You know who’s living a ‘good long life’? Dick Cheney. “As if it worked that way,” Sedaris writes, “and extra years were tacked on for good behavior. When someone says Lou must have been “a wonderful man to have been rewarded with such a long life,” his son fumes. When some mourners call his father “a character,” he provides a wry definition: “A character is what you call a massively difficult person once he has reached the age of eighty-five.” One, “A Better Place,” is a furiously uproarious dissection of the hoary cliches people offer to survivors. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.Several of this book’s essays deal with what happens when (spoiler alert!) Lou finally does die, at age 98.

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.īack 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 david sedaris