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 first reading David Sedaris

I knew of David Sedaris because I, probably like most people, had heard him on National Public Radio (NPR), including the annual Christmastime rebroadcasts of his 1992 reading of "Santaland Diaries." It is a funny story perfectly written. Call him a humorist and NPR celebrity, but Sedaris is a writer.

Sedaris's stories draw from his own life. I suspect much of it is stretched and embellished. Some parts could be completely fictional. But almost all of it is good.

So far, I have read Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Both are collections of essays. These essays spin off Sedaris's childhood, his family, drug use, on-the-job and education experiences, and his relationship with his partner Hugh, which led to a relocation to France.

Me Talk Pretty One Day, published in 2000, might be Sedaris's most popular. He read some of the essays on the public radio show, “This American Life.” The stories I enjoyed most include "Go Carolina," which describes a young David going to his elementary school speech therapist for his lisp; the story about his brother Paul, "You Can't Kill the Rooster" (I think the accounts of Paul’s swearing are almost entirely fictional); and "Today's Special," which makes fun of fancy restaurant menus.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is another collection of essays and was released in 2004. My favorites here include "The Change in Me,” in which Sedaris attempts to become a late-era hippie; “Slumus Lordicus," the story of working for his low-income-housing landlord-parents; and "The End of the Affair,” one I really enjoyed about Sedaris and Hugh disagreeing about a romantic movie.

Of the two books, my favorite Sedaris prose so far is in “Slumus Lordicus," when Sedaris is reflecting on the collection of low-income rental properties his parents now owned:

"So what do you think?" my father said. He wasn't talking about Lance or Minnie Edward's boyfriend, but all of it. Everything before us was technically ours—the lawns, the houses, the graveled driveways. This was what ingenuity had bought: a corner of the world that could, in time, expand, growing lot by lot until you could drive for some distance and never lose your feelings of guilt and uncertainty.

Note: Sedaris’s first collection of essays, Barrel Fever, was published in 1994. His sister is Amy Sedaris, who was Jerri Blank in Comedy Central’s “Strangers with Candy.”