What I got from this is that David Sedaris is older and sadder than he used to be. In 2011 I went on a big Sedaris binge, and read almost everything he ever wrote. This year, on an unexpected holiday in Barcelona, I borrowed his first book THE SANTALAND DIARIES. So it is especially jarring to read his latest. In the first he is poor and young; in this one is rich and old. I’m not quite sure how you contrive to be unhappy when you have enough money to buy a second home (by the beach) or Japanese trousers that‘cost as much as a MacBook Air,’ but he is managing it.
Perhaps it is just him. Or perhaps it just shows that, horrifyingly enough, money really doesn’t make you happy. Or perhaps, even worse, it’s shows that to get older is to get sadder. You have more time for sad things to happen to you, so the odds are against you. His sister, from whom he was estranged, killed herself. His mother is dead, his father is ninety-one and doing some serious hoarding.
You feel him sort of flailing for his old style, trying to have last lines that neatly and unexpectedly complete every essay (a miracle of his past books) but somehow, at least for me, it all seems a bit effortful. That said, Sedaris not at his best is about ten times better than most. A small sample:
I started seeing people wearing face masks in the airport and decided that I hated them. What bugged me I realized, was their flagrant regard for their own lives. It seemed not just overcautious but downright conceited. I mean, why should they live?
This really made me laugh. I feel this way about people with their raw/paleo/whatever diets, but I’m not ballsy enough to say so.