HAPPY-GO-LUCKY - DAVID SEDARIS

Always exciting to get a new David Sedaris book. The Santaland diaries came out in the mid-90’s and his book run picked up steam from there. My family, believe it or not, were big NPR listeners so I remember always hearing him on the radio then reading his books as they came out. I remember finding it so strange that he was also from the triangle in North Carolina, sometimes making references to places like malls, from him childhood, that were still there and that I went to. Sedaris does occasionally write fiction and he’ll also write non-fiction on other topics, but he’s really narrowed in on his family. His parents and siblings form the backbone of his work and they can sort of be seen as the main characters in this books-long epic about their family over the years. One would worry that all the big stories, the ones with the really big laughs or emotional payoffs, like You Can’t Kill the Rooster, or the one about his mom dying, would have been told by now, so many years later. Sedaris gets around this in two major ways. The first is how skilled he’s become at writing. He was always a good, funny writer, but he’s been able to move from essays that are mostly funny to ones that weave sorrow and jokes and deeper themes in and out of the narrative at ease. Part of this has to do with the nature of most of the material in this book, which, despite the title, is downbeat. During the period of time covered in this book, one of his sisters killed herself and his father, often the villain in the Sedaris universe-at-large, dies. It’s a testament to Sedaris’ prodigious skill that he manages to weave these life-events in with jokes and humor. There’s some other big, picture stuff that’s interesting if you’ve kept up with the larger Sedaris story. This is the first book of his in which I’ve noticed the amount of money Sedaris has made as an author is mentioned. Covid shuts down Sedaris’ touring life and he’s forced to live in one of his multiple houses with his boyfriend (who finally gets an essay about him in this volume, he’s been something of a background character in earlier Sedaris stories) and reflects briefly on how successful he’s managed to be. In a similar vein, his father, if Sedaris is to be believed, tells David, “you won” on his deathbed, which also feels like a culmination of a process cataloged in the earlier books. Sedaris is still pumping out interesting books of essays on his life in his unique style. How many more of these will we get? Sedaris is 65, surely we’ve got half a dozen or more left. Stories about getting older, the secondary characters will die off, his writing will continue to improve and I intend to read them all. 65 siblings