Heather Stratford

Expository Writing

April 19, 1999

David Sedaris Is Naked

Naked

by David Sedaris

Little, Brown and Company, New York, 1997. 291 pages; Price: $3 to $22, depending where you shop.

Someday, perhaps the anti-cheerleaders of free speech will expand from the music business and start slapping warning labels on just about everything, from your dog (WARNING!: May exhibit lewd behavior.) to those first crafty concealers of immorality, books. On that day, the POM POMs (Public Outrage Manufacturers & Protectors of Morality), will undoubtedly put a big red sticker on the dust jacket of David Sedaris' wonderful collection of personal essays, Naked.

Horrified by the blatant honesty of the thing, the touters of public morality will try to preserve everyone's nonexistent innocence by covering our eyes with labels. I will give you a less judgmental warning: Sedaris' writing is the opposite of an acquired taste. His ESSAYS/MEMOIR (as it reads inside the jacket beside the price) is a hilarious, horrifying, amusing collection and straightforward rendition of the absurdity of life. No moralizing added. It is bound to offend most people at some point, but either you laugh, shriek with horror, and continue reading--or you lose interest in his highly 'dysfunctional' life and consign it to the bookshelf. Either you have a taste for it or you don't. This is the way with many a personal essayist, of course. A writer's 'voice' can endear or repulse within the first few lines, depending upon the nature of the reader.

I, myself, was unable to resist Sedaris' light touch with serious subjects. In relaying, chronologically, episodes from his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, he tackles some traditional subjects of personal essayists: aging and dying parents, for example. With this subject, Sedaris is the most successful of any essayist I have read. His parents have personality and life; they are not just the means for someone to write a personal essay about how they felt, acted, or survived a difficult situation.

Sedaris' is hardly afraid to condemn himself--lightly--but he never wallows in self-pity. Nor does he condemn or judge others--and he's met some oddballs, lunatics, and weird hitch-hiker-picker-uppers in his journeys. Sedaris' deals with the comi-tragedy of life. Each chapter has something fresh, but familiar: surviving camp, lying, dealing with college roommates, nosing around where one shouldn't. Yet Sedaris also offers a unique perspective. (The less disclosed in this area, the more fun the discovery.)

Sedaris' honesty--and mild exhibitionism--give his book its suggestive title. The theme may be that unbearable pain revealed is, maybe, more bearable --it's certainly more endurable than the triviality or pretension present in some memoirs. "Why should we be interested in you?" is the unavoidable question that each writer must answer. When I first picked up this book, it never even occurred to me to ask. It was captivating--and extremely difficult to lay aside. Words taken out of context are never quite as lively, but here is a good sample from the title essay, "Naked." The first lines from this wholesome example of 'reportage' read

It is disconcerting to talk to someone on the phone and

know that he is naked. Every now and then I might call

a friend who says, "You caught me on my way to the

shower," but that's different. The man at the nudist

colony sounded as though he had been naked for years.

Even his voice was tanned.

Naked is a book about growing up different, learning to live in a strange world, and enjoying the oddity of existence. Its purpose is to enjoyably expose the world without sentimentality or euphemisms. Not an easy task, but Sedaris succeeds.