"Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim"
(reviewed by Poornima Apte JUL 3, 2004)
Ardent listeners of NPR will admit to many a “driveway moment” when you reach your destination but can’t get out of the car until a story being narrated on the radio is over and done with. David Sedaris is the originator of my most memorable such moment when his Billie Holiday rendition of the Oscar Meyer bologna commercial had me in splits for the better part of the day. Sedaris has been a regular at NPR more specifically at “This American Life,” and it is hard not to imagine his high-pitched grinding voice when one reads the essays in his latest collection.
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is arguably Sedaris’s most mature volume to date and he writes with a pathos and empathy that can only come from deep introspection. Even in the funniest of moments, sometimes, one can sense an underlying current of sadness. The family eventually gradually moved away and apart from each other so parts where he recalls at least fifteen minutes of childhood happiness during a summer visit to a potential vacation home, are beautifully touching. “What would ultimately last were these fifteen minutes on the coastal highway; but we didn’t know that then,” he writes, “when older, even the crankiest of us would accept them as proof that we were once a happy family: our mother young and healthy; our father the man who could snap his fingers and give us everything we wanted, the whole lot of us competing to name our good fortune.”
Sisters Lisa and Tiffany generate regular material for Sedaris’s work even if he is warned over and over again not to use any of the stories they share with him. “In my mind, I’m like a friendly junkman, building things from my little pieces of scrap I find here and there, but my family’s started to see things differently,” Sedaris writes, “Their personal lives are the so-called pieces of scrap I so casually pick up, and they’re sick of it. More and more often their stories begin with the line “You have to swear you will never repeat this.” I always promise, but it’s generally understood that my word means nothing.”
Mama Sedaris is here as well cigarette in hand and keeping all her children in check. “As a relative newcomer to the middle class, she worried that her children might slip back into the world of public assistance and bad teeth,” Sedaris writes, “The finer things were not yet in our blood, or at least that was the way she saw it. My thrift-shop clothing drove her up the wall, as did the secondhand mattress lying without benefit of box springs upon my hardwood floor. “It’s not ironic,” she’d say, “it’s not ethnic. It’s filthy.” The piece “Let it Snow” where she dispatches the kids outside in snow after a severe case of cabin fever, is another beautiful gem in the book.
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is filled with warm and funny episodes. It confirms yet again what we have suspected for a long time: above all, David Sedaris is a really nice guy. He is someone we can all identify with whether he is looking at his own house through the eyes of a stranger (as in the hilarious “Nuit of the Living Dead”) or holding down a job cleaning apartments in New York City in “Blood Work.” In “Repeat After Me,” Sedaris and his sister, Lisa, are amazed when a movie they watch has a family exactly like their own. Similarly, there is not a reader who will pick up the book and not find one of their own in these pages. This has always been Sedaris’s biggest strength, and it shines through again in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.
- Amazon readers rating:
from 273 reviews
Read a chapter excerpt from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim at twbookmark.com
(back to top)"Holidays on Ice"
(Reviewed by Judi Clark OCT 31, 2002)
At first I thought that David Sedaris didn't really belong on this "bookshelf" because it is reserved for humorous fiction, and Sedaris, from what I had understand, doesn't write fiction. He writes autobiographical essays. After reading this collection of stories, I'm not so sure that description is oh so acurate. The majority of the material is about as autobiographical as any fiction is; that is, the ideas are based on the writer's keen observation of human behavior. But most of these "essays" read a lot like short stories. However you want to label them, as we say in New Hampshire, they are wicked funny. This guy can sure write. The stuff in this book will have you breaking into paroxysms of laughter.
There are six stories/essays in this special holiday collection. The book was originally published in 1997; then released in paperback; and now, AOL TimeWarner has released it again in hardcover. The first essay is his SantaLand Diaries, which is certainly working its way to becoming an annual holiday classic, and well worth owning the book just to have a copy of it.
SantaLand Diaries are based on David's two Christmas seasons working as an elf in Macy's Department store on New York's Herald Square. He draws us into the day-to-day experience in applying for the job, being trained and then working as an elf in Macy's SantaLand through the busy holiday season, right up to Christmas Eve. His delivery style is a deadpan monologue in which he gives brief notes on his experiences as he progresses through the season. "This morning we were lectured by the SantaLand managers and presented with a Xeroxed booklet of regulations titled 'The Elfin Guide.' Most of the managers are former elves who worked their way up the candy-cane ladder but retain vivid memories of their days in uniform." Sometimes the humor is juvenile, like when he and another elf realize that Santa can spell Satan and they start substituting this new word. But overall, it's a story about working with the public at Christmas while wearing "green velvet knickers." Despite it's astute observations, I also found it to be a bit nostalgic; reminding me of when my parents would take my sisters and I to Boston see the "real" Santa at Jordan Marsh (now Macy's). (If memory serves me correctly, I believe they only took us once or twice before giving up on this annual sojourn.)
Sedaris originally read some of the SantaLand Diaries on National Public Radio (NPR) two days before Christmas in 1992. When it was first broadcast, it generated more requests for tapes than any story in Morning Edition's history except the death of Red Barber earlier that year. At the time he was making a living washing windows (really!) and continued to do this for a while. NPR was a little daring in airing this piece because it included a part on his flirtation with another male elf called Snowball. Since then, SantaLand Diaries have taken many forms including a script that is performed in theaters during the holiday season.
The next story, Season's Greetings To Our Friends and Family, has also been previously published, but it is worth having a copy. It's a farce of the annual Christmas letter that so many people like to send out at the end of the year. From the start we know this isn't going to be the typical letter, "Many of you, our friends and family, are probably taken aback by this, our annual holiday newsletter. You've read of our recent tragedy in the newspapers and were no doubt thinking that, what with all their sudden legal woes and 'hassles,' the Dunbar clan might just stick their heads in the sand..." In Sedaris's pitch perfect, matter-of-fact style, he unveils the Dunbar's year leading up to the events referred to in the opening letter. I swear this is one that you have to read out loud.
Dinah, the Christmas Whore is another autobiographical essay in which David, who yearns to be different than all others, learns that his sister Lisa has been holding out on him. Up until this point, David thought of her a boringly ordinary person (like everyone else except him). Yet on this evening, her actions result in their having the most unique visitor in their kitchen, setting them apart from all the other homes celebrating Christmas.
The next three essays/stories are new material. At least new from the point of view that they were first published in this book. Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol proves that Sedaris holds nothing sacred during the holiday season, not even children's Christmas pageants. In this brief story, the narrator critiques this year's school plays. Naturally he doesn't stop with the kids, Based on a True Story pokes fun at a television producer's attempt at signing up the rights to best Christmas story ever. And finally in Christmas Means Giving you have two neighbors who competitively one-up each other in their material lives, and this escalation takes a sudden downward slide as they try to outdo each other in charitable giving. I can't decide which story in this book is my favorite, but I'm inclined to point to this last one. It's so absurd that it smacks at the truth of what a lot of charity work really is about.
Giving books as gifts is usually a tricky thing unless you know a person truly well. But I'd say that if you are looking to give someone a little Christmas cheer, Holidays on Ice should do it fittingly. Yeah, you could dress it up a bit and throw in a bottle of booze, but I tell you, you don't need to. The way Sedaris writes these stories would make even a Scrooge-like being stop their griping and sit back and chuckle. Yeah, we humans and our rituals really are funny and the holidays do bring out a certain amount of predictable behavior. As Sedaris cites in SantaLand Diaries, "All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints."
- Amazon readers rating: from 71 reviews
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Bibliography: (with links to Amazon.com)
- Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays (1994)
- Naked (1997)
- Holidays on Ice (1997)
- Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000)
- Je Parler Francais (January 2003)
- Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (June 2004)
- When You Are Engulfed in Flames (June 2008)
Other:
Audio:
- The David Sedaris Box Set (unabridged) (October 2002)
- David Sedaris Live at Carnegie Hall (abridged) (October 2003)
Editor:
- Children Playing Before a Statute of Hercules (March 2005)
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Book Marks:
- The New York Times article on David Sedaris (1993)
- David Sedaris and his Slate Diary entries (1996)
- Rogovoy article on David Sedaris (1998)
- Post-Gazette.com review of a David Sedaris lecture (October 1999)
- Book Page interview with David Sedaris and Me Talk Pretty One Day
- Playboy review of Me Talk Pretty One Day
- January Magazine interview on Me Talk Pretty One Day
- Salon.com audio excerpt from Me Talk Pretty One Day
- The Onion interview with David Sedaris (August 2001)
- Post-Gazette.com article on David Sedaris reading (October 2001)
- Globe and Mail review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
- Washington Post review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
- ReviewOfBooks.com collection of reviews for Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
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About the Author:
David Sedaris made his comic debut on December 23, 1992 by recounting his strange-but-true experiences of being a Macy's elf clad in green tights, reading his SantaLand Diaries on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. Sedaris' sardonic humor and incisive social critique have since made him one of NPR's most popular and humorous commentators. Sedaris now can often be heard on public radio's This American Life, distributed nationally by PRI and produced by WBEZ in Chicago. His essays appear regularly in Esquire.
David and his sister, Amy Sedaris, collaborate under the name The Talent Family and have written several plays which have been produced at La Mama, Lincoln Center and The Drama Department in New York City. These plays include Stump the Host, Stitches, One Woman Shoe, which received an Obie Award, Incident at Cobbler's Knob, and The Book of Liz (published in book form by Dramatist's Play Service in fall 2002).
David Sedaris taught writing at the Art Institute of Chicago for two years, and In September 2001, he became the third recipient of the Thurber Prize for American Humor; was named by Time magazine as Humorist of the Year 2001; and, won the 2001 Advocate Lambda Award. Holidays on Ice was nominated for an Audie, which is The Oscars for Audio Books) for best package design.
David Sedaris currently resides in Paris with Hugh Hamrick.
