Calypso

I felt betrayed, the way you do when you discover that your cat has a secret secondary life and is being fed by neighbors who call him something stupid like Calypso. Worse is that he loves them as much as he loves you, which is to say, not at all, really. The entire relationship has been your own invention.

The above quote is a joke about David Sedaris finding out that his secretly favourite snapping turtle near his vacation home (a monster with a missing foot and a growth on its head) is a well-known local legend, variously called Granddaddy or Godzilla. This would be an insignificant passage, in a book with better jokes in it, if he didn't choose “Calypso” for its title; so what does it mean? I reckon it's something to do with the nature of relationships and how hard it is to really know another person; even (especially?) people in your own family. The book's weirdly uncanny cover-art references the story of an artist friend of Sedaris' who “interprets” woodgrain in sheets of plywood, and I can see how that is a kind of metaphor for the same thing. Sedaris is darkly funny in this collection, in all the ways that his longtime fans have come to know and love, but he's also just plain dark sometimes, too. Maybe it's because he was being more truthful than usual, or maybe it was because he was focusing on such a tight theme, but I found this to be Sedaris' most mature and engaging collection.

There are plenty of self-deprecating zingers like, “Yes, my hair is gray and thinning. Yes, the washer on my penis has worn out, leaving me to dribble urine long after I've zipped my trousers back up” and “'Would you be talking to me this way if I were taller than you?' I want to ask the ten-year-old with his hand out.” There's commentary on modern life, as in Sedaris' competetiveness being triggered by his new fitbit:

At the end of my first sixty-thousand-step day, I staggered home with my flashlight knowing that now I'd advance to sixty-five thousand and that there'd be no end to it until my feet snapped off at the ankles. Then it'd just be my jagged bones stabbing into the soft ground.

Or the same mindless conversations he has with people from the service industry as he travels around the US:

Her: So how was your trip?

You: Well I was originally going to fly, but then this tiger offered to carry me very gently in her mouth. I said OK, but you know what? She wasn't gentle at all. One of her teeth pierced my small intestine, so now, on top of everything else, I have to shit in a bag every day for the rest of my life!

Her: Well, that is just awesome. We're all so glad you made it.

So, while all of that feels familiar and entertaining, there is a darker theme running through this collection. Near the beginning, Sedaris writes about buying a Carolina beach house for his family – along the same stretch of coast where the Sedaris clan used to vacation as he was growing up – and as good as it felt to be able to gather the family together again, they were definitely missing both their mother (who died of cancer twenty-some years earlier) and their sister, Tiffany (who had just recently committed suicide). Most of these essays have something to do with the beach house, and most have something to do with the Mom or Tiffany; and that's not meant to be entertaining:

“I don't know that it had anything to do with us,” my father said. But how could it have not? Doesn't the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?

Sedaris has written before about how crazy his childhood was as a closeted gay in a redneck community, with a cold father and a flamboyant mother and six eccentric kids who competed for their Mom's attentions. But I don't remember specifically him writing before about how his mother became a mean and sloppy drunk in later years:

“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 a reason. I think my mother was lonely without her children – her fan club. But I think she drank because she was an alcoholic.

The Mom and Tiffany are woven throughout in some surprising ways, and the stories that Sedaris tells about his tough love approach to his troubled sister over the years don't always reflect well on him – and this is the painful truthfulness that marked this as something different to me; a raw truthfulness that makes this collection feel deeper and wiser than Sedaris' usual ironic fare. I liked, and admired, this book very much.