David Sedaris reads about worlds he’ll never see
August 1, 2006 | 12:00am
It was a pleasant way to spend the afternoon. Meet best-selling humorist David Sedaris at a cozy merienda with only a few writers. I had enjoyed his appearance on the David Letterman show a few months ago. He read an essay on male accessories… it was hilarious. His poker-faced rendition of the merits of having a "pee bag" attached and the points against it was just too funny. As it turns out, just David (Sedaris, that is) hates doing television just as he hates having his picture taken. Being a popular author, he is unable to stay away from both of his pet peeves. I hope his book signings at various Powerbooks branches this weekend were filled with book lovers as he is truly a delight to meet.
David took the time to share with us some of his favorite books:
RANDOM FAMILY By Adrian Nicole LeBlanc: Journalist LeBlanc spent more than 10 years following two Latina women from the Bronx, and in this ambitious work, she tells their stories, beginning in the late 1980s with their young teen years. Older Jessica becomes a mistress to an enormously successful heroin dealer, and Coco falls for Jessica’s brother, an aspiring gangster. "Such a good book. It is about a world I don’t know and I love to read books that show me a world I would never have a chance to see."
AN OBEDIENT FATHER By Akhil Sharma: Sharma, a Delhi-born New York investment banker, has written a novel that’s satisfyingly ambitious and full of really lovely imagery (tulips, for instance, are "heavy-hearted"). He depicts Ram’s downfall in the context of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. As India descends into political turmoil, Ram is made accountable for corruption both at work and at home. What gives the book its engine is its even-tempered handling of Ram himself: he is always complex, never a moral lesson or a villain. "Once again this book is about people I have never met and gives me a glimpse of what their lives are all about."
LIFE FOR ME AIN’T BEEN NO CRYSTAL STAIR: One Family’s Passage Through the Child Welfare System by Susan Sheehan: This Pulitzer Prize-winning author has written a poignant and moving tale of foster care in America. Sheehan tells the story of Florence, an African American; her oldest child, Crystal; and Crystal’s son, nine-year-old Daquan. Although interviews with Crystal’s younger siblings and social workers are incorporated, this narrative is told mainly from Crystal’s point of view. At age 14, she gave premature birth to her son. Because she was a minor and her mother was a drug addict, she and her baby were placed in two different foster homes by the state of New York.
BIRDS OF AMERICA By Lorrie Moore: Though the characters in these 12 stories are seen in such varied settings as Iowa, Ireland, Maryland, Louisiana and Italy, they are all afflicted with ennui, angst and aimlessness. They can’t communicate or connect; they have no inner resources; they can’t focus; they can’t feel love. "Magnificent writer!" says Sedaris.
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD by Richard Yates: Yates’s incisive, moving, and often very funny prose weaves a tale that is at once a fascinating period piece and a prescient anticipation of the way we live now. Many of the cultural motifs seem quaintly dated – the early-evening cocktails, Frank’s illicit lunch breaks with his secretary, the way Frank isn’t averse to knocking April around when she speaks out of turn – and yet the quiet desperation at thwarted dreams reverberates as much now as it did years ago. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, this novel conveys, with brilliant erudition, the exacting cost of chasing the American dream.
BLUE ANGEL By Francine Prose: A satire of academia, specifically of English and writing departments, the setting is Euston College in rural Vermont, a place kids go if they don’t get into Bennington; a place where desperate novelists teach creative writing to rich kids who don’t seem to read. Prose, who has taught at all the hotshot workshops in the US, skewers both teachers and students in the way only a true insider could. An "incredible, skilled craftsman," says Sedaris.
THE AFTERLIFE: A MEMOIR by Donald Antrim: Acclaimed novelist Antrim, who wrote The Verificationist, makes his first foray into memoir with a moving attempt at tracing the roots of his own depression, anxiety and trouble with women. He does this by examining his relationship to his life-threateningly alcoholic mother, Louanne, who wrecked two marriages to the same man and irrevocably scarred her children. "Remarkable writer! Autobiographical essays mixed with gifted writing."
THE COLUMNIST by Jeffrey Frank: The innocuous, limp title is the single failure of this searingly satiric portrait of the hyperactive Washington, DC, news scene. Frank, onetime staff member of the Washington Post and its defunct rival, The Washington Star, and currently a senior editor for The New Yorker, has etched with acidic precision the story of Brandon Sladder, a mock maven who latched onto a journalism career with a bit of handy blackmail. "Fake memoirs but really funny!"
THEM by Joyce Carol Oates: This is one of Ms. Oates’ earlier works set in Detroit. It is a book of excellence as one generation is rolled into the other. A very true-to-life book where as the characters advance in reaching their destiny, however small, there are always setbacks and stumbling blocks, not allowing them to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and reminding us of the pathways we’ve walked before and are forever walking in. "One of her earlier books but I believe it’s one of her best."
FLANNERY O’CONNOR: COLLECTED WORKS: Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays & Letters (Library of America): "I reread once a year," says Sedaris. "No one writes dialect like Flannery O’Connor."
The Reading Club recommends Naked by David Sedaris. He draws from his life, from his observations of his family, his worldview and gives us something to smile – and oftentimes find ourselves laughing out loud – about. His books are available at all Powerbooks and National Bookstore Branches.
I can be reached at readclub@aol.com.
David took the time to share with us some of his favorite books:
RANDOM FAMILY By Adrian Nicole LeBlanc: Journalist LeBlanc spent more than 10 years following two Latina women from the Bronx, and in this ambitious work, she tells their stories, beginning in the late 1980s with their young teen years. Older Jessica becomes a mistress to an enormously successful heroin dealer, and Coco falls for Jessica’s brother, an aspiring gangster. "Such a good book. It is about a world I don’t know and I love to read books that show me a world I would never have a chance to see."
AN OBEDIENT FATHER By Akhil Sharma: Sharma, a Delhi-born New York investment banker, has written a novel that’s satisfyingly ambitious and full of really lovely imagery (tulips, for instance, are "heavy-hearted"). He depicts Ram’s downfall in the context of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. As India descends into political turmoil, Ram is made accountable for corruption both at work and at home. What gives the book its engine is its even-tempered handling of Ram himself: he is always complex, never a moral lesson or a villain. "Once again this book is about people I have never met and gives me a glimpse of what their lives are all about."
LIFE FOR ME AIN’T BEEN NO CRYSTAL STAIR: One Family’s Passage Through the Child Welfare System by Susan Sheehan: This Pulitzer Prize-winning author has written a poignant and moving tale of foster care in America. Sheehan tells the story of Florence, an African American; her oldest child, Crystal; and Crystal’s son, nine-year-old Daquan. Although interviews with Crystal’s younger siblings and social workers are incorporated, this narrative is told mainly from Crystal’s point of view. At age 14, she gave premature birth to her son. Because she was a minor and her mother was a drug addict, she and her baby were placed in two different foster homes by the state of New York.
BIRDS OF AMERICA By Lorrie Moore: Though the characters in these 12 stories are seen in such varied settings as Iowa, Ireland, Maryland, Louisiana and Italy, they are all afflicted with ennui, angst and aimlessness. They can’t communicate or connect; they have no inner resources; they can’t focus; they can’t feel love. "Magnificent writer!" says Sedaris.
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD by Richard Yates: Yates’s incisive, moving, and often very funny prose weaves a tale that is at once a fascinating period piece and a prescient anticipation of the way we live now. Many of the cultural motifs seem quaintly dated – the early-evening cocktails, Frank’s illicit lunch breaks with his secretary, the way Frank isn’t averse to knocking April around when she speaks out of turn – and yet the quiet desperation at thwarted dreams reverberates as much now as it did years ago. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, this novel conveys, with brilliant erudition, the exacting cost of chasing the American dream.
BLUE ANGEL By Francine Prose: A satire of academia, specifically of English and writing departments, the setting is Euston College in rural Vermont, a place kids go if they don’t get into Bennington; a place where desperate novelists teach creative writing to rich kids who don’t seem to read. Prose, who has taught at all the hotshot workshops in the US, skewers both teachers and students in the way only a true insider could. An "incredible, skilled craftsman," says Sedaris.
THE AFTERLIFE: A MEMOIR by Donald Antrim: Acclaimed novelist Antrim, who wrote The Verificationist, makes his first foray into memoir with a moving attempt at tracing the roots of his own depression, anxiety and trouble with women. He does this by examining his relationship to his life-threateningly alcoholic mother, Louanne, who wrecked two marriages to the same man and irrevocably scarred her children. "Remarkable writer! Autobiographical essays mixed with gifted writing."
THE COLUMNIST by Jeffrey Frank: The innocuous, limp title is the single failure of this searingly satiric portrait of the hyperactive Washington, DC, news scene. Frank, onetime staff member of the Washington Post and its defunct rival, The Washington Star, and currently a senior editor for The New Yorker, has etched with acidic precision the story of Brandon Sladder, a mock maven who latched onto a journalism career with a bit of handy blackmail. "Fake memoirs but really funny!"
THEM by Joyce Carol Oates: This is one of Ms. Oates’ earlier works set in Detroit. It is a book of excellence as one generation is rolled into the other. A very true-to-life book where as the characters advance in reaching their destiny, however small, there are always setbacks and stumbling blocks, not allowing them to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and reminding us of the pathways we’ve walked before and are forever walking in. "One of her earlier books but I believe it’s one of her best."
FLANNERY O’CONNOR: COLLECTED WORKS: Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays & Letters (Library of America): "I reread once a year," says Sedaris. "No one writes dialect like Flannery O’Connor."
The Reading Club recommends Naked by David Sedaris. He draws from his life, from his observations of his family, his worldview and gives us something to smile – and oftentimes find ourselves laughing out loud – about. His books are available at all Powerbooks and National Bookstore Branches.
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