Theft By Finding, Diaries 1977 – 2002 by David Sedaris

You have to be a David Sedaris fan to love this – I am and I did.  Sedaris has made a name for himself as a writer of essays about his life that are often laugh-out -loud funny.  I always “read” his work as audio books because he narrates them himself, and the pauses, the intonation and the accents all make the writing even more humorous.  I’ve used excerpts from his writing as models for teaching, although I always had to choose judiciously.  His language and his humor are, well, adult. 

This book, a departure from his usual form, contains his edited journal entries from 1977 to 2002.  Listening to these, I was struck first by what has always been so problematic for me about keeping a journal – the idea of audience.  In my unsuccessful attempts over the years, I’ve always felt like I had to explain too much – where I am, who this or that person is, how I feel about what is happening – as if I am writing for someone else - and it inevitably becomes too tedious.  Sedaris, instead, has clearly written for himself.  He jumps right in without explaining who Tom is or describing his surroundings other than, say, Paris.  He also focuses on a salient event for the day rather than attempting to capture everything that happened.  As for most of us, “salient” is relative and there are days when not much happens, but somehow recording these almost nonevents provides a better sense of his life than focusing on just, say his appearance on Letterman or a book signing where 400 people show up.  What he most often focuses on “are remarkable events I have observed (fistfights, accidents, a shopper arriving with a full cart of groceries in the express lane), bits of overheard conversation, and startling things people have told me” (p. 4). For example: 

“April 12, 1981. Friday night we went to dinner at the Villa Capri.  Mom got lost on the way there.  She took two or three incorrect turns and wound up jumping the median when she realized we were in the wrong lane and a car was heading directly toward us.  Her excuse was that she hadn’t had a drink yet.”

And that’s it for April 12.

He is masterful at capturing (or is it re-creating?) conversations, whether overheard (which seems to happen frequently) or involving himself.  He is approached more than you would think by people asking for money and cigarettes, including people who actually come to his apartment door in Paris.  Surprisingly, he receives phone calls and letters from readers sent to his home address and, manages to turn wrong numbers into a funny anecdote.

“September 18, 1995, New York.  A woman phoned at eleven o’clock last night and asked if she could speak to Rich.  I said there wasn’t a Rich.  ‘Ok,’ she said. ‘Is this the game we’re going to play?’ ‘Game?  Listen-‘I said.  ‘Rich is having his roommate cover for him, is that it?’  ‘There is no roommate.  Listen, this is David Sedaris and Hugh Hamrick-‘ ‘Rich? Is that you, you shithead?’ ‘There is no Rich,’ I repeated.  ‘You have the wrong number.  ‘You think you can f___ with me, Rich? You have no idea who you’re f_ing with.’ ‘That’s just it,’ I said.  ‘I don’t have any idea.  None whatsoever.  This is wasted on me.’”

Before Sedaris makes a name for himself as a writer, there are many lean years in which he is alternately picking fruit, waiting tables, moving furniture, painting houses and working construction projects to make enough money to get by.  Several years running, he is an elf at Christmastime for Macy’s in New York City.  During the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, he is also a big drinker and drug user. 

“March 16, 1991.  I’m down to $190 and am starting to panic.  In this situation, I have no business buying pot, but that’s what I did.  Scotch too.”

These early decades are also filled with examples of misogyny and racism that, in today’s climate stir a strong sense of outrage. Sedaris sees women who have been beaten.  Stereotypic construction workers ask him if he’s gotten any pussy.  There’s gay-bashing; Sedaris, a small homosexual man, mostly just tries to stay out of people’s way. He doesn’t often comment on how he feels about these incidents, but the fact that he includes them suggests he finds such outbursts remarkable.

In the later years, after he has become more professionally successful, Sedaris lives first in Paris and, by the end of the book, in London with his partner Hugh.  He’s cleaned up his act, given up drinking and focused on his writing and, in a hilarious section, he is learning French from a Parisian who comes across as the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld.  She throws chalk, scolds her adult students as if they were children and screams, “I hate you!” at Sedaris, a lover of language, who is never satisfied with simply doing the assignment as directed.  When the teacher asks for an essay about the future (September 13, 1998), “something along the lines of ‘One day I will be rich and successful,’ he writes, ‘One day I will be very old and reside in a nursing home.  Toothless, bald and wrinkled, I will wake myself three times a night. . .”  He quickly becomes hated by the rest of the class, people from all over the world, for typing his homework, learning 10 new vocabulary words a day and for writing complex sentences.

“September 3, 1998, Paris.  Why write, ‘I went to the store with a friend’ when, without relying on the dictionary, I can say ‘I visited the slaughterhouse with my godfather and a small monkey?’”

His observations about the French culture often focus on mundane events that strike an American as odd. 

“January 22, 1999, Paris.  In New York, you’d see signs reading NO CHANGE WITHOUT PURCHASE, but here they should read, simply, NO CHANGE.  Every time you pay for something, they shake you down for the exact amount.  If the thing costs, say, 185 francs, and you hand over a 200-franc bill, the person will frown at it and say, ‘Really? You don’t have a hundred and eighty-five?’”

The Sedaris family appears frequently in the diaries.  Sister Amy joins David in Chicago when, at 29, he decides to finish his college degree at the Chicago Institute for the Arts.  She joins Second City.  The two later collaborate on plays that are staged in New York and Amy, of course, goes on to make a name for herself as a comedic actress.  All of the siblings have a sense of humor and provide comic relief, particularly in the retelling of family Christmas gatherings.

“December 20, 1977. I bought a half dozen books this week on horrible diseases, some for me and some to give to Gretchen [a sister] for Christmas.” 

“December 27, 1987, Raleigh.  Tiffany [a sister] left this morning.  Last night we sat around in the basement with the company and she told us that she often gets gas trapped in her neck.  She pointed to a spot beneath her ear, saying, ‘It’s right here.’  I never heard of such a thing.”

“December 26, 1997, New York. Continuing our tradition of seeing movies about black people on Christmas Day, after opening presents, Dad, Lisa, Paul, Amy and I went to see Jackie Brown.  Last year I think it was The Preacher’s Wife, and the year before that Waiting to Exhale.”

“December 31, 1998, Paris. “Last night, shortly after dinner, my father’s head caught on fire. . .This morning we went to buy him a hat.”

A side effect of listening to this book for 2 weeks is that I found myself starting to narrate experiences in my head, as if writing them, as they were happening.   “I was nervous as I walked back into the senior center after 7 months away from pickleball.  How rusty would I be? Would I become one of those people whom others tried to avoid having to play with?”  Now that I have finished the book, I wonder if my brain will readjust to worrying, making lists – the stuff that’s usually going on in my head while I am doing other things.  I realize that it takes practice to be the sort of wry observer that Sedaris is and even more skill to capture the poignancy or the humor or just the sheer oddness of an experience in writing.  At this, he is a true master. I anxiously await the next installment.

A psychological page turner

The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn is the perfect book when it is cold and blustery outside, preferably snowing too, and all you want is a page-turner with which to curl up as you sip your hot chocolate (or wine).  Inevitable comparisons will be made to The Girl on the Train; both are told from the point of view of a woman in her 30’s who has suffered a marriage break-up and drowns herself in alcohol.  Like Hawkins’ narrator Rachel, Anna Fox, a child psychologist penned in her Harlem brownstone for 10 months by a case of agoraphobia, observes a seemingly happy family across the street and she fantasizes a bit about their lives as well as those of her other neighbors.  An amateur photographer, she peers through her Nikon zoom lens, spying on those her limited world view offers.  Shortly after the new family moves in, Anna meets the wife, Jane Russell, and her teenage son, Ethan, and soon after witnesses a shocking scene that moves her to leave her house and to contact the police.  As in Train, the police are skeptical and we, as readers, see Anna, on her third bottle of merlot and having downed narcotics for her anxiety, as potentially unreliable.  Anna is also a fan of old movies, re-watching "Gaslight," "Strangers on a Train" and - eerily paralleling her own story, "Rear Window." Have the movies caused her to create her own drama to help her escape her isolated life?  You wonder, but because the story is told from Anna’s point of view, you have to believe something strange is going on.  Finn has a series of twists and turns that keep the book going.  You don’t find out the nature of the event that has so traumatized Anna until halfway through and a few red herrings distract from the clever resolution.  Ultimately, this is a better book than Train, a story of love and loss whose themes reverberate through the lives of multiple characters. I wasn't all that interested in seeing the movie version of Train, despite the presence of Emily Blunt in the title role, because I never found Rachel all that endearing or sympathetic.  Anna too is a mess and she, like most people, creates some of her own problems, yet I found myself rooting for her.  Window is a well-constructed mystery that leaves you thinking about what really goes on behind the facades of other people's lives.

Fredrik Backman soars on the ice in his newest novel, Beartown

Fredrik Backman had me with A Man Called Ove.  His subsequent novels (My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry and Britte-Marie Was Here) were equally good but with his latest outing, he has raised his game considerably.  Characters have always been a strength, but in Beartown, the cast is larger and richer and the story arc more complex.  The book is set in a small, wintry town in the forests of Sweden where hockey is king.  From the time children can stand, they are buckled into skates and handed a stick.  The titular Beartown has teams at every level, always hoping to get itself on the map and, more importantly, bring a hockey academy and all the business surrounding it to bolster their faltering economy. 

Backman toggles between the points of view of a number of the teenage boys who play on the junior team, which is one step away from winning a regional championship, their classmates, their parents and various other townspeople.  Initially, the book seems to be about the benefits and dangers of such extreme investment in hockey.  Suburban America may be geographically far distant from Beartown, but the obsessive behavior of a community too invested in youth sports for their own good seems familiar.  But, it turns out that the novel is about much more:  what it means to be a good parent, to be a good friend, whether you are able to accept the consequences of your choices.  Importantly, it asks, is there a point at which loyalty stops?  The story also takes on topical issues such as classism, gender roles and sexual aggression.

The book begins: “Late one evening toward the end of March, a teenager picked up a double-barreled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.  This is the story of how we got there” (1).  Thus, Backman establishes the uneasy, ever-present sense of violence that exists in plain sight in the hockey rink and in the shadows of dark streets, isolated locker rooms, and at out-of-control parties.   

The action builds in complex layers as the junior team of boys wins their semi-final match and then prepares for the championship.  The teenagers walk the halls of the school and the streets as the idols that they have become in the town’s eyes.  As we all know, such power corrupts, and it’s not long before certain individuals believe themselves above rules, laws and civil behavior.  They come to first period late and call the English teacher “Sweet cheeks” to her face, knowing – rightly – that as the heroes and the town’s future, they will not be disciplined.  Backman does a good job of creating not only the pack mentality of the team and the adults who run it, but also the individual boys.  Kevin is the star scorer, without whom they are unlikely to win and who stands the best chance of turning professional.  He’s also a lonely boy whose parents are always too busy, jet-setting off on business trips, to watch him play, instead buying him the best of everything and helping to finance the hockey club.  Benji is the scruffy fighter on the team and Kevin’s best friend.  Incredibly naturally talented, he is also perpetually sad, growing up without a dad and harboring a secret he can’t share.  Amat is an immigrant who lives in the Hollow (as opposed to the upscale Heights) and whose mother suffers daily insults and back aches as the custodian at the rink.  Younger than the others, he is shunned by the team for his size and his poverty and is only finally accepted when they see his value both as a player and as a secret keeper. 

The turning point in the novel occurs at a celebration in which the unchaperoned team, their friends and the girls who fawn over them drink shots and things get out of control.  The aftermath challenges the integrity of the teenagers and the townspeople as they individually and collectively grapple with their willingness to accept the truth. This may sound like a dark novel – and there are some fairly serious subjects – but because Backman has created characters who are complex, there is also joy and humor and – at the risk of a spoiler – individual goodness, bravery and perseverance leave the reader satisfied.