David Sedaris' "Naked": Cyclops

"Cyclops" is by far my favourite story from the book. Sedaris' father is my favourite of his "characters." He's loving and wholesome, but maintains a few highly questionable parenting methods. In "Cyclops," he's shown warning his children against various "dangerous" actions - driving, setting off fireworks, using a pencil - with grotesque cautionary tales inevitably ending in the loss of life and limb. The children become petrified of the simplest everyday activities, even the ones that their father asks them to perform. It seems he can't help himself - in his mind, the little lies are all for their own good.

Eventually, of course, we learn that Lou was lying to his son about all that - he doesn't even remember telling most of them - and in the end, it seems as if it really did help, to some degree. David even turns the idea on his father, warning him that he had a friend who lost his right arm snapping his fingers at a waiter. Lou turns it around on him, saying one day, his arrogance will kill him. This is a perfect ending to the story, as it sums up the feeling of the piece without seeming too punchliney.

David Sedaris' "Naked": I Like Guys

“I Like Guys” is an exercise in perfect self-loathing. Unlike most of his stories, this one has no hopeful ending, and no note of redemption at its conclusion. The piece itself is painful and drawn out, in the best possible way. The anguish Sedaris feels while sequestered in a Christian camp in Greece, battling his own homosexuality and developing a fleeting romance with a fellow camper, is mirrored by our anxiety in reading it. Sedaris’ books create a strong connection to the protagonist, affection for him: a feeling that you’re a part of his diabolically dysfunctional family. Because of this, to see him so tortured breaks your heart and in this case educates you on the awkward truths of repressed sexuality. To avoid being sensationalist or preachy, he discusses the more explicit aspects of his life with frank, matter-of-fact sincerity. Everywhere unnecessary details can be avoided, they’re left out.

I found the subplot about his sister avoiding him as interesting as the main homosexuality plot. Obviously he couldn’t explore every aspect of the experience, but having your sister ditch you for a trash-talking Queens girl could be as potentially devastating as anything else in the story. I think he could’ve rewritten the whole story about that.

David Sedaris' "Naked": Next of Kin

“Next of Kin” is another short but somewhat disturbing vignette, remniscent of Augusten Burroughs’ “Transfixed by Transsexuals.” The passing around in the family of a book discovered while babysitting, a crude explicit book about incest, exposes many uncomfortable, Freudian issues. I laughed out loud at the misspellings in the book – “Feck me hard, hardir,” The book fosters paranoia towards other family members and other families in the neighborhood. They speculate on whether the Sherman family is engaged in the horrific acts described, and they recoil in horror when their parents show them any affection. To stop the madness, David employs a sort of “pay-it-forward” strategy, dropping the book in the bed of a pickup truck. Despite the dark material of the book they read, this is one of the lighter stories about the family, and also one of the shortest. Sedaris once again uses exaggerated hyperbole to represent the overreactive feelings of a young adolescent, and the tone is exactly right.

David Sedaris' "Naked": Get Your Ya-Ya's Out

Sedaris’ touching tale of his Greek Orthodox grandmother is once again salvaged by its inherent truth. If it wasn’t real, it would be cynical and uncaring, but the piece is infused with inescapable familial love. Unfortunately, Sedaris’ mother really comes off as the villain – I would’ve like to have seen her side of the story, why she insists on getting rid of Ya Ya. She gains a little bit of redemption at the end, when she reveals that her disgust for Ya Ya’s cling to life is true of all old age. She tells her kids to pull the plug, no matter what, if they have a choice. “When I get that way, I want you to shoot me, no questions asked,” she says, and though there’s a hint of irony in her voice we know she’s being serious.

There is a moment in this story that reminded me of when my own grandfather died. In the story, David complains when he’s told he’s not allowed to wear his gold earring to the funeral. His mother guilts him into taking it out, saying that it is, after all, a funeral. The shame that he feels for thinking of himself more than the deceased reminded me of a similar situation involving formal pants at my grandfather’s funeral. I was eight, but the shame stayed with me. This is an example of the truth I praised earlier –the situations he creates come up in real life all the time.

David Sedaris' "Naked": A Plague of Tics

In "Tics," Sedaris perfectly describes the crushing cruelty of OCD and its social consequences. From a very young age, up until his time in college, Sedaris details how the condition chased him with its absurd demands throughout a good portion of his life. He provides a layman's look into the world of OCD, describing it in the simplest terms possible: he "had to" touch his nose to the doorknob, he "had to" kiss his foot. Sedaris doesn't attempt to provide reason or rationality for the actions, and exposes the silly paradox that all Obsessive Compulsive people are aware of - they know it's stupid to do what they're doing, but they simply have no choice. Because of this, "Tics" is similar to his pieces on drug addiction in his other books. He seems to be very good at providing an outsider view of various internal mental conditions.

David Sedaris' "Naked": Chipped Beef

"Chipped Beef" is divided neatly between Sedaris' dreams of wealth and familial fame and the harsh reality of his North Carolina existence. I've always been a huge fan of Sedaris, mainly because his stories are so real. The little heartbreaking details - "the toilet was always filled with diapers" - help to make the story come alive in all its gritty glory. This piece is so remniscent of Augusten Burrough's "Vanderbilt" piece that I was forced to wonder who stole it from who; regardless, both are masterpieces of middle-American wallow.

I particularly enjoy the bantering dialogue between the members of the family, like when David's mother tells him he drove the cat to suicide by always talking about having ribs with the Kennedys. It is believable that Sedaris' family possessed such wit. The apple hardly falls far from the tree.

Augusten Burroughs' Magical Thinking: Model Thinking

Burroughs' stories about modelling are similar to his tales of child-acting woe in many ways. He has high hopes for stardom and believes, through a mixture of pathos and vanity, that nothing can stop him from becoming incredibly successful. Rather than find complete failure, however, he finds relative vindication for his arrogance. Intead of capitalizing on it, however, he throws it away by sitting around and smoking weed all day - again the engineer of his own demise.

Burroughs again demonstrates his bizarre combination of self-love and self-loathing, saying "I knew that my nose was too big and my ears were uneven" in one paragraph, and then condemning the less-than-stellar appearances of his teachers in the next.

Augusten Burroughs' Magical Thinking: Transfixed by Transsexuals

Ironically, "Transfixed by Transsexual" is both the most profoundly disturbing (from a squeamish hetero point of view) and the only one so far with a somewhat happy ending. Burroughs' reveals that he resisted the temptation to undergo transformative surgery by purchasing a male puppy and naming him "Becky." Do not be fooled by this note of light humour - the rest of the piece is made up primarily of descriptions of various surgeries and their after-effects. I found myself skipping over one or two particularly gruesome passages, which I will refrain from quoting here at the risk of losing marks for lack of detail. To me, these parts of the story are grossly unnecessary. To others, they might provide that dash of disgust that one might look for in a Chuck Pahlaniuk book or a Quentin Tarantino film. Regardless, while it was of course well written, the piece was my least favourite of those I've read so far.

Augusten Burroughs' Magical Thinking: Vanderbilt Genes

Burroughs again establishes himself as both a brilliant writer and an insufferable brat of a child. His love of all things gold had already been described earlier in the book, but in "Vanderbilt Genes" he describes himself as desperate to live among New England's Rich and Famous. One feels infinitely more sympathy for the parents than for Burroughs in this story, even as he self-awarely slanders them as base and common. The irony that pierces these stories is so subtly obvious that the tone never starts to grate on the reader. Even though he descibres throughout the story his childhood belief that he was kidnapped from the Vanderbilt mansion, there is such a strong current of self-mockery that he never comes off as arrogant. Perhaps it is stating the obvious, but the stories in this book seem to be as much (if not more) about making fun of himself as they are about making fun of his family. It takes a great deal of skill to pull of self-loathing without sounding overly emotional or depressed, and Burrough's sardonic wit is perfectly matched for the challenge. I particularly enjoyed the passages within this story in which he describes how he imagines his past life: "My mother searched for me, silk and gold-thread slippers on her feet, martini glass poised in her hand, pinkie extended."

Augusten Burroughs' Magical Thinking: Commercial Break

I enjoyed "Commercial Break," one of the stories from by Augusten Burroughs, because it reminded me of my own experience (singular) with professional child acting. The way Burroughs describes the hope that THIS will be your big break, that stardom is just around the corner; I experienced it all at the age of eleven. I won't go into it - suffice to say I experienced a similarly crushing disappointment.

Like most of what Burroughs writes, the conclusion of the story is an unhappy one, and he sets it up from the beginning. It's clear to the reader that young Burroughs, full of hope and vain pride, is destined to find heartbreak at the cruel hands of reality. The two well-dressed men that he so desperately relies on forsake him, as does his beloved Tang. Burroughs is good at giving hints throughout the story as to the outcome - a talent which he uses throughout Magical Thinking. In this story, along with so many of his others, he reveals only the petty, heartless side of human nature - a perfect counterpoint, I've always thought, to his contemporary David Sedaris, who I'm also reading at the moment. They're both from highly dysfunctional families, both devastatingly funny, both write autobiographical short-stories; if I didn't know better, I'd swear they were the same person, one writing about the good in life and the other about the bad.