As for my dad, I couldn’t tell if he meant “You won” as in “You won the game of life,” or “You won over me, your father, who told you — assured you when you were small and then kept reassuring you — that you were worthless.” Whichever way he intended those two faint words, I will take them and, in doing so, throw down this lance I’ve been hoisting for the past sixty years. For I am old myself now, and it is so very, very heavy.
When I finished David Sedaris’ latest volume of diary entries (A Carnival of Snackery), my biggest complaint was that it felt, overall, mean in spirit and in tone. And while the humour in Sedaris’ latest essay collection, Happy-Go-Lucky, can also cross the line from arch to snide, there’s something polished and refined in each essay — a narrative arc, space for comedic recalls, a thematic thread — that made it feel like there was a point to reading each, and I was entertained throughout. Further, as these essays were written during the last few years of his father’s life, Sedaris writes often here about their uncomfortable relationship, and where the author seems to have come to a place of peace about that relationship, I was touched. Proving himself, once again, to be a humorously caustic observer of modern life, Sedaris serves up everything here that I came hoping for. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
As in Snackery, Sedaris likes to remind us here that he’s “made it” (mentioning in a couple of places that he has recently bought an original Picasso sketch, casually writing about all of the homes he owns [including recently buying the apartment upstairs from his in Manhattan’s Upper East Side so his boyfriend of thirty years, Hugh, can have privacy while practising the piano], referencing his obsessions with shopping, and high-end fashion, and first class hotels), but while the “diary” form of Snackery made Sedaris feel out of touch to me, the essays in this collection give him the room to show the human behind the outward appearances; the naked face behind the clown paint. Sedaris acknowledges that the pandemic was harder, in a lot of ways, for other people, but it was also devastating for someone like himself who craves travel and the attention of a live audience. It may be hard to feel sorry for a rich couple who lost their holiday home to a hurricane, but while Sedaris admits that there were others worse off — those who had no other home to go to — it was still a devastating loss to Hugh, whose diplomat father was forever moving his family one step ahead of the anarchy of failing states. And while living well might be the best revenge against a father who assured him his entire life that he was worthless and untalented, it’s hard to know how much (money, fame, stuff) would be enough to prove that point to one’s self. And so, along these themes (although Sedaris writes about much more than these themes in Happy-Go-Lucky), we find the ironic humour:
The terrible shame about the pandemic in the United States is that more than eight hundred thousand people have died to date, and I didn’t get to choose a one of them. How unfair that we lost Terrence McNally but not the guy on the electric scooter who almost hit me while he was going the wrong way on Seventh Avenue one sweltering afternoon in the summer of 2021. Just as I turned to curse him, he ran into a woman on a bicycle who had sped through a red light while looking down at her phone. Both of them tumbled onto the street, the sound of screeching brakes all around them, and I remembered, the way you might recall a joyful dream you’d once had, that things aren’t as bad as they sometimes seem, and life can actually be beautiful.
And the touching:
Through other people’s eyes, the two of us might not make sense, but that works in reverse as well. I have a number of friends who are in long-term relationships I can’t begin to figure out. But what do I know? What does Gretchen or Lisa or Amy? They see me getting scolded from time to time, getting locked out of my own house, but where are they in the darkening rooms when a close friend dies or rebels storm the embassy? When the wind picks up and the floodwaters rise? When you realize you’d give anything to make that other person stop hurting, if only so he can tear your head off again? And you can forgive and forget again. On and on, hopefully. Then on and on and on.
And the relationship with his father:
My father’s last words to me, spoken in the too-hot, too-bright dining room at his assisted living facility three days before his ninety-eighth birthday, are “Don’t go yet. Don’t leave.”
My last words to him — and I think they are as telling as his, given all we’ve been through — are “We need to get to the beach before the grocery stores close.” They look cold on paper, and when he dies a few weeks later and I realize they are the last words I said to him, I will think, Maybe I can warm them up onstage when I read this part out loud. For, rather than thinking of his death, I will be thinking of the story of his death, so much so that after his funeral Amy will ask, “Did I see you taking notes during the service?”
The title phrase “happy-go-lucky” doesn’t appear in this collection (although there is an essay of that name along with “Lucky-Go-Happy”), and in conjunction with the creepy clown cover picture (laugh, clown, laugh!) and the often cataclysmic material (the pandemic, the hurricane, social and political unrest, abuse and death and gun violence), I can only conclude that it’s meant ironically: Sedaris acknowledges that he is lucky to not have been materially affected during our recent financially challenging times, but despite being a comic writer expected to find the funny in the chaos, that doesn’t mean he’s always been happy. And that’s fair and totally relatable. There’s a lot of humanity on display in this collection and I’m pleased to have been an early reader.
