Gaming with the Great American Exaggerator

So, I did a Google search for “David Sedaris and drinking games” and no relevant hits appeared.  What a missed opportunity.  If you took a drink every time he made a self-depreciating comment about his looks, dissed his father, or cussed, you would be passed out in 47 minutes. If you added shots each time, you read the word “Greek” or “gay,” you would die of blood alcohol poisoning.   If you took a drink every time, he introduced something novel or challenging into his writing, you would be a very sober reader.

Most likely the David Sedaris drinking game won’t take off, but as parent, I probably shouldn’t be role modeling the practice of doing shots while reading anyway.  Instead, I’ll just play my new favorite David Sedaris game: Guess which essays were published in the New Yorker? (With a name that catchy, try not to be jealous that you didn’t think of it first).

I originated this game while reading “This Old House” from When You Are Engulfed in Flames. The essay originally appeared in the New Yorker on July 9, 2007 and chronicles Sedaris’ wacky stay in a boarding house in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It is perfection from start to finish with fascinating supporting characters, great pacing, interesting plot twists, surprising revelations, humor, and tenderness. Finding all these elements in one Sedaris essay is highly unusual. Sedaris’ tales normally move rapidly from punch line to punch line with little plot development, flat characters and almost no use of traditional essay elements, which always leaves me yelling at the pages.  His blatant disrespect of the humor essay as an art form doesn’t stop his books from appearing on the New York Times Best Sellers List and Library Journal’s The Books Most Borrowed in U.S. Libraries List, nor does it stop the overwrought comparisons of him to Mark Twain. Most book critics are not essay connoisseurs, so they might not distinguish between a humorist and essayist. Twain was the rare combination of humorist and an essayist. Sedaris' works fall short of earning him the moniker of an essayist, except when his writings appear in the New Yorker.

No matter if he is called an essayist, humorist, or memoirist, people are more interested in the veracity of his stories opposed to how the editing process changes or improves the quality of his work.  In the essay, This American Lie, Alex Heard contends that Sedaris’ essays are not really truthful or all that personal. He insists that Sedaris is a fraud who creates fiction when the truth fails to be funny and exploits his family for laughs. Heard has made it his personal mission to fact check Sedaris' stories. What kind of stick do you have to have up your ass to even take on a project like that? Sedaris is not a journalist and is not obligated to follow any code of ethics other than his personal values. Sedaris has admitted repeatedly that his works are “realish” and he exaggerates for effect. Heard’s objection is not that exaggerates but that he embellishes his work too much for it to retain the label of non-fiction. 

If there is a problem with the non-fiction and fiction distinction that is an issue for the Library of Congress to resolve, or individual libraries can re-catalog his items (which completes screws up OCLC records but that is a rant for another day). Sedaris is a humorist not a librarian, so Melvin Dewey is not his problem or a problem for the critics.

The problem for critics arises when Sedaris’ reputation goes from Great American Exaggerator to Great American Essayist. If this grand distinction is ever bestowed upon him, there should be an asterisk placed by his name because having your work polished by the editors of the New Yorker is like having Bobbi Brown as your make-up artist and Rachel Zoe as your stylist, they can make anyone look good.    

The Memoir Game

In one of my favorite David Sedaris essays, he imagines himself saying to his younger sister: “Your life, your privacy, your occasional sorrow -- it's not like you're going to do anything with it.”

In that moment, he recognizes a writer’s selfish compulsion to see every moment as opportunity to get a laugh; compose a clever line; or, record biting real-life dialogue. Fortunately for his fans, Sedaris easily shrugs off the guilt and plods along showing the underbelly of suburban life and the morose cobwebs of his self-obsessed psyche. In his brief acknowledgement that not everything can or should be used as writing fodder, the humorist summarizes the dilemma that every writer faces. How much truth is too truthful? When does the personal essay become too personal? Can essayists be too self-evolved?

“Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays,” says E.B. White, one of the most significant and influential essayists of the Twentieth Century. He also ruminates, in his Forward to the Essays of E.B. White, about the negative consequences associated with being a memoirist. “I have been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others.”

Memoirists tend to be stars of their own story. So, when loved ones see themselves relegated to supporting characters in the writer’s drama, they become like teenagers holding the latest issue of the high school annual, looking for what kind of hair day they were having and how clear their skin looked in particular photographs. Often, they don’t like the rendering. So, they make Photoshop requests. A little less color here and little more contrast there until all flaws have been removed, along with the truth.

If essayists have compassion, don’t already have wildly successful careers making fun of their parents and siblings, and don’t have multimillion dollar book deals with publishing houses that expect caustic humor and embarrassing revelations, they will edit their works to either reflect a more positive image of their complainant; pick a different butt of the joke; or, delete the story altogether.

Another option for essayists is to use disclaimers. So, I have come with a few: “To protect identities, real names and distinguishing characteristics have been changed, but really don’t sue me or kick my ass."   

But I am also toying with “Remember back in the day when I lied all the time? Now I lie and call it art.” Or , “My story. My blog. Screw you.” Those might still need a little work. So as an alternative, I have been changing details about my life and the people in it.

My working class hometown in Central Pennsylvania is now an upper-middle class suburb in Massachusetts; my steadfast but occasionally cruel mother becomes a benevolent Mrs. Brady clone with rosy cheeks; and, my impulsive husband who lets the kids eat ice cream for dinner becomes a workaholic with obsessive compulsive hand-washing; my in-laws no longer are Texans with funny accents but are New Yorkers with funny accents.

I create charts, diagrams, and timelines to keep track of all the changes. But each change brings another question: Would a suburb in Massachusetts have a Brother’s Pizza and Sheetz? Is it likely that upper middle class kids in New England would have the first day of Buck season off of school; or that they would hang out at the local mini-mart on Main Street, go to splash hops in the summer, or skate on the iced-over tennis courts in the winter? Would New Yorkers say “fix-in to” and “sea-ment”? And, New Yorkers are certainly too smart to call every type of drink a Coke (even if it’s Pepsi, Sprite, Iced Tea, or bottled water). What a mess!

So after all the changes are made, I have an unauthentic, confusing piece of fiction that doesn’t resemble anything that I intended write in the first place. Screw that. I will use “your life, your privacy, your occasional sorrow….”