“It sometimes helps to remind myself that not everyone is like me,” Sedaris writes, “Not everyone writes things down in a notebook and transcribes them into a diary. “There were days when I’d throw a good three dozen of them to their deaths, this at the expense of whatever else I was supposed to be doing.” It is essays like this that make you wonder if Sedaris has had time weighing a little too much on him. Catching flies became addictive, he says. On the other hand, there’s an entire essay (“April in Paris”) devoted to his pet spider and how Sedaris found and kept her, catching flies for it everyday.

My favorite is an essay about the collecting of art: “Adult Figures Charging Toward Concrete Toadstool.” Sedaris describes his tentative forays into art at a young age: “Even with my babysitting income, paintings were out of the question, so instead I invested in postcards, which could be bought for a quarter in the museum shop and matted with shirt cardboard,” and also details how his parents caught on to the craze. There are a couple of such gems in Sedaris’s latest collection of essays When You Are Engulfed in Flames.

In my favorite essay of his, “Santaland Diaries” (which was included in the collection Holidays On Ice), for example, Sedaris uses a stint as an elf at a local department store and turns it into a subtle critique of American consumerism especially at Christmas.

With Sedaris’s touch, every episode was more than just funny. In fact it was getting to be so bad that in his previous collection of essays, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Sedaris joked that his sisters would preface most of their conversations with: “You have to swear you will never repeat this.”Īnd while one could argue that his family (and his childhood) was quite quirky, Sedaris has always had a special talent of showcasing that quirkiness and underlining it in a way that was also deeply introspective. Sedaris’s family and his childhood have been fodder for many of his stories. The life within, the deeper story, does not yield itself with ease,” he wrote.įor years, humorist David Sedaris has made a career out of rooting out precisely such stories-drawing deeply on his personal experiences and turning them into essays that have won him a wide fan following. “Time must weigh on you, its lulls, accelerations and silences. It was the New York Times columnist, Roger Cohen, who recently said that to find stories, you must give yourself to the moment. ( Jump down to read a review of Holidays on Ice) ( Jump down to read a review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim)

When you were engulfed in flames