Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Chapters 7-11)

First, I have to amend my statement in the last post about this book not being laugh-out-loud funny.  I admit it: I laughed out loud several times during this segment of the book.  This requires a different skill set on the part of a humorist writer than the stand-up comic.  If it’s largely about delivery – as opposed to content alone – the stand-up comic delivers with voice inflection and with timing, the perfectly placed pause or pace of delivery.  The humorist writer has to rely on phrasing a lot more, along with word choice and sentence arrangement.  I’m not an expert on this, but Mr. Sedaris appears to have quite mastered these elements, in my view. 

There is some nice history in these anecdotes, also.  For those of us who lived through the sixties (and, yes, remember them!) there is a strong feeling of re-visiting the past in these pages.  The description of the “hippies” and how they act, dress and speak might be lost on someone who wasn’t around back then.  To today’s college age reader, “hippy” means something rather different than it did then, and the attitude that “normal” people had toward “hippies” at that time – nicely depicted by Sedaris’s mother and her reactions – probably can’t be fully appreciated.  His attempts to dress like a hippy being ridiculed by the “real hippies” speaks to a cultural disconnect prevalent at the time which is difficult to convey to modern youth; especially the ones who attempt to emulate them.

His relationship with his mother is explored in depth in these pages, and we get a pretty clear picture of a rather complex woman, with strengths and weaknesses we can really relate to.  She is not above mocking her son:  “Being mocked by the untalented was easy to brush off, but my mother was really good at imitating people.  Coming from her, I sounded spoiled and vacant, like a Persian cat, only human.”  And a quote from her: “You don’t think I know how these things work?  I wasn’t just born some middle-aged woman with a nice purse and a decent pair of shoes.  My God, the things you don’t know.  My God.” 

Some very poignant moments are depicted as well.  After his father kicks him out of the house, he doesn’t realize that the real reason is because he is gay.  “My mother assumed that I knew the truth, and it tore her apart.  Here was yet another defining moment, and again I missed it entirely.  She cried until it sounded as if she were choking.  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’”  So not only does the humor intensify in this section, but the human drama does as well.  And so do the references to his being gay.

 

Up to the eleventh chapter, the book is probably “PG-13”.  In a decided wrenching into a new direction, we suddenly enter deeply into the realm of “R”.  Just about the time I’m thinking my wife will enjoy this book when I’m through with it, we get an extended scene that is borderline pornographic in nature – but it’s such bizarre Situation Comedy that there is no doubt that it has its place in this semi-autobiographic work.  Who knew that there was such a thing as an erotic housecleaning service?  “…you’d think that on seeing me, he might have realized his mistake.  I’ve never dealt with an erotic housecleaning service, but something tells me the employees are hired for their looks rather than their vacuuming skills.  Something tells me they only surface clean.  I’d wonder for weeks why Martin had put up with me.  In his growing impatience it seemed he would have simply told me what he wanted…”  Yikes – time to move on!





Next week's chapters: 12-16.