnected with a good friend, but the fact that in ten years time I may rediscover it again.
© 2007 Westerfield
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