I finally got around to picking up
David Sedaris's 'Happy-Go-Lucky' (2022). The 19 stories are a collection of his personal essays, emotions and observations when the pandemic hit and world went into an unprecedented lockdown, and had to face a new reality.
In all his writing, he talks about his siblings (Gretchen, Lisa and Paul) and the sister he is closest to, Amy; he also examines his fraught relationship with his Dad, who then died in 2021 at the age of 98. The author had to come to terms with that too. (Reviews here, here, here and here, and a short essay in The New Yorker in 2022 here.)
I find that this author likes to revisit topics and all; that's over-sharing since he largely writes about family relationships with brutal honesty. He chronicles his personal tragedy, mishaps, missteps and forever-feelings of frustration, humiliation and seems stuck in an existential predicament. But whatever. That's the stuff of content-forming right?
His topics addressed are depressive and utterly bleak. One might find comedy in catharsis, but that isn't what I'm looking for when I pick up books. So it takes a while before I finally get around to reading anything of his. 'Calypso' (2018) scarred me so much that I avoided his writing for years.
'Fresh-Caught Haddock'
Set in New York City in 2020, there were the George Floyd killing and Black Lives Matter protests; the pandemic was still gong on, along with its restrictions. The narrator and his sister joined the protests on foot, then veered off. The point of haddock, is how he likens the protestors chanting slogans as similar "in the singsongy way a fishmonger might call, "Fresh-caught haddock!"
It kicked off a lot of thoughts about racism and assumptions/bias in his head. He mentioned a meeting and his words that he was embarrassed by.
"You're lucky she came in to work in weather like this," I said to the actor as we made our way to the living room. "And on a Saturday, no less!"
He offered a thin smile. "Actually, that's my wife."
My face still burns to think of this, but if nothing else, it taught me a lesson. From that day on, whenever I go to someone's home and see a person of a different race working either inside or outside the house, I say, "Is that your husband?" or "How come you make your wife do all the cleaning?"
They always answer, "Conchita, my wife? She's, like, twenty years older than me and has four kids! Plus I'm already married. To a man." Eventually, though, I'll be right, and my host will say, "May I just thank you for being the one person in my life who's not a horrible racist?"
'Happy-Go-Lucky'
The narrator, his partner Hugh and his sister Amy visited the wheelchair-bound Father in his room at assisted-living facility Springmoor in Raleigh. They spent time with Father in the room and at dinner in the dining room. The narrator thought his Father as a different man in this stage; from his conversation and new cheerfulness, the Father seemed rather different from the rage and impatience that were his trademark.
It was three days before Lou Sedaris's ninety-eighth birthday. His brains are fuzzy and his thoughts were all over the place although he wasn't diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Nobody knew it would be the last time they saw Father alive. He ruminated on the final words that his Mother said to him, and he couldn't quite remember; neither could he remember his reply. He remembered his father's last words to him in Springmoor's dining room.
"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?"
There'll be no surprise in her voice. Rather, it will be the way you might playfully scold a squirrel: "Did you just jump up from the deck and completely empty that bird feeder?"
Aside from this eponymous story, there is another story titled 'Lucky-Go-Happy'. It is also the final story in this book. The narrator remembered the last job he did before COVID rolled in. That was a show in Vancouver. He also flew on many flights during the pandemic, and wrote down his observations of how people behaved in the various cities. And he was glad he still had a job.
To prevent myself from being too annoyed by the book, I didn't finish it in one sitting. I split it over a week, reading at my slowest pace. I read a story or two at each sitting. To my surprise, this collection of 19 stories is honestly not too bad. They weren't all depressing, and it didn't put me in a funk after I finished the final story.
In a review in June 2022, The Guardian said,
That might be why, since settling in West Sussex in 2010, Sedaris’s hobby or mission has been to collect rubbish dumped along country roads. When not travelling between sold-out international gigs, he dirties himself as his bleeding hands grope in blackberry bushes for fast-food containers and bags of dog poo. As he says when Tiffany blackmails their father by claiming that he sexually abused her, people are “trashy”. If satire can’t goad us into reforming, Sedaris can at least clean up the mess we so squalidly strew behind us.
