Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Conclusion)

Our next stop on the tour of David Sedaris’s family is his youngest sister, Tiffany.  His other two sisters, besides Lisa, are Gretchen and Amy, but we don’t get a chapter on them in this book.  Maybe he is sparing them from his acerbic wit out of respect, or pity.  Or maybe he rakes them over the coals in a different book.  If so, I may get to read about them after all, as I intend to read more by this author!  Tiffany is the problem child of the family, having been in juvenile detention and living a rather nomadic life ever since.  She makes it clear that she doesn’t even like her family, and that she has been dreading his visit.  It’s hard for me to imagine having a sibling that detests you; it makes me wonder why David even tries to connect with her. 

At this point in the narrative, Sedaris seems to run out of the obvious topics on which to base the chapters, and brings up rather random-seeming events, little snapshots of his life which are all the more bizarre for their mundaneness.  A meal spent with Hugh and a female friend of his, during which she informs him that you are supposed to eat a piece of pie from the outer crust inward, saving the tip until last, and making a wish on it.  A trip to a different state in which everything goes sour, and an awkward situation in which he is sure he looks like a child molester.  All of these are told in his remarkably comic, eloquent and poignant “voice,” while underscoring what it is like to live in his world. 

Listening to a talk-radio show, he hears about a pedophilia case:  “The Catholic Church scandal had been front-page news for over a week, and when the priest angle had been exhausted, the discussion filtered down to pedophilia in general and then, homosexual pedophilia, which was commonly agreed to be the worst kind.  It was, for talk radio, one of those easy topics, like tax hikes or mass murder.  ‘What do you think of full-grown men practicing sodomy on children?’  ‘Well, I’m against it!’  This was always said as if it was somehow startling, a minority position no one had yet dared lay claim to…Then, little by little, they’d begin interchanging the words homosexual and pedophile, speaking as if they were one and the same.  ‘These homosexuals can’t reproduce themselves, and so they go into the schools and try to recruit our young people.’  It was nothing I hadn’t heard before, but I was crankier than usual and found myself in the middle of the room, one sock on and one sock off, shouting at the clock radio.  ‘Nobody recruited me, Audrey.  And I begged for it.’” 

This book isn’t really about homosexuality – and yet it is permeated with the sense of what it’s like to be gay in this society, in much the same way that a book written by a black man or woman will be permeated by a sense of what it’s like to be black in the same society.  This perspective is important to the author, and so it becomes an important theme of the book. 

 

Sedaris’s brother, Paul, is the first one in the family to give his parents a grandchild, much to everyone’s surprise.  The description of the ever-so-crude Paul’s reaction to fatherhood is as appalling as it is funny.  He is totally engrossed in the experience in his Beverly Hillbilly way, complete with endless photographs and videos; some of them rather disgusting.  Or is David exaggerating?  At one point, in one of Paul’s videos, he holds the baby up to the camera “and she gave a little, two-syllable cry that sounded to Paul like ‘whoopee!’ but [David] interpreted as something closer to ‘help meeeee.’”  We can’t choose our relatives; even our parents.  And that, of course, is the over-riding theme of this wonderful book!





September’s book of the month: "Red Mist," by Patricia Cornwell.  With high-tension suspense and cutting-edge technology, Patricia Cornwell--the world's #1 bestselling crime writer--once again proves her exceptional ability to entertain and enthrall in this remarkable novel featuring chief medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta.

[With Labor Day coming up, school getting underway and all the chaos that entails, we'll skip a weekend and shoot for September 7th as our first target date for comments.  See you then!]