Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim | David Sedaris | Dress Your Family in Cords or enim

Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim | David Sedaris | Lovin' Sedaris

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Dress Your Family ...

	Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim David Sedaris Back Bay Books, 2005 - 241 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Dress Your Family in Cords or enim

This book is hysterical! Probably one of his best works if not the best.If you like Sedaris at all then you must read this (even though it's not his latest). It's even funny a second time around, the semi biographical short stories don't get dated.

Lovin' Sedaris

This was the first David Sedaris book I ever read. After reading this book I bought and read three other books of his. This one has turned out to be my most favorite. Once you start reading you won't want to put down. Sedaris will have you laughing over and over again with his bizarre and intriguing memoir. If you read only one Sedaris book ever, choose Corduroy and Denim.

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Edgy and Occasionally Disturbing

I've enjoyed Dave Sedaris's work since I first heard an abridged reading of SantaLand Diaries on NPR several years ago. I loved the unabridged and somewhat edgier version even more. I have enjoyed every one of his essay collections. His delivery, written and spoken, is unique.

On the other hand, I am no Sedarista. While some of his pieces are funny or touching or thoughtful or odd, others are a bit creepy. I first read The Girl Next Door in The New Yorker and it was disturbing, not only because of the strange family he describes, but because of his own behavior. It was no less disturbing a second time around.

All but one of the essays in this collection have appeared before, in magazines or on radio. The single essay that seems to be newly published here is Chicken in the Henhouse, funny in places, but it left me uneasy in the same way that The Girl Next Door did.

These essays have Sedaris's family as their theme. Apparently the family member who is most comfortable in his own skin is his younger brother, Paul, a Southern redneck who surrounds himself with clutter and dogs. Sedaris never mentions that his sister Amy is also a writer. There are funny lines and conversations, but I wouldn't categorize this as a humor collection. His previous collections have included mainstream funny essays with more serious and unsettling pieces. This collection contains nothing like SantaLand Diaries or Me Talk Pretty One Day and Jesus Shaves, two fabulous essays about the trials of learning French, and trying to explain, with limited vocabulary, why an egg-laying bunny is the symbol of Easter in America. The pieces in Dress Your Family are a little too honest and revealing to be comfortably funny.

But I read every word. Sedaris's writing is clean and spare. He doesn't waste any words. These essays, as effortless as they read, must have required merciless editing on Sedaris's part to remove every unnecessary word, and to make every phrase just the right one.

Which is why I am still puzzling over the title. There is no essay called Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, nor is there any reference to corduroy or denim. Perhaps it has to do with the French origin of the words? Maybe the reason is so obvious that when someone tells me what it means, I'll smack my forehead and feel like a dope. But meanwhile, I'm stumped.

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