something about David Sedaris’s "Barrel Fever"

David Sedaris debuted in 1994 with Barrel Fever. The book includes "Santaland Diaries"—the essay that made Sedaris famous. He read it on National Public Radio in December 1992, and now NPR plays it every Christmas.

In Barrel Fever's fictional essays, Sedaris writes in first person and assumes the voice of the fantastically oblivious, outrageous, and delusional. 

The essay "Barrel Fever" features the voice of Dolph. Dolph describes the reporter at crime scenes as an “emotional strip miner” because of how they interview the unfortunate. Then Dolph meets a friend for dinner and routine binge drinking at a BYOB restaurant, but the friend declines to drink. Dolph describes their dinner conversation:

Later in the restaurant, figuring he’d changed his mind, I offered Gill one of my beers. He grew quiet for a few moments, tapping his fork against the table before lowering his head and telling me in fits and starts that he couldn’t have anything to drink. “I am, Jesus, Dolph, I am, you know, I’m ... Well, the thing is that I’m ... I am an ... alcoholic.”

“Great,” I said. “Have eight beers.”

Later, Dolph meets his sisters at their late mother’s house after the memorial service.

During that time at our mother’s house my sisters were remote and mechanical, acting as though they were hotel maids, tidying up after a stranger. They spoke as if a terrible chapter of their lives had just ended, and I felt alone in my belief that a much more terrible chapter was about to begin. I overheard them gathered together in the kitchen or talking to their husbands on the telephone, saying, “She was a very sad and angry woman and there’s nothing more to say about it.” Sad? Maybe. Angry? Definitely. But there is always more to say about it. My mother made sure of that.

In the essay “Giantess,” a man flirting with the idea of writing niche erotica describes an episode of Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, in which people forgive people who have ruined their lives.

One woman had testified on behalf of the man who had stabbed her twenty times. Another had embraced the drunk driver who killed her only son. She invites this fellow over to her house for holidays and Sunday dinners.

“He’s like a second son to me now,” she said, reaching over to take his hand. “I wouldn’t trade Craig for anything.” The felon stared at his feet and shrugged his shoulders. I was thinking that a lengthy prison sentence would probably be a lot more comfortable than having to take the place of the person you had killed.

I liked Barrel Fever, especially the titular essay, but found it less compelling than the autobiographical collections, including Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and Calypso.

Notes:

• "Santaland Diaries" was fact-checked and—surprise, surprise—Sedaris exaggerated and even made up some stuff. So an NPR editor called for the essay to be accompanied by a reader alert. That seems stupid, but I guess NPR felt it necessary after some literary frauds were exposed. Still, anyone who has read a few of Sedaris’s autobiographical essays should be able to guess that these are embellished. All real things are.
  
• I—along with probably nearly every Sedaris fan—prefer the more autobiographical works.

 

something about the David Sedaris book “Calypso”

Calypso is one of many David Sedaris books I read last year. The first books I read were assembled essays and maintained a kind of consistency. But Calypso might have been the most thematic collection. The 21 essays trend toward Sedaris’s family and aging. The book was published in May 2018, and Sedaris has now reached his 60s.

The prose, as always, is fresh and funny. Sedaris tells stories (all semi-autobiographical), and he masterfully balances his thorny wit and criticisms with bits of cottony poignancy.

One of my favorite parts is in “The Silent Treatment.” Sedaris is telling a story about how, at some point in his pre-teen years, he supposedly started flushing empty toilet paper rolls just to be a lil' bastard. His dad, not knowing David was the cause, would then have to plunge or, failing that, pull the toilet and unclog the drainpipe by hand. But dad eventually realizes David is the culprit.

“You are going to reach down into this pipe and pick out that cardboard roll,” my father said. “Then you are never going to flush anything but toilet paper down this toilet again.”

As I backed away, he pounced. Then he wrestled me to the floor, grabbed my hand, and forced it deep into what amounted to my family’s asshole.

And there it was been ever since, sorting through our various shit. It’s like I froze in that moment: with the same interests as that eleven-year-old boy, the same maturity level, the same haircut. The same glasses, even.

“Why Aren’t You Laughing” also hits as Sedaris writes about his mother, who died of cancer in her 60s, and her drinking.

Maybe ours wasn’t the house I’d have chosen had I been in charge of things. It wasn’t as clean as I’d have liked. From the outside, it wasn’t remarkable. We had no view, but still it was the place I held in mind, and proudly, when I thought, Home. It had been a living organism, but by the time I hit my late twenties, it was rotting, a dead tooth in a row of seemingly healthy ones. When I was eleven, my father planted a line of olive bushes in front of the house. They were waist-high and formed a kind of fence. By the mid-eighties they were so overgrown that pedestrians had to quit the sidewalk and take to the street instead. People with trash to drop waited until they reached our yard to drop it, figuring the high grass would cover whatever beer can or plastic bag of dog shit they needed to discard. It was like the Adams Family house, which would have been fine had it still been merry, but it wasn’t anymore. Our mother became the living ghost that haunted it, gaunt now and rattling ice cubes instead of chains.

And then Sedaris writes about his dad, a widower, looking back on his wife’s condition.

“Do you think it was my fault that she drank?” my father asked not long ago. It’s the assumption of an amateur, someone who stops after his second vodka tonic and quits taking his pain medication before the prescription runs out. It’s almost laughable, this insistence on reason. I think my mother was lonely without her children—her fan club. But I think she drank because she was an alcoholic.

I think I was a little stunned by the parts related to his sister Tiffany’s suicide in 2013.

Note: Most of these essays were previously published in magazines.