Sedaris (review)

Welcome to the academy, Mr. Sedaris. For years now, I and uncountable numbers of my colleagues have been teaching David Sedaris's books and essays in undergraduate English courses. They're funny, for starters, which always helps get students' attention, but they're not just funny. The stories and essays in Sedaris's six books—Barrel Fever (1994), Naked (1997), Holidays on Ice (1997), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004), and When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008)—accomplish the same kind of feat we like to see from student writing: they engage in the outer world through the inner self, resulting in a new understanding of both. Sedaris can write about a draconian speech therapist trying almost to beat the lisp out of him ("Go Carolina," from Me Talk Pretty One Day), and as we laugh at her expense, we see how such an episode has sustained this comic narrator as much as it may have scarred him.

Until now, there's been nothing in the realm of critical material on Sedaris's work, nothing but book reviews and author interviews to guide readers in their approach to the work. Enter Kevin Kopelson, a writer and queer theorist, whose Sedaris takes a close, critical look at the entirety of Sedaris's work published to the date of this book. Kopelson is clear about his goal up front: he wants "to articulate why many of us not so much like as love Sedaris. Love him, no doubt, far more than we do less autobiographical [. . .] writers" (2). In short: he's writing as a fan, and while this helps make his book very approachable to other devoted Sedaris fans, it's a move that ultimately hinders Kopelson's analysis.

By now Sedaris's response to the question of whether his stories are true has become legendary enough to make the fave-quotes boxes of blogs and MySpace pages: "I prefer to say they are true enough." And while I hope not to devolve in this review to a semantic argument on the precise meaning of that "creative" in "creative nonfiction," I do think it's fair to assume that some portion of the events and details in his essays come from his admittedly delightful imagination, and thus that straight biographical readings of Sedaris using only these inventive essays as source material are going to raise a whole slew of questions.

One such question, of course, is how much of this can we believe? The answer is either all of it—if you're inclined to read stories for the story—or none of it, if you're a stickler for the facts. One certainty is that analysis of Sedaris's essays cannot lead us to truths or understandings about David Sedaris, the bestselling author. They can only lead us to understandings about "David Sedaris," the narrative persona.

Kopelson seems to ignore this in his project of psychoanalytic readings of Sedaris's relationships with his family and friends. The bulk of Kopelson's book consists of close readings of dozens of Sedaris's essays, forming a kind of corpus of All That We Know about the Sedarises. He spells out which sister is the oldest (Lisa) and how David's relationship with her differs from that with Amy, the other famous sibling (from Strangers with Candy, among other projects). He spells out how Lou, the father, reacted to David's coming out, and how Sharon, the mother, acted differently.

All along, the figure ostensibly being uncovered is David Sedaris the bestselling author, even when I think that author is encouraging us not to read his essays as true confessions. For example, in "Possession," Sedaris visits Anne Frank's house with his partner, Hugh, with whom he's recently been looking all over Paris for a new apartment. Turns out the Franks had a nice setup, and much of the humor of the essay comes from Sedaris's feigned inability to grasp the severity of their situation as he's too busy figuring out which walls he'd tear down...