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Author Interviews

David sedaris on the 'sea section' and his new book, 'calypso'.

Author David Sedaris speaks to NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro about family, love, loss and his new book called Calypso.

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David Sedaris On The 'Sea Section' And His New Book, 'Calypso'

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

David Sedaris bought a beach house. And it's called the Sea Section. This would normally not be a thing to hang a book of personal essays on. But this is David Sedaris, and so it's about a lot more than vacations. In 2013, Sedaris's sister Tiffany committed suicide.

DAVID SEDARIS: (Reading) Why do you think she did it? I asked as we stepped back into the sunlight, for that's all any of us were thinking - had been thinking since we got the news. Mustn't Tiffany have hoped that whatever pills she'd taken wouldn't be strong enough? And that her failed attempt would lead her back into our fold? How could anyone purposefully leave us - us of all people? This is how I thought of it. For though I've often lost faith in myself, I've never lost faith in my family and my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: In his new book "Calypso," he talks about her death, his family, aging and how he picks up trash in his spare time while wearing a Fitbit. Those last two are not unrelated. David Sedaris joins us now from New York. Welcome.

SEDARIS: Thank you for having me, Lulu.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I guess I'd like to start by saying the Sea Section is a great name for a beach house.

SEDARIS: Well, we just bought the house next to our house because what happens is people tear down the building. And then they build what they called sandcastles. I guess you'd call them McMansions. Anyway, so we bought the house next to our house. And that has a pretty dumb name, too, so we want to change it. And so I came up with some things. And then I was at a reading one day. And I said, what do you think are some good names? And a woman wrote and she suggested Canker Shores...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter).

SEDARIS: ...Or the Amniotic Shack...

SEDARIS: ...Both of which are great beach house names.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Those are great beach house names. Have you chosen which one yet?

SEDARIS: I go back and forth because the beach houses used to all have pun names, like Crabba Dabba Doo and Clamelot, right? And a lot of the new ones - they have names like Dolphin Song or, you know, God's Promise. So I just thought it was much better when they were pun names.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: This book is many things. As I mentioned, it's a meditation on aging and on loss and family. But as we mentioned, hanging over it all is the suicide of your sister. Can you tell me about Tiffany?

SEDARIS: Well, she was my youngest sister. And she committed suicide just before she turned 50. And - but she was the only one in the family really who sort of backed off from the family. And the rest of us - we all came home for Christmas. And we all came home for summer vacations. And - but Tiffany was the only one who - well, I have to work. Well, something came up. I can't come. And, you know, she had a lot of, you know, mental problems. And she didn't want to take her medication, so she didn't. And then her life just got more and more out of control. And then she committed suicide in 2013.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Were you surprised when you heard?

SEDARIS: I was surprised when I heard. But then she left behind some notebooks. And when I look through the notebooks, I think, well, gosh, if that was my mind, if that's the way that I thought, I can understand wanting to put yourself out of that misery. Her thoughts were so disjointed. And even the note that we eventually found - the suicide note that she left - it was just so convoluted and so - it didn't make any sense. When you thought, well, gosh. Why would a person commit suicide over that? So - and I hadn't - she was a very difficult person. She had a lot of very intense friendships that would end with a restraining order.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: There are some very funny segments in this book, of course. But the one that I really liked was when your sister Amy goes to a psychic and contacts your dead sister. And the message that she brings back struck me so true of siblings. Basically, even from beyond the grave, the message from Tiffany was irritating. She was (laughter) - you were irritated by what apparently the medium had said she was saying.

SEDARIS: Right. The message was basically, I forgive you. When it's like, you forgive me? Like, I'm the one who is supposed to be forgiving you. But then the psychic said - I mean, I don't believe in things like that, right? But Amy has a pretty open mind. So she went to this psychic. And the psychic said that Tiffany had been trying to contact me, right? And she said, have you had a lot of - has your phone been acting up? And I said no. And then she said, have you seen a lot of butterflies? And it was shocking to me because our house that winter was loaded with butterflies in the winter. And what happens is on the second floor of our house in England, there's a big, tall loft ceiling. So butterflies come in at the end of the summer. And they just sort of hibernate up there. And then when you turn the heat on in the winter, they think it's spring. And they come and they bat themselves against the windows. But they were - I don't know. There must have been - there were dozens and dozens and dozens of butterflies in our house. And...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And a psychic knew that? Or said it?

SEDARIS: The psychic said that that was one of the signs that Tiffany was trying to contact me with these butterflies. And I don't necessarily - I still don't believe in the psychic. And I don't believe in anything that she said. But I hate it when you don't believe in something and then something makes you wonder if maybe you're wrong. I'd just rather...

SEDARIS: ...I would just rather close my mind against something and just have it settled.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You wrote, though, in your book that your sister and your mother visit you in your sleep.

SEDARIS: I don't believe in ghosts. But I do believe that dead people can visit you when you're asleep. I mean, I have had visits with my mother. And again, I don't believe in ghosts. But - and my sister Tiffany, too. And I have to say it's so comforting. And it just makes you feel like, you know, caught up and makes you feel loved. But I look forward to visiting people after I'm dead. And not to say, where's that money you owe me?

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I was about to say, what were you - you want to visit with them to reminisce? Maybe not...

SEDARIS: Just to catch up.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Another theme in this book is your own aging. And you write, it's just a matter of time before our luck runs out, and one of us gets cancer. Then we will be picked off like figures in a shooting gallery, easy targets given the lives that we've led. So that's cheery. Do you feel guilty for having had a great life?

SEDARIS: No, I don't, as a matter of fact. I mean, I know people who do feel guilty. And I'm not one of them. So no. I mean, that line, though, pertains to, like, my brother and my sisters. I just - gosh. That's going to be - I don't know how I'll live with that. You know, I - it's odd when a sibling dies. And to this day, people say, oh, how many kids are in your family? And I say, oh, six. And I don't say five - there used to be six - because then you don't want people to feel weird. And in my mind, there are still six. But I can't imagine, like, when I say, oh, two. There are two left. Or, oh, I'm the last. You know, when you meet people, and they're the last of their siblings, I don't know how you carry on. I really don't. But when I look forward like that and I try to conceive of that - of life without my siblings - life without my boyfriend. Yeah, I'll take it. But life without my siblings is just unfathomable to me.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's David Sedaris. His new book is "Calypso." Thank you so much.

SEDARIS: Oh, thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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20 Free Essays & Stories by David Sedaris: A Sampling of His Inimitable Humor

in Comedy , Literature | September 15th, 2014 6 Comments

My first expo­sure to the writ­ing of David Sedaris came fif­teen years ago, at a read­ing he gave in Seat­tle. I could­n’t remem­ber laugh­ing at any­thing before quite so hard as I laughed at the sto­ries of the author and his fel­low French-learn­ers strug­gling for a grasp on the lan­guage. I fought hard­est for oxy­gen when he got to the part about his class­mates, a ver­i­ta­ble Unit­ed Nations of a group, strain­ing in this non-native lan­guage of theirs to dis­cuss var­i­ous hol­i­days. One par­tic­u­lar line has always stuck with me, after a Moroc­can stu­dent demands an expla­na­tion of East­er:

The Poles led the charge to the best of their abil­i­ty. “It is,” said one, “a par­ty for the lit­tle boy of God who call his self Jesus and… oh, shit.” She fal­tered, and her fel­low coun­try­man came to her aid. “He call his self Jesus, and then he be die one day on two… morsels of… lum­ber.”

The scene even­tu­al­ly end­ed up in print in “Jesus Shaves,” a sto­ry in Sedaris’ third col­lec­tion,  Me Talk Pret­ty One Day . You can read it free online in a selec­tion of three of his pieces round­ed up by  Esquire . Sedaris’ obser­va­tion­al humor does tend to come out in full force on hol­i­days (see also his read­ing of the Saint Nicholas-themed sto­ry “Six to Eight Black Men” on Dutch tele­vi­sion above), and indeed the hol­i­days pro­vid­ed him the mate­r­i­al that first launched him into the main­stream.

When Ira Glass, the soon-to-be mas­ter­mind of  This Amer­i­can Life , hap­pened to hear him read­ing his diary aloud at a Chica­go club, Glass knew he sim­ply had to put this man on the radio. This led up to the big break of a Nation­al Pub­lic Radio broad­cast of “The San­ta­land Diaries,” Sedaris’ rich account of a sea­son spent as a Macy’s elf. You can still hear  This Amer­i­can Life ’s full broad­cast of it on the show’s site .

True Sedar­i­ans, of course, know him for not just his inim­itably askew per­spec­tive on the hol­i­days, but for his accounts of life in New York, Paris (the rea­son he enrolled in those French class­es in the first place), Nor­mandy, Lon­don, the Eng­lish coun­try­side, and grow­ing up amid his large Greek-Amer­i­can fam­i­ly. Many of Sedaris’ sto­ries — 20 in fact — have been col­lect­ed at the web site,  The Elec­tric Type­writer , giv­ing you an overview of Sedaris’ world: his time in the elfin trench­es, his rare moments of ease among sib­lings and par­ents, his futile father-man­dat­ed gui­tar lessons, his less futile lan­guage lessons, his relin­quish­ment of his sig­na­ture smok­ing habit (the easy indul­gence of which took him, so he’d said at that Seat­tle read­ing, to France in the first place). Among the col­lect­ed sto­ries, you will find:

• “The San­ta­land Diaries” (audio)
• “The Youth in Asia,” “Jesus Shaves,” and “Giant Dreams, Midget Abil­i­ties”
• “Our Per­fect Sum­mer”
• “Let­ting Go”
• “Now We Are Five”

For the com­plete list, vis­it:  20 Great Essays and Short Sto­ries by David Sedaris . And, just to be clear, you can read these sto­ries, for free, online.

Note: If you would like to down­load a free audio­book nar­rat­ed by David Sedaris , you might want to check out Audi­ble’s 30 Day Free Tri­al. We have details on the pro­gram here . If you click this link , you will see the books nar­rat­ed by Sedaris. If one intrigues, click on the “Learn how to get this Free” link next to each book. 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Be His Guest: David Sedaris at Home in Rur­al West Sus­sex, Eng­land

David Sedaris Reads You a Sto­ry By Miran­da July

David Sedaris and Ian Fal­con­er Intro­duce “Squir­rel Seeks Chip­munk”

David Sedaris Sings the Oscar May­er Theme Song in the Voice of Bil­lie Hol­i­day

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer . Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book .

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Comments (6) |

Related posts:

Comments (6), 6 comments so far.

When­ev­er we are down and out, there is David to lift our spir­its. I hope he knows just how muh joy he brings to the life of the aver­age read­er. David, the world loves you.

I just rec­om­mend­ed your site to my grand­son. He is 40 and I am 80 but we like the same Kinds of read­ing. Thanks

Love David Sedaris’s work. I enjoy read­ing his work aloud & can laugh myself into a fren­zy , which is very fun. He is the anti­dote to what­ev­er ails me. Much respect. Please nev­er stop writ­ing for us :-)

I had already trad­ed my Amer­i­can Life for an Ital­ian one when David rose to suc­cess and I was in the dark until, while on a vis­it back to the States, my sis­ter intro­duced me to his work. I bought sev­er­al of his books to take back with me.

The build­ing I lived in was a restored 16th Cen­tu­ry sta­ble and sound trav­eled in odd ways. One night, as I lay on my cot which could have sub­sti­tut­ed for a board in a masochis­tic clois­tered con­vent, the young cou­ple upstairs had final­ly got­ten their frac­tious, col­icky baby to sleep, I could final­ly read. Silence was of the essence.

I opened my first David Sedaris book, the one that begins with him try­ing to drown a mouse out­side his home in Nor­mandy when he is inter­rupt­ed in his mur­der­ous act by some­one seek­ing direc­tions. That was hilar­i­ous enough, but I man­aged to con­trol myself on behalf of the sleep deprived trio who slum­bered above me.

Then I got to French Lessons and par­tic­u­lar­ly to “are thems the brains of young cows?” as David attempts to order calves brains in his local butch­er shop.

I had a near death expe­ri­ence that late night, oblig­ed as I was to turn over and bury my face in my pil­low in order to muf­fle my shrieks of laugh­ter. I could­n’t stop. I was learn­ing Ital­ian at the time and had recent­ly told a room­ful a peo­ple that once, I had found my lost infant sis­ter lying beneath a squid.

The word for hedge is siepe, which is the thing she was in fact lying under fast asleep and not a squid which is sep­pia.

I can’t recall now exact­ly how much time I was com­pelled to remain face down on that pil­low, but it was long enough to begin run­ning out of oxy­gen and yet each time I thought I was safe to regain a sem­blance of san­i­ty and lift­ed my head I was again assailed by incon­trol­lable laugh­ter.

I now live in a 13th Cen­tu­ry build­ing where sound bounces around in even weird­er ways. The Labrador pup­py upstairs,left to his soli­tary devices dur­ing the day, whacks his heavy chew toy on the floor above my head while I try to write, result­ing in the explo­sive sound of a stack of heavy books being repeat­ed­ly slammed down on the floor.

And that is when I look to David, free as I am to sub­mit to venge­ful aban­doned laugh­ter. After all, the pup­py can’t call the land­lord to com­plain.

Your link to the San­ta­land audio at This Amer­i­can­Life seems to be bro­ken: looks like they’ve reor­gan­ised their site.

Here’s a new, work­ing link: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/47/christmas-and-commerce/act-two‑5

Struc­tur­ing your essay accord­ing to the log­ic of the read­er means study­ing your the­sis and antic­i­pat­ing what the read­er needs to know and in what sequence in order to under­stand and con­vince your argu­ments as they devel­op.

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Now We Are Five

David Sedaris and his family gather at a beach house in North Carolina, for the first time since his sister’s suicide:

“Even if you weren’t getting along with Tiffany at the time, you couldn’t deny the show she put on—the dramatic entrances, the non-stop, professional-grade insults, the chaos she’d inevitably leave in her wake. One day she’d throw a dish at you and the next she’d create a stunning mosaic made of the shards. When allegiances with one brother or sister flamed out, she’d take up with someone else. At no time did she get along with everybody, but there was always someone she was in contact with. Toward the end, it was Lisa, but before that we’d all had our turn.”

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Advertisement

Letter from emerald isle, issue 222, fall 2017.

Our house on Emerald Isle, The Sea Section, is divided down the middle, and has an  E  beside one front  door  and a  W  beside the  other.  The east side is ruled by Hugh, and the bedroom we share is on the top  floor.  It opens onto a deck that overlooks the ocean and is next to  Amy’s  room, which is the same size as ours   but is shaped differently. Unlike Lisa and Paul, who are on the  west  side of the house and could probably sleep on burlap without noticing it, Amy likes nice   sheets.

She’d packed a new set in her suitcase, and on the night before Thanksgiving, as I helped her make her bed, she mentioned a friend who’d come to her apartment for dinner the previous evening in New York. “He drinks Coke, right, so I went to the store on the corner to buy some,” she said. “And you know how those new bottles have names on the labels—Blake or Kelly or whatever?”

“Well there were only two left on the shelf, one with  Mom  printed on it and the other with  Tiffany .”

I reached for a pillowcase. “Do you think if I were dead there would have been three bottles on the shelf instead of two and the third would have had  my  name on it?”

Amy thought for a moment. “Yes.”

“So the only Cokes at that store in New York City are for people in our family who have died.”

She smoothed out the bedspread. “Yes.”

I couldn’t tell if she honestly believed this or not. It’s hard to say with Amy. On the one hand, she’s very pragmatic, and on the other, she’s open to just about anything. Astrology, for instance. I wouldn’t call her a nut exactly, but she has paid good money to have her chart done, and if you’re talking about someone, she’ll often ask when this person’s birthday is, and then say something like, “Ah, a Gemini. Okay. That makes sense now.”

She’s big on acupuncture as well, which I also tend to think is dubious, at least for things like allergies. That said, I admire people who are curious and open their minds to new possibilities, especially after a certain age. You have to draw the line somewhere, though, and with me it’s my anus. My brother, Paul, fell down the alternative-medicine hole a few years back and is now giving himself coffee enemas once a week and suggesting that the rest of us try them as well. “It cures all kinds of cancer,” he told me.

“Yes, but I don’t have cancer,” I reminded him. “And neither do you.”

“Not yet we don’t.” Then he started in on processed sugar and all the toxins in our water.

Up the ass is the only way Paul will take coffee anymore. No caffeine for him, at least by mouth, just herbal tea and the juice of things like brussels sprouts and stinging nettles. He wouldn’t be eating turkey this Thanksgiving because a month earlier, at the state fair, he had looked a chicken in the eye.

“I wish he’d look  me  in the eye,” his wife, Kathy, said. “Here some prize-winning hen changes his life forever while I can’t even get him to empty the fucking dishwasher.”

He’s also taken to Transcendental Meditation—TM—which I didn’t even know was a thing anymore. I thought it went the way of EST and ­sheepskin vests. When I asked him to show me what was so great about it, he explained that he couldn’t. Only a certified instructor could initiate me. It would cost six hundred dollars and be, he promised, the best thing I ever did for myself.

“It’s bad enough for Paul to believe all this crap, but now he’s brought Dad into it,” Lisa told me on Thanksgiving morning. She had a glazed doughnut in one hand and a coffee mug full of milk in the other. “Last month, he took him to his quack nutritionist, the one who convinced him that ice cream causes Alzheimer’s. The women ran a bunch of tests, the outcome ­being that Dad shouldn’t eat wheat, dairy, or any fruit whatsoever, especially green grapes. Can you believe it? And he’s almost ninety-three!” She took a bite of the doughnut. “You’d think that if all these things were  really  that bad for him he’d have had some sign of it earlier.”

Lisa’s  not open to the things that Paul and Amy are, but she has her equivalents. If you told  her,  for instance, that she was holding her car keys the wrong way and that there were meetings for people like  her,  she’d likely attend them for at least three months. One of the groups she was going to lately was for mindful eating.  “It’s  not about dieting—we don’t believe in that,” she said.  “You’re  supposed to carry on as usual: three meals a day plus snacks and desserts or whatever. The difference is that now you  think  about it.” She then confessed that the doughnut she’d just finished had been her sixth of the  day.  “Who  brought  these?” she asked.

I looked at the box and whimpered a little. “Kathy, I think.”

“Goddamn her,” Lisa whispered.

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Suggested Reading

On Nate Lippens

“The spiky poetic homelessness of My Dead Book is in relation to a devotion to not fitting in, not anywhere ever.”

The Art of Editing No. 4

By the time I arrived in New York in the late seventies, Lapham was established in the city’s editorial elite, up there with William Shawn at The New Yorker and Barbara Epstein and Bob Silvers at The New York Review of Books . He was a glamorous fixture at literary parties and a regular at Elaine’s. In 1988, he raised plutocratic hackles by publishing Money and Class in America , a mordant indictment of our obsession with wealth. For a brief but glorious couple of years, he hosted a literary chat show on public TV called Bookmark , trading repartee with guests such as Joyce Carol Oates, Gore Vidal, Alison Lurie, and Edward Said. All the while, a new issue of Harper’s would hit the newsstands every month, with a lead essay by Lapham that couched his erudite observations on American society and politics in Augustan prose.

Today Lapham is the rare surviving eminence from that literary world. But he has managed to keep a handsome bit of it alive—so I observed when I went to interview him last summer in the offices of Lapham’s , a book-filled, crepuscular warren on a high floor of an old building just off Union Square. There he presides over a compact but bustling editorial operation, with an improbably youthful crew of subeditors. One LQ intern, who had also done stints at other magazines, told me that Lapham was singular among top editors for the personal attention he showed to each member of his staff.

Our conversation took place over several sessions, each around ninety minutes. Despite the heat, he was always impeccably attired: well-tailored blue blazer, silk tie, cuff links, and elegant loafers with no socks. He speaks in a relaxed baritone, punctuated by an occasional cough of almost orchestral resonance—a product, perhaps, of the Parliaments he is always dashing outside to smoke. The frequency with which he chuckles attests to a vision of life that is essentially comic, in which the most pervasive evils are folly and pretension.

I was familiar with such aspects of the Lapham persona. But what surprised me was his candid revelation of the struggle and self-doubt that lay behind what I had imagined to be his effortlessness. Those essays, so coolly modulated and intellectually assured, are the outcome of a creative process filled with arduous redrafting, rejiggering, revision, and last-minute amendment in the teeth of the printing press. And it is a creative process that always begins—as it did with his model, Montaigne—not with a dogmatic axiom to be unpacked but in a state of skeptical self-questioning: What do I really know? If there a unifying core to Lapham’s dual career as an editor and an essayist, that may be it.

— Jim Holt

From the Archive, Issue 229

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It May Not Always Be Happy, but David Sedaris’s Latest Memoir Is Still an Awfully Good Time

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David Sedaris: Happy-Go-Lucky | Little, Brown and Company; May 31, 2022 

An Evening With David Sedaris | Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh Wed., April 13, 7:30 p.m., $55+

North Carolinians—or at least those of us who enjoy seeing our state through the twisted lens of Sedarian humor—may rejoice: David Sedaris’s latest essay collection, Happy-Go-Lucky , has much more of the Old North State in it.

Happy-Go-Lucky starts with Sedaris and his sister Lisa visiting a Winston-Salem gun range. In following essays, he shares his and his partner Hugh’s fight to restore their Emerald Isle beach house (wonderfully named the Sea Section) after Hurricane Florence and the family’s time spent in their father’s North Carolina nursing home.

In these new essays, Sedaris continues on themes he began to explore in Calypso , namely his father’s aging, his own aging, and the business of maintaining a beach house on a hurricane-plagued piece of coastline. He also spends ample time being concerned for young people and meditating on the nature of comedy, writing, and performance. Oh, and dental work.

If those topics don’t sound like cause for rejoicing, well, fair. But if you’re a devotee of Sedaris’s work, I think you’ll enjoy this collection. He approaches each of these challenges with his characteristic witty ire, but a few of the essays did leave me thinking about more somber topics like the mortality of my parents and the horror of training children to deal with school shootings.

As always, Sedaris is often shockingly candid. He shares his phobia of looking at his own teeth (this checks out: have you ever seen a photo of him smiling with them visible?), a touch of regret about the last words he said to his father, and the immensely uncomfortable tension of being the subject of at least one youth’s sexual awakening. Just a heads up, the most uncomfortably frank essay investigates his father’s consistent sexual comments about his daughters and one daughter’s accusations of sexual abuse.

Sedaris has often relied on the alternate insight and obliviousness of children to highlight the comedy of everyday life. (Well, he uses them to highlight the comedy of his everyday life, which I’ll admit has a higher level of inherent humor than I can find in my own.) Earlier collections focused almost entirely on Sedaris’s own childhood, but he spends a good amount of time in Happy-Go-Lucky focusing on other children, through exercises such as imagining what it might be like to be a child in a time of school shootings. It works well to highlight the whole uneasy aging thing.

Sedaris is often thoughtful, attacking uncomfortable topics in a darkly funny way. But at least one essay, the one about his father’s death, made me feel the way Bo Burnham’s Inside or Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette did: that I’d fallen prey to a bait and switch where I did not get the laughs I thought I would.

Other essays even take a similar path to some of Burnham’s more poignant moments in Inside . Sedaris considers, for example, the fact that he gets to profit off of his own trauma as long as he can frame it in a way that makes people laugh. Sedaris describes both the freedom that can come from turning trauma into comedy gold and into actual revenue and the necessity of an actual audience for what he does. (Zoom just doesn’t cut it some days, does it?)

He doesn’t linger in this place of self-reflection (indulgence?) for too long, though. He also arrives at a different conclusion than many of us when we reflect on varying levels of emotional exploitation in our own careers: Sedaris likes his job. He likes it when you and I are there to laugh at the trials of his childhood. I found myself touched by his gratitude that we continue to support him in that line of work.

And then, there’s the book cover: on it, a small child smiles while leaning on the arm of a truly grotesque clown who’s holding a small white dog—a poodle maybe? As uncomfortable as the artwork might be, it’s fitting for this collection. If you or I sat down and drew a clown face right now, we’d all probably do similar versions of exaggerated features. Double those to get the scope of this clown’s raggedy face, and trim the mouth down to three painted-on teeth in a Joker smile.

I probably wouldn’t allow this snapshot in my house in any form other than as a necessary attachment to Sedaris’s essays, but I couldn’t imagine a better representation of them. Children watch or attack or ignore Sedaris throughout the collection. He uses their innocence to highlight the creeping horror of confronting his own mortality or, more hauntingly, that of the kindergarteners across the country practicing active-shooter drills.

If you’re looking to be entertained by another round of lightly self-effacing elitism and Sedarian “can he really say that?”—well, he did, and in just another month or so, Happy-Go-Lucky can be yours to have and to hold.

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25 great essays and short stories by david sedaris, you can't kill the rooster, us and them, go carolina, it's catching, our perfect summer, old lady down the hall, the man who mistook his hat for a meal, now we are five, laugh, kookaburra, journey into night, the santaland diaries, when you are engulfed in flames, company man, the shadow of your smile, my finances, in brief, why aren’t you laughing by david sedaris, see also..., 150 great articles and essays.

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Hurricane Season

Grow up in North Carolina and it’s hard to get too attached to a beach house, knowing, as you do, that it’s on borrowed time. If the hurricane doesn’t come this autumn, it’ll likely come the next. The one that claimed our place—the Sea Section—in September of 2018, was Florence. Hugh was devastated, while my only thought was: What’s with the old-fashioned names? Irma, Agnes, Bertha, Floyd—they sound like finalists in a pinochle tournament. Isn’t it time for Hurricanes Madison and Skylar? Where’s Latrice, or Category 4 Fredonté?

Florence, it was said, gave new meaning to the word “namaste” along the North Carolina coast.

“Are you going to evacuate?”

Hugh and I were in London when the hurricane hit, and was followed almost immediately by a tornado. Our friend Bermey owns a house—the Dark Side of the Dune—not far from ours, and went over to check on the Sea Section as soon as people were allowed back onto Emerald Isle. He found our doors wide open—blown open by the wind. A large section of the roof had been ripped off, and the rain that had fallen in the subsequent days had caused the ceilings on both floors to cave in, the water draining, as if the house were a sieve, down into the carport. Bermey took pictures, which looked so tawdry I was embarrassed to share them. It seems that rats had been living in the second-floor ceilings. So there were our beds, speckled with currant-size turds and tufts of bloated, discolored insulation.

All the interior drywall would need to be replaced, as would the roof, of course, along with the doors and windows. We were left with a shell, essentially. Had ours been the only place affected, it might have been easy to have the repairs done, but, between the hurricane and the flooding, thousands of homes had been either destroyed or severely damaged—and that was just in North Carolina.

Our other house, luckily, was relatively unscathed. It’s next door to the Sea Section, and when it came up for sale, in 2016, Hugh disregarded my objections and bought it. His argument was that if he didn’t get it someone would most likely tear it down and construct the sort of McMansion that has become the rule on Emerald Isle rather than the exception. The size of these new houses was one thing—eight bedrooms were common, spread over three or four stories—but what came with them, and what you really didn’t want next door to you, was a swimming pool. “It happened to us ten years ago,” moaned my friend Lynette, who owns an older, traditionally sized cottage up the street from us. “Now all we hear is ‘Marco!’ ‘Polo!’ over and over. It’s like torture.”

The place that Hugh bought is ancient by Emerald Isle standards—built in 1972. It’s a single-story four-bedroom, perched on stilts and painted a shade of pink that’s almost carnal. Like the Sea Section, it’s right on the ocean, but unlike the Sea Section it’s rented out to vacationers. At first, Hugh went through an agency, but now he does it himself, through a number of Web sites. Our friend Lee across the street rents out his place, Almost Paradise, as do most of our Emerald Isle neighbors, and all of them have stories to tell. People leave with the pillows and coat hangers. People grill on the wooden decks. They bring dogs regardless of whether or not you allow them, and small children, meaning all sorts of things get flushed down the toilets: seashells, doll clothes, dice. And, of course, people complain about absolutely everything: The TV only gets ninety channels! There’s some missing paint on the picnic table!

Lee once got a comment from a renter that read “I was shocked by your outdoor shower.”

“I was thinking, How surprising can it be?” he told me. “I mean, you’re at the beach, for God’s sake. Then I went out to wash up, and when I touched the handle for the hot water I got thrown clear across the room.”

Hugh bought the second house with everything in it, and, although it’s a bit heavy on the white wicker, the furniture is far from awful. He drew the line at the art work, though. It was standard fare for a beach house: garish pictures of sailboats and sunsets. Signs reading “If You’re Not Barefoot, You’re Overdressed” and “Old Fishermen Never Die, They Just Smell That Way.”

If he wanted to, Hugh could work as a professional forger. That’s how good he is at copying paintings. So for the rental house he reproduced a number of Picassos , including “La Baignade,” from 1937, which depicts two naked women knee-deep in the water with a third person looking on. The figures are abstracted, almost machinelike, and cement-colored, positioned against a sapphire sea and an equally intense sky. Hugh did three others—all beach-related—and got a comment from a renter saying that, although the house was comfortable enough, the “art work” (she put it in quotes) was definitely not family-friendly. As the mother of young children, she had taken the paintings down during her stay, and said that if he wanted her to return he’d definitely have to rethink his décor. As if they were Hustler centerfolds!

“Can you believe that woman?” Hugh said, almost a year after the hurricane hit, when we arrived to spend a week on Emerald Isle. It was August. The Sea Section was still under construction, so we stayed at the rental house, which he was calling the Pink House, for reasons I could not for the life of me understand. “It’s just such a boring name,” I argued.

“It really is,” my sister Gretchen agreed. She’d pulled up an hour before we had, and was dressed in a fudge-colored tankini. Her long hair is going silver, and was gathered in a burger-size bun, not quite on the back of her head but not on top, either. She had turned sixty earlier that week and looked as if she were made of well-burnished leather—the effect of age and aggressive, year-round tanning. The skin between her throat and her chest had gone crêpey, and it bothered me to notice it. I cannot bear watching my sisters get old. It just seems cruel. They were all such beauties.

“Calling this the Pink House is just nothing,” she said.

The best name, in my opinion, considering that the rental was next to the Sea Section, was a choice between the Amniotic Shack and Canker Shores. Both had been suggested by a third party and were far better than what I’d come up with.

“And what was that?” Gretchen asked, opening a cabinet in search of a coffee cup.

“Country Pride Strong Family Peppermill,” I told her.

“Not that again,” Hugh said.

“It’s not a pun, but I think it has a nice ring to it.”

Hugh opened the refrigerator, then reached for the trash can. Renters aren’t supposed to leave things behind, but they do, and none of their condiments were meeting his approval. “It sounds like you just went to the grocery store and wrote down words.”

“That’s exactly what I did,” I told him.

“Well, too bad. It’s my house and I’ll call it what I want to.”

He tossed a bottle of orange salad dressing into the garbage. “But nothing. Butt out.”

“C-R-A-B,” Gretchen mouthed. I nodded in agreement, and made pinching motions with my hands. It can sometimes be tricky having Hugh around my family. “What is his problem ?” each of my siblings has asked me at one time or another, usually flopping down on my bed during a visit.

“What is whose problem,” I always say, but it’s just a formality. I know who they’re talking about. I’ve heard Hugh yell at everyone, even my father. “Get out of my kitchen” is pretty common, as is “Use a plate,” and “Did I say you could start eating?”

I’d like to be loyal when they complain about him. I’d like to say, “I’m sorry, but that’s my boyfriend of almost thirty years you’re talking about.” But I’ve always felt that my first loyalty is to my family, and so I whisper, “Isn’t it horrible?”

“How can you stand it?” they ask.

“I don’t know!” I say. Though, of course, I do. I love Hugh. Not the moody Hugh who slams doors and shouts at people—that one I merely tolerate—but he’s not like that all the time. Just enough to have earned him a reputation.

“Why did you yell at Lisa?” I asked, the year that three of my sisters joined us for Christmas at our home in Sussex.

“Because she came to the dinner table with a coat on.”

“It made her look like she wasn’t staying,” he said. “Like she was going to leave as soon as her ride pulled up.”

“And?” I said, though I knew exactly what he was saying. It was Christmas dinner, and it’s a slippery slope. One year you wear a down coat at the table, and the next you’re dressed in a sweatsuit eating cold spaghetti out of a pan in front of the TV. My sisters can say what they will about Hugh’s moodiness, but no one can accuse him of letting himself go, or even of taking shortcuts, especially during the holidays, when it’s homemade everything, from the eggnog to the piglet with an apple in its mouth. There’s a tree, there are his German great-grandmother’s cookies, he will spend four days in an apron listening to the “Messiah,” and that’s the way it is, goddammit.

Similarly, he makes the beach feel the way it’s supposed to. A few years back, he designed a spiral-shaped outdoor shower at the Sea Section that we found ourselves using even in the winter. He grills seafood every night, and serves lunch on the deck overlooking the ocean. He makes us ice cream with fruit sold at an outdoor stand by the people who grew it, and mixes drinks at cocktail hour. It’s just that he’s, well, Hugh.

When I get mad at someone, it’s usually a reaction to something he or she said or did. Hugh’s anger is more like the weather: something you open your door and step into. There’s no dressing for it, and neither is there any method for predicting it. A few months after we met, for example, he and I ran into an old friend of mine at a play. This was in New York, in 1991. We thought we’d all go out to eat, then Hugh offered to cook at his apartment. Somewhere between the theatre and Canal Street, his mood darkened. There was no reason. It was like the wind shifting direction. The making of dinner involved a lot of muttering, and, when my friend sat down to eat, his chair gave way, causing him to tumble onto the floor.

I apologized, saying that the chair was already broken, and Hugh contradicted me: “No, it wasn’t.”

“Why would you say that?” I asked, after my friend had hobbled home.

“Because it wasn’t broken,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I explained. “The point was to make him feel less embarrassed.”

“Too bad,” Hugh said. “I can’t hide who I am.”

“Well, it’s really important to try,” I told him. “I mean, like, really, really important.”

“Let me ask you two a question,” Hugh said to Gretchen and me, on our first afternoon at the Pink House in August. He opened the sliding glass door to the deck and invited us to sit on the rocking chairs out there. The nails that held them together had been weeping rust onto the unpainted wood for so long that I put a towel down so as not to stain my white shorts, and got snapped at for it.

“ Now , please.”

I took a seat. “Ready.”

“O.K., do you think those are rickety? That’s what the renter who hated the paintings called them.”

I settled in and swayed as much going side to side as I did going back and forth. “Yes,” I said. “ ‘Rickety’ is probably the best word for this, possibly followed by ‘kindling.’ ”

“This one, too,” Gretchen said.

“Well, you’re just spoiled,” Hugh told us. “There’s nothing at all wrong with those rocking chairs.” He stormed back into the house, and I heard the click that meant he had locked us out.

“Goddammit,” Gretchen said. “My cigarettes are in there.”

Lisa and Paul and Amy couldn’t make it to the beach this time. It was sad being on the island without them, but at least it left fewer people for Hugh to crab at. “If you want to raise your voice to someone, you might consider the contractors,” I said in the living room the following morning, looking next door at our empty driveway, and not hearing what I heard coming from other houses: the racket of hammers and Skilsaws.

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“Why don’t you call them?” Hugh asked. “I filled out all the insurance forms. I see to all the bills and taxes, so how about you take care of something for a change?”

I didn’t respond, but just sighed, knowing he wasn’t serious. The last thing Hugh wants is me taking care of something. I wouldn’t have paid him any mind, but Gretchen was in the room. I don’t like seeing my relationship through her eyes. That said, I do like seeing my family from Hugh’s vantage point. To him, we’re like dolls cut from flypaper, each one of us connected to the other and dotted with foul little corpses.

“What is with men adjusting their balls all the time?” Gretchen asked, staring down at her phone.

“Are you talking about someone specifically?” Hugh asked.

“The guys that I work with,” she said. “The landscaping crews. They can’t keep their hands away from their crotches.”

“It could be due to heat rash,” I suggested, adding that touching your balls in public is now illegal in Italy. “Men did it to ward off bad luck, apparently.”

“Hmmm,” Gretchen said, turning back to her phone. “I was in a meeting a few weeks back, and when I took one of my shoes off a roach ran out. It must have been hiding in there when I got dressed that morning.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Hugh asked.

I rolled my eyes. “Does it matter? It’s always time for a good story.”

“Your family,” he said, like we were a bad thing.

That afternoon, I watched him swim out into the ocean. Gretchen and I were on the beach together, and I remembered a young woman earlier in the summer who’d had a leg bitten off, as well as a few fingers. Squinting at the horizon as Hugh grew smaller and smaller, I said that if the sharks did get him I just hoped they’d spare his right arm. “That way he can still kind of cook, and access our accounts online.”

It’s hard to imagine Gretchen’s boyfriend crabbing at anyone. She and Marshall have been together almost as long as Hugh and I have, and I can’t think of a gentler guy. The same can be said of Paul’s wife, Kathy. My brother-in-law, Bob, might get crotchety every so often, but when he snaps at Lisa for, say, balancing a glass of grape juice on the arm of a white sofa, we usually think, Well, she kind of deserved it. Amy’s been single since the mid-nineties, but I never heard her last boyfriend, a funny and handsome asthmatic, yell at anyone, even when he had good reason to.

Gretchen and I had been on the beach for all of twenty minutes before she did what she always does, eventually. “I went online recently and read all sorts of horrible comments about you,” she said lazily, as if the shape of a passing cloud had reminded her of it.

I don’t know where she gets the idea that I—that anyone—would want to hear things like this. “Gretchen, there’s a reason I don’t Google myself, I really don’t want to—”

“A lot of people just can’t stand you.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s a consequence of putting stuff out there—you’re going to get reactions. That doesn’t mean I have to regard them all.”

Jeez, I thought, sprinting back to the house over the scorching sand and wondering which was worse—getting snapped at by Hugh or having to endure what Gretchen was doling out. Although it’s true that I don’t read reviews or look myself up, I do answer my mail. A few months earlier, I’d been given two hundred and thirty letters sent to me in care of my publishing house. I had responded to a hundred and eighty already, and brought the remaining fifty to the beach, where I figured I’d see to ten a day. Most were just what I’d always wanted: kind words from strangers. Every now and then, though, a complaint would come along. I’d like to say I brush them off, and I guess I do, in time. For days, though, and sometimes months, I’ll be bothered. For example, a woman sent me her ticket stubs, plus her parking receipt, demanding that I reimburse her. She and her husband had attended a reading and apparently objected to my material. “I thought you were better than that,” she scolded, which always confuses me. First off, better than what? I mean, a clean show is fine, but no finer than a filthy one. Me, I like a nice balance.

That aside, who doesn’t want to hear about a man who shoved a coat hanger up his ass? How can you not find that fascinating? “What kind of a person are you?” I wanted to write back.

Sometimes after a hard day of angry letters or e-mails, after having an essay rejected or listening to Gretchen tell me how much a woman she works with thinks I suck, I’ll go to Hugh and beg him to say something nice about me.

“Like what?” he’ll ask.

“I shouldn’t have to tell you. Think of something.”

“I can’t right now,” he’ll say. “I’m in the middle of making dinner”—as if I’d asked him to name all the world capitals in alphabetical order. I feel as though I’m always complimenting him. “You look so handsome tonight.” “What a great meal you made.” “You’re so smart, so well read, etc.” It’s effortless, really.

“I don’t want to give you a fat head,” he’ll tell me, when I ask for something in return.

“My head is, like, the size of an onion. I’m begging you, please, enlarge it.”

He says I get enough praise already. But it’s not the same thing.

“O.K.,” he’ll say, finally. “You’re persistent. How’s that?”

I like coming to Emerald Isle in May. It’s not too hot then, and most everyone in my family can take a week off. Ditto at Thanksgiving . August, though, is definitely something I do for Hugh, a sacrifice. The heat that month is brutal, and the humidity is so high my glasses fog up. At home, in Sussex, I’d happily be walking twenty-two miles a day, but at Emerald Isle, at the height of summer, I’m lucky to get fifteen in, and even then I really have to force myself.

I don’t like to aimlessly wander, especially in a place where thunderstorms can appear without warning. I need a destination, so I generally go to a coffee shop near the grocery store, usually with a couple of letters to answer. Back and forth I’ll walk, making three or more trips a day. When Hugh and I lived in Normandy, he heard a local woman telling a friend about a mentally challenged man she often saw marching past her house. He wore headphones, she said, and looked at pictures while talking to himself.

That, of course, was me, but they weren’t pictures I was holding. They were index cards with that day’s ten new French vocabulary words on them.

In Sussex not long ago, an acquaintance approached me to share a similar story. Again I was identified as mentally challenged, this time because I was picking up trash and muttering to myself. Only I wasn’t muttering—I was repeating phrases from my Learn to Speak Japanese or Swedish or Polish audio program. “The woman who saw you said, ‘I just hope no one tries to take advantage of him,’ ” the acquaintance told me.

On Emerald Isle this August, it was German I was muttering. I might have picked up an occasional bit of trash, but I wasn’t carrying any equipment, just ziplock bags of hot dogs or thick-cut bologna to feed the snapping turtles in the canal.

We’d been at the beach for four days when I noticed a great many ant colonies in the dirt bordering the sidewalk between the strip mall the CVS is in and the one the grocery store is in. The ants were cinnamon-colored, hundreds of thousands of them, all racing about, searching for something to eat.

“Excuse me,” I said that afternoon to the guy behind the counter at the hardware store. “I was wanting to feed some ants and wonder what you think they might like. How would they feel about bananas?”

The man’s face and neck were deeply creased from age, and the sun. “Bananas?” He took off his glasses and then put them back on. “Naw, I’d go with candy. Ants like that pretty good.”

I bought a bag of gummy worms from beside the register, bit them into thirds, and, on my way back to the house, distributed them among the various colonies as evenly as I could. It made me happy to think of the workers, presenting their famished queens with sugar, and possibly being rewarded for it.

“You’re out there feeding ants candy ?” Hugh said that night at the table, when we were all discussing our day. “They don’t need your help, and neither do the stupid turtles. You mess these things up by feeding them—you hurt them is what you do.” It wasn’t what he said that concerned me but, rather, his tone, which, again, I wouldn’t have noticed if my sister weren’t there.

“Well, they seemed pretty happy to me,” I said.

Gretchen patted my hand: “Don’t listen to Hugh. He doesn’t know shit about being an ant.”

This was a relatively short beach trip. Renters were arriving on Saturday, so the three of us had to have the house clean and be out by 10 a.m. Gretchen left a bit earlier than we did, and, though I was sorry to see her go, it was a relief to escape her judgment regarding the life I have built with Hugh. As it was, whenever anything good happened during that week, whenever he was cheerful or thoughtlessly kind, I wanted to say, “See, this is what my relationship is like— this! ”

It was a three-hour drive to Raleigh. I had work to do, so while Hugh drove I sat in the back seat. “Just for a little while,” I said. I must have fallen asleep, though. After waking, I read for a bit, and the next thing I knew the car wasn’t moving. “What’s going on?” I asked, too lazy to sit up and look out the window.

“I don’t know,” Hugh said. “An accident, maybe.”

I righted myself and was just attempting to hop into the front seat when Hugh advanced and tapped the car in front of us. “Now, see what you made me do!”

I don’t know anything about cars, but the one he’d hit was bigger than ours, and white. The driver was husky and pissed-off-looking, with the sort of large, watery eyes I’d expect to find behind glasses. “Did you just hit me?” he asked, walking toward us. He bent to examine his bumper, which seemed to be made of plastic and had a pale mark on it, possibly put there by us.

Hugh rolled down his window: “I maybe did, but just a little.” The man glared at what he probably assumed was an Uber driver making extra money by taking people to the airport, or wherever that gap-toothed dope in the back seat was headed. He gave his bumper another once-over, then the traffic started moving. Someone honked, and the man got back into his car. “Hit him again,” I said to Hugh. “But harder this time. We need to show him who’s boss.”

“Will you please shut up,” he said. “As a favor to me. Please.”

When we first got news that Hurricane Florence had all but destroyed the Sea Section, I felt nothing. Part of my indifference was that I’d expected this to happen. It was inevitable. Then, too, I wasn’t as attached to the place as he was. I wasn’t the one who’d be contacting the insurance company. I wouldn’t be dropping everything to fly to North Carolina. It wouldn’t be me picking turds off our beds, or finding a contractor. In that sense, I could afford to feel nothing. After looking at the pictures that Bermey had sent, I shrugged and went for a walk. At dusk, I returned and found Hugh in our bedroom, curled up with his face in his hands. “My house,” he sobbed, his shoulders quaking.

“Well, one of your houses,” I said, thinking of Florence’s other victims.

Some, like Hugh, were crying on their beds, far from the affected area, while others were on foldout sofas, in sleeping bags, in the back seats of cars, or on cots laid out like circuitry in public-school gymnasiums. People who’d thought they were far enough inland to be safe, who’d had real belongings in their now ruined houses: things that were dear to them, and irreplaceable. The hardest-hit victims lost actual people—mates or friends or family members swept away and swallowed by floodwaters.

Then again, this was something of a pattern for Hugh. So many of the houses he’d lived in growing up had been destroyed: in Beirut, in Mogadishu, in Kinshasa. He’s actually sort of bad luck that way.

I put my arms around him, and said the things that were expected of me: “We’ll rebuild, and it will all be fine. Better, actually. You’ll see.” This was how I always imagined myself in a relationship: the provider, the rock, the reassuring voice of wisdom. I had to catch myself from saying, “I’ve got you,” which is what people say on TV now when they’re holding a distraught person. It’s a nice sentiment, but culturally speaking there was only a five-minute period when you could say this without sounding lame, and it has long passed.

I do have him, though. Through other people’s eyes, the two of us might not make sense, but that works in reverse as well. I have a number of friends who are in long-term relationships I can’t begin to figure out. But what do I know? What does Gretchen or Lisa or Amy? They see me getting scolded from time to time, getting locked out of my own house, but where are they in the darkening rooms when a close friend dies or rebels storm the embassy. When the wind picks up and the floodwaters rise. When you realize you’d give anything to make that other person stop hurting, if only so he can tear your head off again. And you can forgive and forget again. On and on, hopefully. Then on and on and on. ♦

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by David Sedaris

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The one-and-only David Sedaris's latest collection may be his most poignant, hilarious, and sharp-eyed yet.

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Famous author

If you've ever laughed your way through David Sedaris's cheerfully misanthropic stories, you might think you know what you're getting with Calypso . You'd be wrong. When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: It's impossible to take a vacation from yourself.

With Calypso , Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. Make no mistake: These stories are very, very funny—it's a book that can make you laugh till you snort, the way only family can. Sedaris's writing has never been sharper, and his ability to shock readers into laughter unparalleled. But much of the comedy here is born out of that vertiginous moment when your own body betrays you and you realize that the story of your life is made up of more past than future.

This is beach reading for people who detest beaches, required reading for those who loathe small talk and love a good tumor joke. Calypso is simultaneously Sedaris's darkest and warmest book yet—and it just might be his very best.

Why I love it

Liberty Hardy

When I worked as a bookseller, the thing I dreaded hearing more than anything was, “I want to read something funny.” In my experience, you could fill a canyon with books that are sad or poignant, or full of mystery or romance. But trying to find a book that will make someone actually laugh is tremendously difficult. Luckily, every three or four years, David Sedaris comes out with another uproarious essay collection to help in that department.

Sedaris is the king of translating his observations and experiences into witty pieces that can also be tremendously moving. He addresses serious subjects effortlessly, never more so than in Calypso , which primarily tackles the subject of aging, a topic Sedaris works into astute observations on his need for—and fear of—a physical, his siblings’ health issues, or his father (who takes a spin class at the age of 91!). Whether it’s a story about shopping in Japan, his beach house, his family, his Fitbit obsession, his sister’s death, or astrology, he always turns his wit to the task of dissecting the nuances of being human, which, I think, takes far more talent than being just raunchy or shocking.

Sedaris is smart and clever, but also delightfully shameless (he is a master at the humble brag), occasionally naughty (the brainstorming session about what to name the beach house is A+ material), and a little strange, too. Instead of quoting something funny from the book, I will just say I started laughing out loud on page two, and I continued to laugh through the whole book (as well as tear up a time or two).

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By David Sedaris

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• Audiobook Download (Unabridged)
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This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around June 4, 2019. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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Description

• "This book allows us to observe not just the nimble-mouthed elf of Sedaris's previous work, but a man in his seventh decade expunging his darker secrets and contemplating mortality...The brilliance of David Sedaris's writing is that his very essence, his aura, seeps through the pages of his books like an intoxicating cloud, mesmerizing us so that his logic becomes ours...The geeks really do inherit the earth." Alan Cumming, New York Times Book Review
• "The king of the humorous essay returns with a brand-new collection -- his first in five years. Sedaris fans will find plenty of familiar delights: His misanthropic charms and wry wit are as delightful as ever, even if some of the subject matter has changed. From his new vacation home on the coast of North Carolina, he writes about the concerns of health and aging, treating us to a story about the persnickety doctor who refused to let him keep a noncancerous tumor that he'd planned to feed to a snapping turtle once removed. We can only assume that the audiobook version of Calypso will be the perfect travel companion during road trips and getaways this spring and beyond." Maris Kreizman, New York Magazine
• "Age and family occupy beloved humorist Sedaris's latest collection of essays. His observations feel sharper and often darker than in previous collections, as he ponders the inevitable breakdown of the human body, the shame attendant with illness and age, the nature of addiction, and the eccentricities of his family. Though middle age may have made his shades of gray blacker, the wit and incisiveness that make Sedaris much-adored remain." Lauren Hubbard, Harper's Bazaar
• "Honest, reflective, and even tender...Eloquent and silly, Sedaris' collection could probably find unshakable life even in the dust kitties under the bed...He gets you laughing even as he gently turns you toward the darkness we all must face." Caroline Leavitt, San Francisco Chronicle
• "David Sedaris's new essay collection is the sharpest retort to anyone who thinks they know what our favorite curmudgeonly humorist will be up to next. His charming observational humor is still the engine, but there's nothing frivolous about it. In the wake of his sister's suicide, Sedaris grapples poignantly and satisfyingly (and yes, often hilariously) with death, the aging body, and just how far the bonds of family can stretch." Alex Postman, Conde Nast Traveler
• "David Sedaris's biggest strength as an essayist and a humorist lies in his remarkable power of observation, of detecting the humor and pathos is the everyday conversations most of us don't register. His attention and wit are as incisive as ever, but Sedaris brings a stronger sense of self to the pages of Calypso ...It's both warmer and bleaker than any Sedaris that's come before." Laura Adamczyk and Caitlin Penzeymoog, AV Club
• "If there's one thing you can count on in life, it's Sedaris to leave you giggling on the beach in both humor and horror. His latest collection of stories is a bit more serious than his previous, but even when the Sedaris clan is at its worst, the humorist reveals their antics with his characteristic wit in a way that manages to both soften and sharpen the dark truths behind the stories he tells." Allison McNearney, Daily Beast
• "Sedaris is widely considered is widely considered America's leading humorist, and his new book Calypso does nothing but burnish that reputation." Nic Brown, Garden & Gun
• "Laugh-out-loud funny, true and introspective." Holly Silva, St Louis Post-Dispatch
• "With this tenth book, Sedaris demonstrates yet again what makes him the best American humorist writing today: a remarkable ability to combine the personal with the political, the mundane with the profane, slime with sublime, and hilarity with heart." Heller McAlpin, NPR
• "The beauty of David Sedaris's personality---and what keeps his readers coming back for best-selling book after best-selling book---is his unwavering dedication to a helter-skelter train of thought... Calypso is his most personal and open book yet, shedding light on his late sister's struggle with mental health, his mother's addiction, and his own experiences with the legalization of gay marriage, but it still finds plenty of room for laughs." Seija Rankin, Entertainment Weekly
• " Calypso is the most family-centered of his books yet and, although much of it is very funny, it's also his most melancholy as it addresses aging and loss...it ranges across a number of other subjects as well, often with Sedaris's trademark off-center, self-deprecating humor." Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times
• "If you're ever stuck in an elevator or airport, just pray for David Sedaris to appear. Time passes quickly with this national treasure of a storyteller. Reading Calypso is like settling into a glorious beach vacation with the author, whose parents, siblings and longtime boyfriend, Hugh, feel like old friends to faithful readers...While Sedaris is laugh-out-loud funny in his brilliant, meandering way, it's his personal reflections that will stay with you." Alice Cary, Bookpage

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David Sedaris

About the author.

David Sedaris is the author of the books Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls , Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk , When You Are Engulfed in Flames , Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim , Me Talk Pretty One Day , Holidays on Ice , Naked , and Barrel Fever . He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and BBC Radio 4. He lives in England.

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Steve of Upland

Another self-indulgent, boring weblog. move along, folks, nothing of interest here. don't bother. waste of time, really., the oar house in santa monica, circa mid-1970s.

Oar House ad from late ’60s. Yes, that’s exactly how it looked inside.

I worked at the Santa Monica Evening Outlook newspaper in the 1970s.

One day I wanted to find out if a friend was at our favorite watering hole, the Oar House bar down by the beach on funky Main St.

I called information and when the operator asked, “What number please?” I said, “The Oar House in Santa Monica.”

There was silence for a while, then the operator increduously asked, “What? What? Did you say whorehouse?”

I just assumed everyone knew about the Oar House.

It was more like a warehouse then a whorehouse. A rambling building a group of hyperactive airline pilots took over sometime in the mid-Sixties and filled with bizarre crap they picked up in their travels all over the world. It was their playground and it was open to the public.

Here’s how David Markland remembers The Oar House on his blog:

“The Oar House was the definition of a dive bar. Besides the phonetically inviting name, the place itself looked like a TGI Fridays that had exploded, and all the chairs and antiques had stuck to the walls and ceiling.

“If you’ve been on Pirates of the Caribbean and can recall the part towards the end of the ride where it looks like wooden planks are about to drop on you, you can probably get a good mental image of what the Oar House looked like.”

The current owners of the Oar House have this history on their website :

“The Oar House was a child of the sixties.  Over time it became a popular destination fueled mostly by word of mouth.  Serving Budweiser products and the finest call drinks at low prices also contributed to its popularity.

“Patrons were as mixed as the musical selections.  Students, local Santa Monica beach residents, surfers, celebrities, airline crews and a melting pot of SoCal fans.

“Santa Monica was the official end of the line for Route 66, the nations famous transcontinental migration route from the east.  Most young-but-of-age pilgrims landed at the bar.  This aided in spreading the gospel of a coolest bar throughout all points back east.”

The Oar House was always real loud — fantastic speaker system; eclectic music: rock, jazz, classical. Wall-to-wall people talking and laughing.

Every ten feet along the bar were emergency flashing lights on poles. These were the “fight lights” that a bartender could turn on to let the bouncer know the exact location of an altercation or problem patron.

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Repeat After Me

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A story by regular contributor David Sedaris involving his sister Lisa, a secret, and her very understanding parrot. David read this story live, and it's on his CD Live at Carnegie Hall . The story is also published in his book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim . (24 minutes)

More in Live Performance

Act one: the youth in asia, act two: the heels on the bus, act four: bus stop, more by david sedaris, act four: now we are five.

• in Apple Podcasts

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