One of my books for A Century of Books is David Sedaris’s 1997 collection Naked. One of the other books I’ve read recently, albeit not for A Century of Books because 2016 was already taken, is Miss Fortune by Lauren Weedman – which I read on the strength of seeing her described as being the female David Sedaris. One might think that Amy Sedaris fit the bill there – or, more accurately, that the description was primarily marketing copy – but it convinced me, and I’m glad it did because Miss Fortune was great.
But Naked first. It’s exactly what you expect to get from David Sedaris, if you’ve read anything by him before. Like all his books, it has funny, bizarre, moving, and self-deprecating stories from across his life. I assume everything in all the collections has at least a foot in the truth, and I don’t quite know how one life has fit all of this in.
Then again, perhaps it is just his talent for turning the ordinary into the quirky and unusual. He writes about living with his injured grandmother, about finding a dirty book, about working in a cafeteria. Quite a few are about hitchhiking, at times with a quadriplegic friend. Each has its bizarre moments that Sedaris frames with deadpan sardonicism. Nobody could call him cheerful. His persona is mildly grumpy and cautiously optimistic – only to hit brick walls of people everywhere he goes.
Here’s a good example of how he writes – in this instance, about his experiences while experimenting with mime as a child:
I went home and demonstrated the invisible wall for my two-year-old brother, who pounded on the very real wall beside his playpen, shrieking and wailing in disgust. When my mother asked what I’d done to provoke him, I threw up my hands in mock innocence before lowering them to retrieve the imaginary baby that lay fussing at my feet. I patted the back of my little ghost to induce gas and was investigating its soiled diaper when I noticed my mother’s face assume an expression she reserved for unspeakable horror. I had seen this look only twice before: once when she was caught in the path of a charging, rabid pig and then again when I told her I wanted a peach-coloured velveteen blazer with matching slacks.
I think my favourite Sedaris remains Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, but that is chiefly because it’s the first one I read – and I think there is a lot to say for the first time one discovers his humour. It’s such a joy (without being remotely joyful in tone) that happening upon it is something to treasure. Naked was written a while before Dress Your Family, but the tone and the world are unchanging.
And what about Lauren Weedman? Well, I can certainly see why she is described as the female David Sedaris – she definitely has his way with a pithy sentence (“You know what bothers me about the idea of death? It’s so hard to look forward to, and I love planning”), shrugging at the absurdity of the world and contributing her own heavy doses of ridiculousness. In Miss Fortune (subtitled ‘fresh perspectives on having it all from someone who is not okay’), she focuses mostly on her the past decade of her life, with a few jumps further back in time. And that part of her life is dominated by marrying, gaining a stepson and a biological son, and getting divorced when her husband has an affair with the babysitter.
One of my favourite chapters/stories was about a stranger on Facebook contacting her to say that he’d killed nine people and would she write his life story. She takes this in her stride – getting in touch with their mutual friends to find out how likely he was to murder her, and then engaging in an occasional conversation with him. Like Sedaris, she refuses to sound too surprised.
It has been three days since Scott entered my life, and I can think of nothing else. “What would you do if someone told you that they had killed nine people?” has replaced “How much sand can a kid eat before it becomes a medical emergency?” as my opener in all social situations.
There’s also a lot about being pregnant and having a baby, about struggling as an actress, and about body image. Almost all of these stories – not so much the pregnancy ones – are, indeed, things I could imagine Sedaris writing about. She also writes about being adopted, and having two mums (since she reunited with her birth mother) – there is relatively little about this, and I think it might have been covered more thoroughly in her previous book, A Woman Trapped in a Woman’s Body. I have to say, this snippet about her (adoptive) family makes me want to read much more about them:
My mother and father had decided that instead of leaving us money after they died, like nice parents do, they wanted to spend their money while they were still with us. Our inheritance would be the memories we created together of touring vanilla bean factories and learning how to make a coin purse out of a coconut.
All in all, I think the Sedaris comparison is warranted and isn’t undue praise – indeed, I actually liked Miss Fortune even more than Naked. Her comedic balance of a sentence is exemplary. I guess the book is confessional, though with so much observational humour that you only realise afterwards that it has been confessional. It’s certainly extremely funny, and I hope she writes a lot more.
