David Sedaris: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Often books that I read merely for pleasure leave with me with the thought, "I should read more of these."  Not so with Sedaris.  On the contrary, the thought this book left me with was, "I should write more of these."  The allure of Sedaris for me is not his humor, his knack for creative storytelling, his insight, his seemingly endless supply of insane anecdotes--not in and of themselves at least. Rather, it is the fact that all of these overlap nearly perfectly with my own traits as a writer, and as a man who has lived through at least some of those experiences myself.  When I read Sedaris, I hear, of course, his voice telling the stories as I have so often on various radio broadcasts.  But I also hear my own voice, my own way of treating the most ghastly thoughts and images as offhandedly hilarious, my own coping mechanisms, clenched teeth, cocked eyebrow, and pursed lips.

Those anecdotes I've solidified into essays are filled with the same voice, and if the things that happened to this writer happened to me, I'm sure I would set them down in a very similar way.  Were I to relate, for example, the very clear memory of hearing a review of Sedaris' book on NPR twenty years ago.  Such a turbulent time in my life.  A fundamentalist Christian, married to a beautiful woman, running a successful business and yet transfixed by the account of this other world that existed.  A world in which a gay writer can rise above his pain, look at it with snarky condescension, and say to the world, "Well, isn't this is ridiculous and morbid?"

I committed the name of the book to memory, and pressed it to the back of my mind until a spare moment allowed me to seek it out at Barnes and Noble.  Even looking at the book was dangerous, and purchasing it would have raised far too many questions--mostly to myself, so I slid it out of its niche on the shelf, and parked in one of the broadly striped forest green and maroon armchairs that were provided in bookstores for those glorious ten years between Waldenbooks and Amazon.  I read the whole thing.  It wasn't erotic by my current standards, but even the hint of such liasions as he described were titillating in the extreme to my mind then.  A particular encounter in a Jeep stays with me to this day.

It's also entirely in character, and a detail that Sedaris himself would enjoy, that after reading this newer collection I revisted the one that had so influenced me twenty years ago.  It wasn't Sedaris at all.  It was another David.  David Leavitt.  Arkansas.  Sedaris isn't channeling my voice after all.  He isn't even, as some might argue, channeling the voice of every gay man of our generation.  Rather, we all speak with one voice, one of shared pain and sarcasm, both Davids and I.