Mostly because it’s one of the few things about the David Sedaris I know and love that is recognizable in this book.įor the first time, I didn’t finish a Sedaris book. That joke makes an appearance in his new book, Happy-Go-Lucky, and I greeted it like an old friend. I met him once, several years ago, when he signed my copy of Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, “To Emilie – let’s spit on Asian widows together.” I have no idea what it means but I’ve treasured it - and the slightly inappropriate joke he told me while I was in the autograph line - ever since. I follow him around like a lost puppy, hanging on both his written words and his reading of his own stuff on audio books and at live appearances. Since then I haven’t missed a single Sedaris book, article, podcast appearance, interview or radio show. I still harbored dreams back then of being a writer myself, and Sedaris was who I wanted to be – snarky and cynical and so hilarious you’d guffaw out loud while reading him on an airplane (I did that more than once while reading Me Talk Pretty One Day).

I read my first David Sedaris book more than 20 years ago, and I was immediately in love. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris. In Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. And back on the road, he discovers a battle-scarred America: people weary, storefronts empty or festooned with Help Wanted signs, walls painted with graffiti reflecting the contradictory messages of our time: Eat the Rich. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone’s son. His offer to fix a stranger’s teeth rebuffed, he straightens his own, and ventures into the world with new confidence. He vacuums his apartment twice a day, fails to hoard anything, and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine.Īs the world gradually settles into a new reality, Sedaris too finds himself changed.

To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. As Happy-Go-Lucky opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes.īut then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he’s stuck in lockdown, unable to tour and read for audiences, the part of his work he loves most. David Sedaris, the “champion storyteller,” ( Los Angeles Times ) returns with his first new collection of personal essays since the bestselling Calypso Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask-or not-was a decision made mostly on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things.

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris