David Sedaris’s The Best of Me looks at first like a conventional career retrospective: a successful writer selects favorite pieces from decades of work and gathers them into one volume. Yet the book becomes more revealing than a simple greatest-hits collection because Sedaris does not choose only his most famous essays, arrange them chronologically, or restrict himself to autobiography. He places personal essays beside invented letters, animal fables, grotesque comic monologues, travel writing, childhood memories, and increasingly intimate accounts of his parents, siblings, partner, aging, addiction, suicide, and death.
That mixture makes the collection a portrait not just of Sedaris’s subjects but of his development as a writer. His early comic fiction often keeps the author at a distance by inventing narrators so vain, prejudiced, resentful, or deluded that they expose themselves. In much of the later nonfiction, Sedaris increasingly occupies that dangerous position himself. He judges strangers, relatives, cultures, classes, fashions, institutions, and social habits, but he also records his own greed, snobbery, cowardice, cruelty, competitiveness, resentment, and need for approval. The comedy grows more intimate without becoming gentler in any simple sense.
This is therefore a book about judgment as much as humor. Again and again, someone looks ridiculous until Sedaris adjusts the angle and reveals that the observer is ridiculous too. As the collection moves toward Tiffany Sedaris’s suicide, Sharon Sedaris’s alcoholism and death, Lou Sedaris’s physical decline, and the older siblings’ continued attachment to one another, that habit of self-implication gives the comedy unexpected emotional weight. Laughter does not solve grief, redeem every cruelty, or convert family pain into an inspirational lesson; it becomes one of the ways these people continue living together.
This article discusses the complete collection, including the endings of individual pieces and the deaths, family conflicts, addictions, animal harm, sexual material, offensive stereotypes, and estrangements that Sedaris uses as material. It also distinguishes the book’s explicitly fictional pieces from its memoiristic essays, because treating every narrator in The Best of Me as David Sedaris would fundamentally misread the collection.
What The Best of Me Is—and How Sedaris Chose It
Published by Little, Brown and Company in 2020, The Best of Me is an author-selected retrospective rather than an externally assembled anthology. The publisher describes it as a collection chosen by Sedaris himself, and the distinction matters because “best” here does not mean “the pieces that became most culturally famous.” It means work that Sedaris still wanted to stand behind, return to, and perform.
The book contains an introduction followed by forty-six selections. Thirteen are explicitly identified in the edition as fiction: “Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 2,” “Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol,” “Christmas Means Giving,” “Girl Crazy,” “Card Wired,” “How to Spend the Budget Surplus,” “Dog Days,” “The Cat and the Baboon,” “The Motherless Bear,” “The Faithful Setter,” “Think Differenter,” “If I Ruled the World,” and “Just a Quick E-mail.” The rest are predominantly personal essays drawn from Sedaris’s life, family, travels, relationships, and observations.
That distinction is essential because many of the fictional pieces depend on first-person or quasi-documentary voices whose prejudices and delusions are the entire joke. A narrator advocating something grotesque or revealing contempt for others is often being exposed rather than endorsed. Sedaris uses the same principle in memoir, but with a crucial difference: when the embarrassing narrator is “David Sedaris,” self-exposure becomes part of the ethical bargain with the reader.
Sedaris explained in a 2020 WBUR interview that the project began partly as an audio collection. He gravitated toward pieces he still enjoyed reading aloud, which helps explain the volume’s strong reliance on rhythm, dialogue, escalation, and endings designed to change how the listener understands what came before. It also explains why a retrospective called The Best of Me omits “Santaland Diaries,” the Macy’s-elf story that helped make him famous. Sedaris was not trying to produce a museum of his most historically recognizable work.
His introduction provides the collection’s clearest internal theory of his development. When he began writing essays, he says, he was attracted to large, dramatic events—the stories a person might use when explaining his life to someone new. As he grew older, he became increasingly interested in smaller experiences and found them harder and more rewarding to turn into writing. The Best of Me lets readers watch that transformation because early premise-driven pieces sit beside mature essays in which an airport delay, a shopping trip, a dental appointment, an injured animal, a manuscript read silently by Hugh, or an afternoon with an elderly father becomes enough to sustain an entire moral and emotional structure.
Family supplies the other organizing principle. Sedaris objects in the introduction to casual descriptions of his family as “dysfunctional,” not because the essays conceal conflict but because conflict is only one part of the relationship. His parents and siblings insult, disappoint, embarrass, abandon, judge, compete with, frighten, and occasionally wound one another, yet they remain intensely connected. For Sedaris, family is powerful precisely because it is not a collection of people chosen for compatibility. It is an assigned group that keeps defining who each member is, sometimes inaccurately, throughout life.
That idea allows a book containing comic letters, doggerel, animal fables, childhood memoir, political satire, travel writing, and essays about death to feel more coherent than its table of contents initially suggests. The formal modes change, but the underlying question remains remarkably stable: what happens when a person watches other people closely, judges them quickly, turns them into stories, and then realizes that he is also being revealed?
Complete Summary of The Best of Me
The collection does not present a continuous autobiography, and its pieces originated at different moments in Sedaris’s career. Reading them in the order Sedaris selected nevertheless creates a discernible progression. The book begins with highly constructed comic voices and extravagant premises, gradually places the autobiographical narrator under the same scrutiny, and ends with some of Sedaris’s most intimate writing about family, guilt, aging, and mortality.
That progression should not be mistaken for a clean movement from “silly” writing to “serious” writing. The late pieces are still built around insults, bodies, bad behavior, shopping, absurd conversations, and jokes, while early pieces can contain startling moral reversals. What changes is the amount of distance between Sedaris and the person being exposed.
Early Satire, Persona, and Comic Escalation
“Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 2” begins with one of Sedaris’s purest unreliable comic personae. Glen writes to subscribers as though he were reporting from the front lines of persecution, explaining why his newsletter has missed issues and chronicling the people who have supposedly mistreated him. The details steadily undermine his interpretation. Failed relationships, conflicts at work, hostile interactions, and social rejection become evidence of homophobia only because Glen is incapable of considering the possibility that his own conduct might repel people.
The humor works through accumulation rather than a single revelation. Glen repeatedly supplies enough information for the reader to construct a version of events radically different from his own, yet every new humiliation strengthens his certainty that he is the victim. The final appeal for understanding and renewed subscriptions leaves him exactly where he began: interpreting self-created disasters as proof of systematic mistreatment. Sedaris establishes a pattern that will recur throughout the book, in fiction and memoir alike—the person speaking most confidently about other people is often the person least capable of seeing himself.
“Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol” transfers that blindness to a theater critic. Thaddeus reviews children’s Christmas productions with the vocabulary, contempt, and professional severity of a critic covering major theatrical premieres. Homemade costumes, slow scene changes, childish acting, elementary-school staging, and the performers’ eagerness to please are treated as unforgivable artistic failures.
The disproportion is the joke. Children are being assessed by standards that make no sense for the work they are performing, and the critic’s refusal to grant them ordinary generosity gradually becomes more revealing than anything happening onstage. His sophistication is exposed as moral stupidity. The essay also introduces a tension that becomes important later in Sedaris’s memoir: sharp perception can produce excellent comic description while still leaving open the question of whether the observer’s intelligence has made him fairer.
“Christmas Means Giving” turns competitive consumption into an escalating nightmare. The narrator and his wife, Beth, are affluent suburbanites who understand possessions as evidence of superiority. When the Cottinghams move next door and begin matching or surpassing their displays of wealth, both households enter an arms race of houses, amenities, luxuries, and Christmas spectacle.
The competition eventually shifts from owning more to giving more. Charity becomes another form of status consumption, valuable not because someone is helped but because generosity can be displayed and compared. Donations grow progressively more extreme until people begin surrendering parts of their own bodies to prove their moral superiority. The narrator continues to describe this self-destruction as generosity, unable to see that giving has become indistinguishable from vanity.
Sedaris pushes the premise past plausibility because excess is the method. The families eventually give away houses, possessions, money, organs, and physical security until their quest to appear charitable destroys them. Nothing in the story moderates the competition because its characters possess no value independent of comparison. Even deprivation becomes worthwhile if someone else can be deprived more completely.
“The Incomplete Quad” shifts into memoir and immediately complicates the moral position. As a teenager, Sedaris fantasizes about an Ivy League education less because of intellectual ambition than because he associates elite campuses with money, sophistication, horses, estates, and a social world that would certify him as exceptional. His grades make that fantasy impossible, and after an unsatisfying experience at another state school, he transfers to Kent State, where he lives in a dorm that accommodates many disabled students.
There he befriends Peg, a quadriplegic student. Their friendship includes drugs, hitchhiking, jokes, and the exploitation of other people’s discomfort around disability. Sedaris and Peg discover that strangers respond to her wheelchair with sympathy and accommodation, and they can manipulate those expectations for amusement or advantage. At the time, their behavior feels clever because they imagine themselves as outsiders puncturing sentimentality.
Retrospect changes the story. Peg’s condition worsens, and she eventually dies. Sedaris recognizes that many of the people they treated as ridiculous were simply trying to be kind. The essay does not erase his youthful behavior by announcing that he has matured; instead, the adult narrator permits the earlier self to remain embarrassing. That willingness to preserve rather than repair the ugliness of memory becomes one of the mature Sedaris persona’s defining features.
“Girl Crazy” returns to constructed voices. Prompted by news that the sitcom character Ellen might come out as a lesbian, Sedaris invents a sequence of letters whose writers reveal their own obsessions through the way they respond. Their supposed concern about representation quickly becomes a vehicle for prejudice, voyeurism, grievance, sexual resentment, self-promotion, and contradictory assumptions about lesbians.
Because the piece imitates correspondence rather than providing authorial explanation, readers must identify the gap between what the letter writers think they are communicating and what they actually reveal. As in Glen’s newsletter, self-description becomes involuntary confession.
“Card Wired” uses a similarly artificial form. Beginning from the idea that greeting cards increasingly provide language for difficult emotional conversations, Sedaris imagines cards tailored to extraordinarily specific crises, grievances, betrayals, illnesses, sexual problems, and damaged relationships. Commercial sentimentality is pushed until the cards begin replacing communication rather than facilitating it.
The underlying joke is about language that has been prepackaged to perform intimacy. A card exists because people cannot or will not formulate the necessary words themselves, yet the more precise the situation becomes, the more absurd it seems to imagine buying an appropriate emotional response from a rack in a store. Sedaris turns the promise of convenient emotional honesty into evidence of avoidance.
“How to Spend the Budget Surplus” takes the form of letters proposing uses for a projected U.S. federal budget surplus. Each correspondent converts an enormous public-policy question into a vehicle for private obsession. What appears to be civic participation becomes another exercise in vanity, eccentricity, resentment, or opportunism.
The political setting gives the piece its premise, but the deeper target is the assumption that private desire naturally constitutes public wisdom. The letter writers do not reason from collective priorities toward policy; they begin with what fascinates or benefits them and expand it until it becomes a national proposal. Like the earlier fictional narrators, they reveal themselves by believing that their perspective is universal.
Family, Language, and the Move Toward Memoir
“You Can’t Kill the Rooster” introduces Paul Sedaris, David’s much younger brother, whose identity appears at first to violate almost everything their father values. Paul speaks with a deliberately coarse Raleigh vocabulary, uses profanity casually, performs a kind of aggressive masculine irreverence, and refuses the markers of refinement that the older Sedaris children learned to navigate. He seems, superficially, like the sibling least likely to satisfy Lou Sedaris’s expectations.
The essay gradually demonstrates why appearances are misleading. Paul can insult his father in language that would devastate or enrage the other siblings, yet he also responds practically and loyally when Lou needs help. Their exchanges sound like conflict without carrying the same emotional injury. The son who appears most disrespectful is capable of an intimacy the others do not possess.
That paradox becomes increasingly important in the collection’s later essays. David has spent much of his life measuring himself against Lou’s standards and longing for acknowledgment. Paul seems almost immune to that form of approval and therefore capable of loving their father more directly. What sounds like rejection can contain loyalty, while polished behavior can conceal resentment.
“Me Talk Pretty One Day” moves to Paris, where the forty-one-year-old Sedaris enrolls in a French class. He arrives already insecure about his language ability and quickly discovers that his teacher conducts the classroom through intimidation, ridicule, and demands that the students cannot easily satisfy. The multinational class shares the humiliating experience of trying to express adult thoughts with childlike vocabularies.
Sedaris’s comic advantage comes from reproducing the logic of linguistic helplessness. Students know what they want to communicate but lack the grammar and vocabulary required to appear like their normal selves. Their identities shrink under the pressure of incomplete language. Every mistake becomes more humiliating because the speaker is aware of how much intelligence has vanished between thought and speech.
The ending gives Sedaris a victory so modest that it becomes perfect. The teacher insults him in French, and for the first time he understands her completely. He still cannot respond with the fluency he wants, but comprehension itself feels miraculous. The essay turns progress into a comic paradox: his breakthrough is knowing exactly how he is being abused.
“Jesus Shaves” remains in the French classroom. During a discussion of Easter, the students attempt to explain Christian traditions to a Moroccan Muslim classmate using their inadequate French. Familiar religious imagery becomes bizarre once the speakers lose access to specialized vocabulary and inherited assumptions. Resurrection, church rituals, bells, rabbits, chocolate, and eggs sound increasingly arbitrary.
The class also discovers that traditions considered obvious in one country are strange in another. Sedaris assumes a version of Easter associated with the United States, while French classmates introduce different customs. The essay does not resolve these differences by deciding which version is more rational. Instead, limited language performs a kind of accidental anthropology, forcing everyone to hear familiar beliefs as an outsider might.
“Dog Days” is a short fictional poem that strips romantic ideas about dogs down to appetite, bodily functions, sex, sickness, and excretion. Its deliberately crude rhymes make the piece feel closer to comic doggerel than reflective prose. Yet it introduces an animal motif that becomes much richer later: animals in Sedaris’s work are rarely untouched emblems of innocence. They eat, mate, suffer, die, become projections of human desire, and expose the sentimentality people attach to them.
“Us and Them” returns to childhood. Young David becomes fascinated by the Tomkey family because they do not own a television, a fact he interprets not simply as difference but as a kind of cultural deficiency. He watches them, invents explanations for their behavior, and enjoys the sense that his own family possesses something essential that they lack.
Halloween reveals how flimsy that superiority is. When the Tomkey children come for candy after the accepted trick-or-treating period, David realizes his mother may make him share his own supply. Rather than surrender the sweets, he begins frantically eating them. His greed becomes so grotesque that the family he has been observing as abnormal no longer matters; the essay has redirected scrutiny toward him.
The adult Sedaris does not redeem the childhood self by explaining that he learned a permanent lesson. The effectiveness lies in how completely the moral perspective flips. Watching other people had allowed him to feel normal. Being watched exposes what “normality” was hiding.
“Let It Snow” compresses Sedaris family dynamics into a childhood snowstorm. After days trapped indoors, Sharon Sedaris sends the children outside, where resentment at their mother’s refusal to let them back in develops into melodramatic retaliation. The siblings decide that if something happens to young Tiffany, their mother will feel guilty, and they place her in the road as part of the plan.
The episode is cruel, absurd, and recognizably childish in its logic. The children imagine themselves as victims of outrageous maternal injustice while behaving in ways that make their own moral position increasingly indefensible. Yet the story does not end by declaring anyone monstrous. When Sharon eventually needs help, the children rally around her, and family loyalty reasserts itself with little explanation.
“The Ship Shape” begins in childhood longing for wealth. David and his siblings encounter richer families and develop elaborate fantasies about what money, second homes, and elite social worlds might provide. Their father appears on the verge of satisfying one version of this fantasy when he considers buying a beach house called the Ship Shape.
Lou ultimately does not buy it, and the lost property becomes a family symbol of the life they nearly possessed. For the children, the decision feels like deprivation even though the object being mourned is a second house near the beach. Adult perspective allows Sedaris to see the absurdity of presenting this as hardship without eliminating the emotional truth of the childhood disappointment.
The essay therefore works on two levels. It records the seductive power of class aspiration while showing how quickly expectation can make privilege feel like deprivation. Lou’s decision becomes one more item in the complicated ledger through which his children measure what he gave, withheld, promised, and failed to understand.
“The Girl Next Door” is among the collection’s most uncomfortable childhood essays. Sedaris becomes involved with Brandi, a neglected nine-year-old neighbor whose behavior, home life, and social circumstances both fascinate and unsettle him. His interest mixes sympathy with voyeurism, class judgment, curiosity, and the desire to make sense of a child whose world differs sharply from his own.
Their relationship pulls him closer to circumstances he does not know how to interpret responsibly. Brandi is not merely a colorful eccentric inserted into a comic childhood; she is a vulnerable child whose situation reveals the limits of Sedaris’s understanding. His mother eventually warns him about the dangers surrounding the relationship, and the episode contributes to his leaving.
Retrospection does not turn young David into a rescuer. If anything, the essay remains disturbing because the adult writer preserves the imbalance between the child he was, the younger girl he observed, and the social assumptions through which he viewed her. The piece raises a question that will become explicit in “Repeat After Me”: what does a writer owe the people whose lives become memorable because they make good material?
“Repeat After Me” makes that problem central. Sedaris visits his sister Lisa, who knows from long experience that conversations with her brother may later become essays. Family members therefore live with an unusual form of exposure: an ordinary story told at home can be transformed into a polished narrative, performed before strangers, and preserved in print.
Lisa tells David a remarkable story but explicitly does not want him to use it. His immediate response is revealing. Instead of accepting the boundary instinctively, he begins negotiating internally and imaginatively for ownership of the material because it is exactly the kind of story a writer wants. The tension is no longer between his memory and someone else’s memory; it is between love for a person and professional appetite.
Sedaris does not excuse himself. He imagines a cinematic version of the situation in which he is recognizably the villain, the brother who converts intimacy into property. Lisa’s parrot, Henry, becomes part of the essay’s ending, carrying the fantasy of speech that might repeat the apology Sedaris cannot make adequate simply by writing it. The piece is crucial because it demonstrates that self-awareness does not solve the ethical problem. Knowing that appropriation is exploitative does not eliminate the writer’s desire to appropriate.
“Six to Eight Black Men” begins with Sedaris’s habit of learning about a place through customs rather than conventional guidebook facts. In the Netherlands, he becomes fascinated by local versions of the St. Nicholas tradition, particularly the confusing number and identity of the attendants who accompany the saint. The unfamiliar story sounds outrageous to an American listener, just as American holiday mythology can sound absurd when narrated without cultural familiarity.
Sedaris responds competitively, wanting the United States to possess an equally striking national story. The comparison sends him through a sequence of cultural observations and eventually toward an American anecdote involving hunting. The essay’s method resembles “Jesus Shaves”: take customs people experience as natural, describe them from outside their home culture, and allow unfamiliarity to reveal how strange inherited traditions can be.
The racial imagery associated with the Dutch tradition requires more contextual caution now than the original comic setup supplies. The essay records Sedaris’s encounter with a cultural practice and his fascination with its oddity; it should not be mistaken for a comprehensive historical account of that tradition or of later debates surrounding it.
Travel, Embarrassment, Class, and Self-Exposure
“Possession” begins with real estate. Sedaris, looking at property in Paris, discovers how quickly viewing apartments activates fantasies of ownership, improvement, status, and acquisition. Rooms cease to be places other people inhabit and become possible extensions of the self.
That acquisitive gaze reaches its most uncomfortable point in Amsterdam. Sedaris visits the Anne Frank House and finds his attention repeatedly drifting toward questions of property and domestic desirability. The historical weight of the site should overwhelm such thoughts, and for a moment Primo Levi’s words restore moral perspective. Yet Sedaris soon notices another attractive apartment.
The joke depends on his refusal to pretend that insight permanently improves him. He understands the obscenity of filtering a site of persecution through real-estate appetite, but the appetite returns. Moral correction proves temporary, which is precisely why the piece belongs beside “Us and Them”: self-recognition is real, but it does not produce a purified narrator.
“Nuit of the Living Dead” begins at Sedaris and Hugh’s home in rural France, where Sedaris encounters an injured mouse and decides to kill it by drowning. The act is practical in his own mind, but the mechanics become increasingly ugly as compassion, squeamishness, control, and cruelty blur together.
Later, lost travelers arrive at the dark house. Through their perspective, Sedaris recognizes that the setting and his behavior can make him look like a character from a horror film. The narrative switches from his fear of animals and disorder to other people’s possible fear of him.
The piece refuses an easy distinction between the humane person and the cruel one. Sedaris can be distressed by suffering while causing it, aesthetically sensitive while behaving grotesquely, helpful to strangers while appearing threatening. Moral identity changes according to angle.
“Solution to Saturday’s Puzzle” turns an airplane seating dispute into a study of resentment. Sedaris refuses to exchange seats with a woman named Becky and quickly constructs an elaborate case for disliking her. The confined space of the aircraft gives both participants nowhere to escape, so tiny acts acquire enormous emotional significance.
Sedaris repeatedly searches for evidence that he is the better person. His charitable habits, crossword puzzle, self-image, and interpretation of Becky’s behavior all become exhibits in an imaginary trial. Yet an accidental bodily humiliation involving a cough drop destroys the posture of superiority.
The essay closes by recalling how he and Hugh sometimes handle petty arguments by agreeing to start over. That private mechanism of reconciliation becomes attractive precisely because the airplane encounter offers no reset. Once Sedaris has decided who Becky is, each event confirms the verdict until embarrassment forces him out of the fantasy.
“The Understudy” revisits childhood babysitters, particularly Mrs. Peacock. The Sedaris children respond to her with fascination and disgust, assembling complaints as though building a prosecutorial case. Her habits, appearance, behavior, and difference from the family become material for the children’s collective judgment.
They expect their parents to validate that judgment when they return. Instead, Sharon’s social response unsettles the children’s assumed moral order. The adults do not simply ratify the children’s sense that Mrs. Peacock is beneath them.
From the perspective of the adult narrator, the essay exposes more than a difficult babysitting experience. It records how children absorb class and racial hierarchies before they necessarily understand them and how quickly disgust can masquerade as objective description. The writing preserves the comedy of the children’s indignation while leaving their assumptions available for criticism.
“Town and Country” is built around the collapse of distinctions between refinement and vulgarity. Sedaris repeatedly encounters people whose appearance or social position suggests one kind of behavior, only to hear conversations or witness conduct that violates the expected script. Respectable presentation proves compatible with sexual explicitness, crude language, bodily preoccupation, and other forms of social disorder.
Yet Sedaris cannot remain the detached observer of this hypocrisy because his own exchanges with Amy are hardly models of decorum. The essay therefore refuses the easy conclusion that sophisticated people are secretly vulgar. Its stronger point is that almost everyone maintains an unstable border between public presentation and private appetite.
“In the Waiting Room” returns to the comedy of inadequate French. Sedaris’s limited understanding becomes particularly dangerous in medical settings, where people need precise language to describe symptoms, understand instructions, and preserve dignity. A misunderstanding leaves him sitting nearly naked in a waiting area, uncertain whether he has followed directions correctly.
The vulnerability differs from the classroom humiliation of “Me Talk Pretty One Day” because medicine makes misunderstanding bodily. Sedaris cannot retreat into cleverness when he does not know what a doctor expects him to do with his clothes or his body.
The essay eventually turns toward affection rather than simple ridicule. A small detail involving French firefighters and a proper drinking glass becomes an example of the kind of cultural difference Sedaris values because it remains surprising. Foreignness embarrasses him, but it also keeps the world from becoming predictable.
“Undecided” begins with impatience toward undecided voters during a U.S. election. The narrator treats uncertainty as incomprehensible and ridicules the idea that someone could remain unable to choose after months of campaigning and public argument. The tone appears certain about the irrationality of other people.
Then memory undermines that certainty. Sedaris recalls his mother’s indecision during the 1968 election and the strange power the children had in influencing how she voted. He also remembers later choices of his own that hardly support the image of a perfectly rational political participant.
The piece does not become a policy argument about which candidate anyone should support. Its subject is confidence itself: the pleasure of assuming that another voter’s uncertainty proves stupidity until personal memory reveals one’s own arbitrary, emotional, or immature choices.
Animal Fables and Moral Projection
Three consecutive fictional animal pieces allow Sedaris to move human vanity, grief, sexuality, loyalty, and prejudice into fable. The animals speak, reason, gossip, desire, and rationalize, but they remain animal enough that bodily instinct and human social language collide.
“The Cat and the Baboon” takes place during grooming. A baboon tries to make conversation with a cat and repeatedly chooses topics that irritate or offend her client. The baboon is performing a service and therefore needs the cat’s approval, but ordinary conversational instincts keep failing.
Eventually, disparaging dogs provides common ground. The relationship improves not through genuine connection but through a shared target. Sedaris reduces social bonding to one of its less flattering mechanisms: two people—or animals—can sometimes become comfortable with each other fastest by agreeing about whom they dislike.
“The Motherless Bear” begins with grief and turns it into identity. A bear loses her mother and discovers that telling other animals about the loss produces sympathy, attention, and extra food. A genuine bereavement gradually becomes a reusable social instrument.
The bear increasingly interprets herself through the role of the bereaved daughter and expects the world to compensate her. Sedaris pushes the dynamic until she encounters suffering that radically exceeds her own. A circus bear has endured captivity and mistreatment that make her familiar story seem comparatively small.
Yet the encounter does not simply cure her of self-pity. The story becomes darker, and the motherless bear eventually occupies the other bear’s place while continuing to understand herself through the narrative she has practiced. That refusal of tidy moral correction helps explain why the story angered some readers. Sedaris is not merely mocking grief; he is examining how real suffering can become a story a person inhabits so completely that it begins obscuring the suffering of others.
“The Faithful Setter” is narrated by a dog whose mate is repeatedly unfaithful. Human concepts of fidelity, betrayal, sexual instinct, breeding, ownership, and loyalty are filtered through an animal consciousness that both resembles and disrupts human relationship logic.
The narrator remains attached despite the mate’s behavior, which allows Sedaris to examine faithfulness without idealizing it. Loyalty can be touching, foolish, instinctive, possessive, or simply difficult to stop. An encounter involving a rescued dachshund further complicates the moral language of being “chosen.” Human beings sentimentalize rescue and attachment, while the animal perspective exposes how much desire, dependency, and circumstance lie beneath those stories.
Observation, Travel, Family Memory, and the Mature Comic Voice
“Dentists Without Borders” recounts Sedaris’s dental treatment in France and his surprise at how comfortable he becomes with the experience. He contrasts what he encounters with anxieties he has heard about socialized medicine, but the essay remains an anecdotal account of his own treatment rather than a systematic comparison of healthcare systems.
What begins as cultural observation gradually becomes more personal. Dental visits create routine, familiarity, and a peculiar form of companionship. Sedaris is interested not only in whether treatment works but in the intimacy created when strangers repeatedly examine and repair the body.
The essay’s warmth depends on its limited scale. Sedaris does not discover a grand theory of France; he becomes attached to an experience that contradicts expectations and then turns the contradiction into a social relationship.
“Memory Laps” begins with adult swimming and moves backward into childhood competition. Sedaris remembers training, racing, and especially his father’s fascination with another young swimmer, Greg Sakas. Lou’s praise of Greg transforms swimming from a private activity into another arena in which David measures his worth against paternal judgment.
Competition therefore becomes emotional before it becomes athletic. Winning matters because it might force Lou to revise his estimate of his son. The pool is one more place where Sedaris learns that achievement is inseparable from the person whose approval he wants.
The adult essay understands that dynamic more clearly than the boy did. Sedaris’s memory of finally succeeding under his father’s gaze remains powerful because it represents a rare alignment between effort and recognition. Later pieces will show how long he continues carrying that need.
“Think Differenter” returns to fictional monologue. Its speaker moves among technology, disability, relationships, firearms, mental illness, consumer culture, and other topics with an almost heroic inability to perceive contradiction. The voice is confident, casual, and repeatedly offensive because the speaker treats half-formed assumptions as obvious truths.
As with Glen, the reader’s task is to notice what the narrator cannot. Sedaris does not need an external character to refute the speaker because the monologue provides its own evidence. Every attempt at explanation deepens the portrait of ignorance.
“Loggerheads” begins with sea turtles and a memory Sedaris would rather revise. As children, he and his friend Shaun captured loggerhead turtles without understanding the harm they were causing. What seemed like curiosity and adventure depended on ignorance of the animals’ needs.
The adult narrator now knows enough to recognize the cruelty, but another revelation gives the memory greater depth. Sedaris later learns more about Shaun’s home life and the pain associated with his alcoholic father. As a child, David had access to his friend’s companionship without understanding the private reality that shaped him.
The turtles and Shaun become connected through the problem of unrecognized suffering. Childhood innocence does not mean harmlessness; people can injure animals and fail friends without intending either. Memory becomes morally serious when the adult narrator recognizes what the child could not see.
“If I Ruled the World” is an especially extreme fictional persona. Its speaker imagines using political power to impose a rigid religious and moral order while punishing people who violate her beliefs. The voice targets ideological, religious, sexual, and gender outgroups with escalating authoritarian certainty.
The extremity is the satire. Sedaris gives the speaker enough rope to reveal how personal grievance and absolute moral confidence can fuse into fantasies of state coercion. Because the piece is explicitly fictional, the persona’s positions should not be attributed directly to Sedaris; the structure depends on readers recognizing the frightening implications of the speaker’s self-righteousness.
“Easy, Tiger” returns to language learning. Sedaris compares the peculiar phrases presented by instructional programs, noticing how strangely specific imagined conversations can be. Learning another language means being supplied with sentences that may bear little relation to the life one actually expects to live.
The absurdity opens into a broader reflection on travel. Complete fluency would offer mastery, but partial comprehension preserves surprise. Sedaris comes to value the condition of not entirely understanding because it prevents foreign places from becoming mere versions of home.
“Laugh, Kookaburra” uses a trip to Australia and a meal shared with others to examine work, family, and sacrifice. A friend introduces a metaphor in which life resembles a stove with four burners, representing major areas such as work, family, friends, and health. To become highly successful, the theory suggests, a person must turn off one or more burners.
Sedaris initially considers the metaphor with the practical curiosity he often brings to social rules. His career has demanded enormous attention, travel, discipline, and solitude. Yet the idea that family could simply be switched off does not fit his life, however much irritation the family generates.
The essay’s deeper insight is that family is not merely one competing commitment among several. Sedaris understands himself through the assigned identities of sibling and son. Even when relatives consume time, create guilt, or interrupt professional life, removing them would alter the self doing the work. Family is not a burner sitting beside the person; it is part of the stove.
“Just a Quick E-mail” revives the epistolary form. Ronda writes to her sister Robin in a breezy, self-exculpatory tone, presenting the message as casual contact while gradually revealing a history of betrayal, privilege, bad behavior, and catastrophic selfishness.
The comedy comes from euphemism. Ronda continually chooses language that minimizes her actions, assumes understanding, and casts herself as a reasonable person caught in unfortunate circumstances. Each attempt to soften the past gives the reader more evidence against her.
The piece resembles “Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter” in structure but shows Sedaris’s increasing precision with the unreliable voice. Ronda does not need to sound absurd in every sentence. The more normal and conversational she appears, the more damning her unconscious disclosures become.
“A Guy Walks into a Bar Car” looks backward at trains, drinking, sexuality, attraction, and opportunities that once seemed renewable because Sedaris was young. Encounters with men carry possibility, but possibility is repeatedly complicated by fear, uncertainty, timing, intoxication, and hesitation.
The essay gains force from retrospective knowledge. The younger Sedaris can postpone, avoid, or fail to act because he assumes other chances will come. The older narrator knows that some moments close permanently.
By its end, the story also approaches the beginning of his relationship with Hugh. After one disappointed or unrealized possibility, Sedaris remembers someone named Hugh from whom he and a friend had borrowed a ladder. He decides that after an appropriate interval he might call him and offer a joke. The casualness is moving because readers of the later essays know what that call will become.
“Standing By” turns airports into laboratories of resentment. Delays, lines, boarding procedures, overheard arguments, public announcements, crowded terminals, and minor inconveniences give travelers opportunities to treat ordinary frustration as personal persecution. Sedaris watches people become furious and experiences the same impulses himself.
Political disagreement appears among the airport conflicts, but the essay’s target is broader than any particular position. People seize identities and grievances quickly because irritation needs an object. Sedaris begins wondering whether airlines actually turn passengers into monsters or merely provide a setting in which existing hostility becomes socially visible.
The final joke transforms a routine flight-attendant request for rubbish into a universal insult. Everyone is implicated. The observer who has spent the essay classifying other passengers cannot remain outside the category.
“Understanding Understanding Owls” begins with Sedaris’s interest in acquiring a stuffed owl and develops into one of the collection’s strangest examinations of taste, death, collecting, and partnership. His search brings him into contact with increasingly disturbing objects whose fascination is inseparable from their grotesqueness.
Sedaris’s attraction to these things differentiates him sharply from Hugh. Their long relationship does not depend on identical tastes, and Hugh’s tolerance becomes its own form of intimacy. Sedaris can bring home evidence of his morbid curiosity without requiring his partner to share it.
The essay is funny because the objects become more unsettling while Sedaris treats his desire for them with consumer seriousness. Yet the deeper pattern is familiar: he recognizes that what delights him may appall another person, and the person who knows him best has learned to accommodate that difference without pretending it is normal.
Grief, Aging, Partnership, and Family at the End of the Collection
“Now We Are Five” begins from a subtraction. Tiffany Sedaris has died by suicide, leaving five surviving siblings where there had always been six. The family gathers at the North Carolina coast, and the familiar setting becomes altered by the knowledge that one place in the sibling structure is permanently empty.
Sedaris reconstructs aspects of Tiffany’s life and estrangement without pretending that he completely understands her. She had spent periods distant from the family and experienced serious difficulties that the other siblings could not resolve. Her death produces grief, but also guilt, anger, confusion, and the uneasy knowledge that family closeness among the survivors did not extend to everyone equally.
The title captures the identity crisis. The surviving siblings do not simply miss Tiffany as an individual; they must relearn the number that defines them. A family that had understood itself through six children now has to say five, which feels mathematically simple and emotionally impossible.
The essay’s power comes from its refusal to make mourning ceremonially pure. The siblings still joke, criticize, eat, complain, remember, and behave like themselves. Humor does not trivialize Tiffany’s death so much as demonstrate that catastrophe does not cancel ordinary family habits. The survivors remain the same people inside a radically changed structure.
“A House Divided” returns to the beach house and the family after Tiffany’s death. Physical space becomes a way of thinking about emotional and political division. Family members occupy rooms, inherit habits, argue, remember, and continue using a house whose comfort now coexists with absence.
The essay also notices political disagreement around and within family life, but its deeper subject is division as a permanent condition rather than a crisis that can be solved through perfect consensus. The Sedaris siblings are not close because they agree on everything. They are close because disagreement does not necessarily dissolve the underlying structure.
Tiffany’s suicide remains part of that structure. The survivors cannot know exactly how family history contributed to her suffering or what alternatives might have changed the outcome. Sedaris allows that uncertainty to remain rather than retroactively creating a clean explanation.
The beach house itself carries class tension as well. From outside, the family can imagine strangers looking at their comfortable surroundings and wondering what they did to deserve them. The thought echoes “The Ship Shape”: property that once represented unattainable privilege has become ordinary family space, yet awareness of privilege never becomes complete enough to eliminate enjoyment.
“The Perfect Fit” follows David, Amy, and Gretchen shopping in Tokyo. Its surface pleasures are consumerist: eccentric clothes, stores, outfits, unfamiliar food, and the delight of acquiring objects that would appear ridiculous almost anywhere else. Yet the essay is fundamentally about sibling chemistry.
Sedaris explains that relationships in a large family change over time. One sibling becomes closest for a period, then another moves into that position; alliances and pairs shift without necessarily implying estrangement. The family is dynamic rather than evenly bonded.
Tokyo allows the three siblings to perform versions of themselves without childhood obligations. Their expensive, bizarre clothing makes them look almost deliberately unpresentable, yet they recognize one another beneath the differences in taste and appearance. The surprise is not that they have become sophisticated adults but that they have become adults who can travel together, enjoy one another, and marvel at where their lives ended up.
“Leviathan” begins with the obsessions people acquire as they age. Some become consumed by dogs; others by diets and elaborate health practices. Paul, once “the Rooster,” has become intensely interested in juicing and bodily maintenance. Sedaris, meanwhile, develops his own fixation on snapping turtles.
The essay wanders through these eccentricities toward the larger subject of memory. Bad experiences often make better stories because conflict, humiliation, and complaint have narrative shape. Happiness is harder to preserve in prose without flattening into sentimentality.
Sedaris therefore deliberately tries to retrieve a gentler image of Lou. Instead of remembering only criticism, strange habits, or conflict, he pictures his father listening to jazz and snapping his fingers with pleasure. The gesture becomes a memory of permission and ease—a version of Lou with whom all is briefly right.
“A Modest Proposal” examines what legal same-sex marriage means for Sedaris and Hugh after decades together. The question is initially practical and linguistic rather than romantic. Recognition by the state changes taxes, inheritance, legal status, paperwork, and the categories available to describe their relationship.
Sedaris has spent much of his adult life neither conventionally single nor interested in performing marriage as a romantic ideal. Hugh has occupied a stable place that does not require a new label to feel real. Legal equality therefore creates an unexpected problem: an institution once unavailable can no longer be dismissed solely because it excludes them.
The essay never becomes a triumphalist marriage narrative. Sedaris remains uncomfortable with words such as “husband” and with the social assumptions that formal marriage might bring. Yet he and Hugh move toward engagement almost through everyday conversation, treating a potentially monumental decision in the same domestic register as their other shared projects.
“Why Aren’t You Laughing?” begins with Sedaris waiting while Hugh reads a manuscript. The silence is excruciating because Sedaris measures reception through laughter. Each moment Hugh does not laugh threatens the writer’s confidence and raises a larger question about what comedy is supposed to do with difficult material.
That anxiety leads into alcoholism, partly through representations Sedaris has encountered and partly through memory of his mother. Sharon drank heavily, and the adult children understand aspects of her behavior differently than they did when young. Addiction complicates the warm portrait of the witty mother who supported her children’s ambitions.
Sedaris is especially attentive to the tragedy that Sharon did not live to see the scale of her children’s adult success. She encouraged creativity and individuality, yet died before many of the outcomes that would have demonstrated how consequential that encouragement had been. Grief therefore attaches not only to losing a person but to the future experiences she was denied.
The title’s question—why are you not laughing?—becomes larger than a writer waiting for approval. Sedaris has built a career on converting discomfort into comedy, but grief and addiction resist any guarantee that a joke will arrive on schedule. The essay does not abandon comedy; it reveals the anxiety beneath producing it.
“The Spirit World” begins with psychics, signs, birds, butterflies, and the human desire to believe that the dead remain communicative. Sedaris is skeptical of supernatural claims and amused by the performance of psychic certainty. He also knows how easily people can manufacture signs when they desperately want contact.
That skepticism becomes difficult to maintain at an emotional distance once Tiffany enters the essay. Sedaris remembers an encounter when she came to see him at a stage door and he refused or limited contact. In retrospect, the moment becomes charged by everything that happened later.
After Tiffany’s suicide, memory turns the episode into evidence in an internal prosecution. Sedaris can list reasons for his behavior and receive reassurance from relatives, but none can prove what Tiffany felt or what might have happened under different circumstances. His family can tell him that he is not responsible, yet absolution remains something given by people who love him, not an objective verdict delivered by the dead.
The supernatural material therefore serves an emotional function even for a skeptic. A sign from Tiffany could provide an impossible certainty: that she understood, forgave, or no longer blamed him. The essay’s power comes from Sedaris recognizing why he might want exactly the kind of message he distrusts.
“Unbuttoned” closes the collection by bringing Sedaris face-to-face with bodily decline, first through his own medical fears and then through Lou’s severe deterioration. Sedaris undergoes tests and rapidly imagines catastrophe. His father, meanwhile, has entered a genuinely diminished physical condition that requires assistance with basic functions and leaves little privacy.
The siblings gather around Lou, negotiating practical matters, old resentments, affection, possessions, and the approaching possibility of death. Sedaris notices how little he actually knows about parts of his father’s biography despite decades spent analyzing their relationship. The man who has occupied so much psychological space remains partly opaque.
Lou himself is forced to confront an identity he once would have judged harshly. He has mocked weakness and dependency, yet now inhabits a body that cannot meet his old standards. Sedaris confronts him with that contradiction, and Lou unexpectedly agrees rather than defending himself.
Then comes the acknowledgment David has wanted for most of his life. Lou tells him, in effect, that his achievements count and that he has won. Sedaris cannot know exactly what his father means—victory in life, victory in their long contest, or simply belated recognition—but he decides to accept it. The point is not that decades of conflict vanish. It is that he can finally stop carrying the demand for a different answer.
Paul’s role becomes equally important. While the other siblings have often interpreted his profanity toward Lou as combat, Paul states plainly that their father is his best friend and resists allowing him to die without every possible intervention. The relationship that sounded most hostile turns out to contain the least ambivalent devotion.
The collection ends after the family goes to dinner. Outside the restaurant, they notice a naked woman through a nearby window and react with astonished delight. Their voices, curiosity, whispered excitement, and collective fixation suddenly make these aging adults sound like children again. After an essay about bodily decline, death, resentment, and paternal approval, Sedaris closes on a body that is neither medical nor tragic but simply startling and funny.
It is an unusually fitting ending. The father may be dying, Tiffany is absent, Sharon is long dead, and every sibling is older, yet the family mechanism survives. Put them together in front of something ridiculous and the children they once were reappear instantly.
Family as the Book’s Central Subject
Sedaris writes about strangers constantly, but family provides the collection’s strongest continuity because relatives cannot be discarded when a scene ends. The same people reappear decades later, changed by age but still carrying roles established in childhood. That recurrence turns The Best of Me into something like a fragmented family novel assembled from essays, except the characters are real people remembered and shaped by one participant.
The family is neither an inspirational refuge nor merely a catalog of dysfunction. Its power lies in contradiction. The Sedarises can be cruel and loyal, selfish and generous, judgmental and protective; someone who causes a lifelong wound in one essay can appear decades later frightened, funny, loving, or dependent. Because relationships continue, no single anecdote earns the right to define a person completely.
Lou and Sharon Sedaris: Approval, Conflict, and Inheritance
Lou Sedaris is one of the collection’s most consequential figures because David’s relationship with him is structured by judgment. In “Memory Laps,” paternal approval transforms competitive swimming into an emotional contest. Praise directed toward Greg Sakas makes another boy’s athletic ability feel like evidence against David, while victory matters because it might force Lou to reconsider his son’s worth.
That pattern extends beyond sports. David becomes a successful writer while carrying the memory of a father who could be skeptical, dismissive, critical, vain, erratic, and difficult to impress. The career produces external validation, but the essays suggest that external success cannot completely replace recognition from the person whose judgment mattered first.
Sedaris is perceptive enough to understand the trap. If someone’s approval becomes psychologically indispensable, every achievement remains partly hostage to that person’s response. Yet understanding the mechanism does not automatically free him from it. “Unbuttoned” matters because Lou’s late acknowledgment arrives after David has become old enough to realize how exhausting the contest has been.
The father is not reduced to antagonist. “Leviathan” deliberately reaches for the image of Lou listening to jazz and snapping his fingers, a memory in which pleasure replaces evaluation. “You Can’t Kill the Rooster” and “Unbuttoned” reveal his extraordinary relationship with Paul, who can exchange obscene insults with him without reproducing the emotional injuries David associates with paternal criticism. Lou is also resilient in physical decline in ways that surprise the son who has spent years cataloging his weaknesses.
Sharon Sedaris has a different presence. Her wit and irreverence help establish the family’s comic culture, and childhood pieces repeatedly show her refusing to perform conventional maternal sweetness. She can lock the children out in the snow, respond unexpectedly to their complaints, puncture melodrama, and deny them the validation they believe they deserve.
The later essays complicate the affectionate portrait through alcoholism. “Why Aren’t You Laughing?” does not rewrite Sharon as secretly fraudulent; it adds a form of suffering and dependency that the children could not fully understand when young. Her humor, drinking, maternal affection, and support for her children belong to the same person.
One of the most painful facts is temporal. Sharon encouraged the creative tendencies that would shape several of her children’s lives but died before their mature successes became visible. Sedaris’s grief therefore includes the impossible desire to report back to the parent who helped make the future possible. The loss is not just of the mother he knew but of all the conversations that success would have created.
Together, Lou and Sharon establish two different forms of inheritance. Sharon’s influence is visible in humor, social irreverence, and encouragement. Lou’s is visible in competitiveness, insecurity, ambition, and the hunger to turn achievement into proof. Sedaris’s adult voice contains both.
The Siblings: Lisa, Amy, Gretchen, Tiffany, and Paul
The siblings give Sedaris a permanent audience and a permanent archive. They remember overlapping versions of the same childhood, know how to reduce one another instantly to earlier identities, and supply stories no outsider could produce. That intimacy is a gift to a memoirist and an ethical danger.
Lisa becomes central in “Repeat After Me” because she articulates the problem directly. She knows that telling David something memorable may mean losing control of it. The sibling relationship contains trust, but the professional writer within that relationship experiences a good story as material.
Sedaris does not pretend that admitting the conflict solves it. His ability to write a brilliant essay about exploiting family privacy is itself evidence of the problem. Even self-criticism can become publishable material. Lisa therefore represents both the intimacy that makes Sedaris’s writing possible and the boundary his craft continually threatens.
Amy appears differently. She shares David’s appetite for performance, grotesque humor, clothing, observation, and rapid comic transformation. “The Perfect Fit” shows how naturally sibling intimacy can survive inside adult eccentricity. Shopping in Tokyo becomes meaningful because the siblings can look at one another’s bizarre outfits and recognize continuity with the children they once were.
Gretchen belongs to that shifting network as well. Sedaris describes large-family intimacy not as a stable ranking but as changing alliances in which pairs and trios form over time. The idea resists the sentimental expectation that all siblings must remain equally close. Family continuity accommodates changing distances.
Tiffany is the most difficult sibling to write about because her absence destabilizes the family’s preferred story about itself. Sedaris insists in the introduction that the family has remained remarkably connected, but “Now We Are Five” exists because one sibling became estranged and died by suicide. Tiffany therefore prevents the family narrative from becoming self-congratulatory.
Sedaris is careful, at his best, not to turn her into a symbol whose death exists only to deepen everyone else. He remembers aspects of her history and acknowledges the family’s incomplete knowledge. Yet the essays inevitably remain written by a surviving brother, which means Tiffany often appears through the guilt, confusion, and memory of people who could not reach her.
“The Spirit World” makes that limitation especially painful. Sedaris wants certainty about an encounter he regrets, but Tiffany can no longer supply her interpretation. His relatives can reassure him, and he can analyze his own motives, yet the person whose judgment matters is absent. The family storyteller encounters a story he cannot close.
Paul appears at the opposite end of the attachment spectrum. He is profane, loud, physically practical, culturally different from David, and capable of talking to Lou in ways the other siblings interpret as aggressive. Yet “Unbuttoned” reveals that Lou is his best friend.
That fact retroactively changes “You Can’t Kill the Rooster.” Paul’s apparent rejection of refinement was never equivalent to rejection of family. His loyalty is less verbalized in conventional emotional language because it does not need to pass through the same grammar of approval that governs David’s relationship with Lou.
Collectively, the siblings show what Sedaris means by family as assignment. These people are not united by uniform values, tastes, professions, politics, or temperaments. They remain connected because they possess access to one another’s earliest selves, and that access survives even when one of them desperately wishes to be understood differently.
Hugh: Partnership, Witness, and the Private Counterweight
Hugh Hamrick occupies an unusual position because he is family by choice in a book that repeatedly emphasizes the force of family one does not choose. Unlike the siblings, Hugh cannot instantly turn David into a five-year-old through a remembered family role. His importance lies partly in that difference.
The essays present Hugh as witness, partner, counterweight, and occasionally audience. He does not share all of Sedaris’s tastes, especially the attraction to grotesque objects in “Understanding Understanding Owls,” but he has lived with those tastes long enough to recognize them as part of the person he loves. Tolerance becomes more meaningful than identical enthusiasm.
Their relationship also supplies practical models for conflict. In “Solution to Saturday’s Puzzle,” Sedaris remembers the possibility of declaring a restart after a pointless domestic argument. The idea matters because it contrasts with encounters in which strangers lock themselves into mutually hostile identities and have no mechanism for returning to ordinary coexistence.
“A Modest Proposal” demonstrates how little the longevity of the relationship depends on conventional romantic language. Hugh and David have built a life before formal marriage becomes legally available to them. Legal recognition matters, but it arrives after the relationship has already acquired decades of routines, projects, negotiations, irritation, loyalty, travel, houses, and private vocabulary.
The essay’s ambivalence about words such as “husband” does not diminish the partnership. It shows Sedaris resisting the assumption that legitimacy requires translating a relationship into familiar sentiment. Hugh’s role across the collection is powerful precisely because it is often undramatic. He is there when manuscripts are read, houses are maintained, trips are taken, medical fears arise, objects are purchased, fights need resetting, and family crises unfold.
If Lou represents the approval Sedaris spends decades seeking, Hugh represents something closer to sustained recognition. He knows the absurdities already. He stays anyway.
Judgment, Shame, Cruelty, and Self-Indictment
Sedaris’s comedy depends heavily on judgment. He notices clothing, accents, habits, bodies, class signals, conversational errors, consumer choices, political behavior, manners, smells, furniture, food, language, and social pretension with unusual speed. The danger is obvious: a writer this attentive can easily make everyone else into specimens while remaining safely superior.
The strongest essays prevent that hierarchy from stabilizing. “Us and Them” initially invites readers to share young David’s fascination with the television-free Tomkeys, then reveals his own grotesque candy hoarding. “Solution to Saturday’s Puzzle” builds a case against Becky before a ridiculous bodily accident punctures his righteousness. “Standing By” catalogs airport monsters until Sedaris recognizes that airports may simply expose a hostility he shares.
“Possession” is even harsher because moral insight fails to cure the appetite it diagnoses. Sedaris recognizes the vulgarity of thinking about desirable property while visiting the Anne Frank House, yet his attention returns almost immediately to real estate. The essay would be less effective if he claimed the historical setting permanently transformed him. Its point is that people can understand why a thought is shameful and keep having it.
That tension distinguishes self-indictment from confession designed to earn praise. Sedaris often admits something unattractive without demonstrating that he has overcome it. His younger self harms turtles in “Loggerheads,” exploits assumptions around Peg’s disability in “The Incomplete Quad,” judges Brandi through class assumptions in “The Girl Next Door,” and is tempted to appropriate Lisa’s private story in “Repeat After Me.” Adult awareness changes the framing but cannot undo the original action.
Self-exposure does not automatically absolve the writer either. One of the legitimate critical questions surrounding Sedaris is whether confessing his own prejudice or cruelty sufficiently addresses the way another person has been represented. If a disadvantaged child, disabled friend, poor neighbor, service worker, or family member becomes funny partly because the narrator describes that person with ruthless specificity, the narrator’s later admission of snobbery may complicate the scene without eliminating its asymmetry.
“The Incomplete Quad” shows why the question cannot be answered uniformly. Sedaris’s retrospective recognition that strangers were often kind to him and Peg genuinely alters the moral shape of the essay. The adult writer does not simply mock his younger arrogance; he reconstructs enough of it for the reader to understand how pleasurable it felt at the time. The correction therefore arises from memory rather than being pasted onto it.
“The Girl Next Door” remains more troubling because Brandi’s vulnerability exceeds the narrator’s. Sedaris can expose his class assumptions, but he still controls the final representation. The essay’s value lies partly in leaving that discomfort unresolved rather than turning the child’s circumstances into a lesson about David’s personal growth.
This is where Sedaris’s comic cruelty differs from the cruelty of characters such as Thaddeus Bristol. Thaddeus cannot see that his standards have made him absurd, whereas the mature Sedaris often knows that his standards are compromised. Yet the collection refuses to pretend that awareness equals goodness.
Shame therefore becomes productive material. Sedaris revisits moments when he failed to be generous, brave, humane, informed, or loyal because embarrassment creates double vision: the remembered self believes one thing while the older narrator understands something else. Humor occurs in the distance between those perspectives.
The best version of this technique does more than invite readers to laugh at the younger Sedaris. It destabilizes the reader’s own confidence. Most people have constructed moral stories about themselves using incomplete information, selective memory, and favorable interpretation. Sedaris makes those mechanisms visible by exaggerating his own.
Grief, Aging, and Mortality
Death appears long before the explicitly bereaved later essays. Animals are injured, drowned, captured, stuffed, eaten, mourned, neglected, and converted into decorative objects. Bodies malfunction in doctors’ offices and dental chairs. Age changes sexuality, travel, family roles, appetites, and the amount of time available for postponed reconciliation.
What changes in the later pieces is proximity. Mortality stops being an object Sedaris can examine at an eccentric angle and becomes the structure surrounding the family. Sharon is dead. Tiffany dies by suicide. Lou grows physically dependent. Sedaris begins confronting medical fears of his own. The siblings can no longer imagine themselves as children whose parents and family configuration will remain fixed.
“Now We Are Five” is central because it refuses the idea that grief creates a morally purified family. The survivors still behave like the Sedarises. They joke, complain, judge, remember, and irritate one another. The absence of Tiffany is therefore more powerful, not less, because it exists inside normal activity rather than replacing it with ceremonial mourning.
The essay also shows how suicide generates interpretive hunger. Survivors want an explanation capable of organizing the death, but family history rarely provides one simple enough to satisfy. Estrangement can become evidence, as can childhood experience, mental distress, conflict, isolation, and particular incidents, yet none offers complete causal certainty.
“The Spirit World” makes guilt more personal. Sedaris remembers refusing Tiffany at a stage door and later experiences that memory through the knowledge of her death. The event becomes almost impossible to judge because its meaning has been altered by what happened afterward.
His skepticism toward psychics matters because a supernatural sign could provide something ordinary memory cannot: a verdict from the dead. Tiffany could forgive him, condemn him, or explain herself. Sedaris recognizes both his disbelief and his desire, which prevents the essay from becoming either spiritual testimony or easy debunking.
Sharon’s death creates a different grief. “Why Aren’t You Laughing?” focuses partly on alcoholism and on the children’s later understanding of their mother. Addiction makes memory harder because affection and harm coexist. Sedaris cannot preserve only the witty mother or only the alcoholic one without falsifying her.
The tragedy of her absence also lies in success arriving too late for her to witness it. Sedaris can achieve public recognition, make readers laugh, publish in institutions that once represented impossible validation, and build a career around family stories, yet the parent whose encouragement helped form that future cannot see the result.
Lou’s decline in “Unbuttoned” reverses the father-son hierarchy. The man who judged weakness becomes dependent; the son who wanted his approval becomes one of the adults looking at a fragile body. Sedaris could use the reversal vindictively, and traces of old anger remain, but age has altered the stakes.
The most significant moment is not forgiveness in any grand sense. Lou acknowledges David’s achievement, and David decides to stop carrying the contest. The emotional movement belongs as much to the son as the father: the words matter because Sedaris is finally willing to let them be enough.
In his conversation with WBUR, Sedaris resisted the comforting idea that writing painful material simply provides catharsis. A more accurate description of these essays is that writing creates form. It allows an experience to be examined, arranged, timed, and sometimes made funny without claiming that the underlying loss has disappeared.
That distinction is crucial to the collection. Comedy does not heal Tiffany’s death, recover Sharon, reverse childhood cruelty, or restore Lou’s body. It makes experience narratable. For Sedaris, that may be the more durable function.
Fiction, Memoir, and the Ethics of Turning Life into Material
The presence of thirteen explicitly fictional pieces complicates the common image of Sedaris as primarily a memoirist. Fiction allows him to create narrators who reveal themselves without requiring the autobiographical “David” to occupy the center. Glen, Thaddeus Bristol, Ronda, the authoritarian speaker of “If I Ruled the World,” and the narrators of other comic documents are machines for producing dramatic irony.
These voices usually share one trait: they believe language is protecting them while language is actually exposing them. Glen writes a newsletter to explain persecution and instead documents his own behavior. Ronda sends a casual email intended to normalize the past and makes the past sound worse. Thaddeus uses critical sophistication to prove that he lacks elementary generosity.
Sedaris’s animal fables perform a related trick. Human vanity becomes easier to see when transferred into bears, cats, baboons, and dogs. The distance of fable permits exaggeration while preserving recognizable motives: grief converted into status, gossip converted into bonding, loyalty converted into instinct, and service work converted into strategic flattery.
Memoir removes some of that protection. The autobiographical narrator can still exaggerate, arrange scenes, select dialogue, compress time, and shape memory, but the people being described have lives outside the page. Parents, siblings, neighbors, classmates, partners, and strangers become characters within a story controlled by Sedaris.
“Repeat After Me” is therefore one of the collection’s most important essays because it makes the problem explicit rather than hiding behind memoir convention. Lisa understands that the family has become a source archive. Her brother’s talent means that an anecdote told privately can acquire a public afterlife.
The central ethical issue is ownership. Who owns a story that happened to several people? A writer may remember it vividly, understand its shape, and be able to make something artistically powerful from it, while another participant may experience publication as exposure or betrayal.
Sedaris’s temptation is intensified by craft. He does not want Lisa’s story because he is indifferent to her; he wants it because he is a writer who recognizes excellent material. The conflict therefore cannot be solved by simply instructing the memoirist to love his subjects. Love may make appropriation more painful without making it less tempting.
The self-accusation within the essay is genuine, but it contains a paradox. Sedaris turns his guilt about using family material into another successful piece of family material. Even ethical awareness can be converted into literature.
That does not make autobiographical writing illegitimate. It means the form has no perfectly clean position. A memoirist either alters, omits, disguises, obtains consent, risks disagreement, or accepts that publication changes private relationships. The Best of Me is unusually strong when it allows this tension to remain unresolved.
The distinction between fiction and memoir also matters for interpretation. A fictional persona’s racism, religious authoritarianism, sexual prejudice, or ignorance is not automatically Sedaris’s stated belief. Conversely, calling something memoir does not mean it is an objective transcript of reality. It is remembered experience shaped by selection, perspective, timing, and literary purpose.
Sedaris’s mature nonfiction gains much of its force by making that shaping visible. He often tells readers exactly when he is being unfair, uncertain, obsessive, or self-serving. That transparency does not guarantee factual neutrality, but it helps explain the persona the collection constructs: a narrator who is reliable about the existence of his own unreliability.
Language, Travel, Class, and Outsiderhood
Foreign travel gives Sedaris something he rarely experiences in English: diminished control. His comic persona depends on verbal precision, quick categorization, and the ability to notice nuances in what people say. In another language, those advantages disappear.
“Me Talk Pretty One Day” makes the loss humiliating. Sedaris knows himself to be an adult with a complex mind but cannot make his French carry that complexity. “Jesus Shaves” expands the problem from individual embarrassment to culture itself. Entire systems of belief become absurd when people lack the vocabulary and assumptions necessary to explain them.
“In the Waiting Room” makes linguistic weakness physical. Not understanding a medical instruction affects what Sedaris does with his own body. The resulting exposure is funny because the narrator who usually describes everyone else so confidently does not know how he appears.
“Easy, Tiger” eventually reframes that condition. Incomplete understanding can be pleasurable because it leaves another country resistant to mastery. Fluency is useful, but bewilderment keeps foreignness alive.
That attraction to outsiderhood does not eliminate cultural generalization. Sedaris often treats a personal encounter as an opportunity to characterize French behavior, Dutch custom, American habits, British manners, Japanese shopping, or another national difference. The writing works best when these observations remain clearly comic and experiential rather than pretending to be systematic anthropology.
Class creates an almost opposite dynamic. Foreign language reduces Sedaris’s confidence; class markers often increase it. He notices who has money, who wants money, who performs refinement, who owns the right objects, who lives in the right place, and who appears socially out of place.
“The Ship Shape” reveals how early the fascination begins. A beach house represents entry into another level of life, and losing the possibility of owning it feels enormous to children already studying wealth. “Christmas Means Giving” fictionalizes the same appetite until status competition becomes self-destruction.
“Possession” shows the adult version. Property becomes a way of imagining identity. An apartment is not merely space; it is a possible improved self.
“The Girl Next Door” and “The Understudy” expose the darker side of class perception. Difference becomes something the narrator can observe with comic fascination, but the people being observed possess less power over how they will be represented. Retrospective self-awareness helps reveal that imbalance without erasing it.
“The Perfect Fit” presents consumption in a warmer register. David, Amy, and Gretchen spend heavily on bizarre clothes in Tokyo, fully aware that the purchases are excessive. Consumer desire becomes sibling play rather than proof of moral superiority.
The collection never constructs a coherent anti-consumerist argument because Sedaris plainly loves objects. Houses, clothes, art, food, taxidermy, furniture, and strange purchases give him pleasure. His interest lies in the point at which taste becomes identity and identity becomes hierarchy.
Outsiderhood is therefore unstable. Sedaris can be the foreigner unable to speak, the gay man navigating social institutions, the artist who once imagined elite education from outside, the wealthy traveler looking at property, the American interpreting another culture, or the successful writer observing people with less social power. The essays become strongest when the narrator recognizes that he can occupy several of those positions at once.
Animals, Bodies, Objects, and the Grotesque
Animals recur so frequently that they form one of the collection’s most important motifs, yet they do not carry a single symbolic meaning. Sometimes they are anthropomorphic comic characters. Sometimes they are victims of human ignorance. Sometimes they represent loyalty or appetite. Sometimes their dead bodies become objects people desire to own.
The animal fables make human behavior strange by relocating it. A grieving bear can become addicted to sympathy; a baboon can navigate customer service by discovering the value of shared prejudice; a setter can narrate sexual betrayal through instinct and loyalty. The animals are human enough to support satire while remaining bodily enough to disrupt sentimental interpretation.
The memoiristic animals are more ethically uncomfortable. “Loggerheads” forces Sedaris to recognize childhood harm that occurred because he and Shaun did not understand the animals they captured. “Nuit of the Living Dead” exposes the ugliness hidden inside the decision to end an injured mouse’s suffering. “Understanding Understanding Owls” turns death into collectible beauty through taxidermy.
These episodes connect animals to the collection’s fascination with bodies. Sedaris repeatedly writes about teeth, skin, nudity, excretion, illness, medical procedures, sex, aging, food, alcohol, and physical decay. Bodies are comic because they refuse the refined identities people build around them.
“Town and Country” repeatedly collapses decorum into bodily vulgarity. “In the Waiting Room” makes sophistication useless once clothes come off under misunderstood instructions. “Dentists Without Borders” turns the mouth into a site of strange intimacy. “Unbuttoned” eventually confronts the body when comedy can no longer disguise the seriousness of dependency.
The grotesque protects Sedaris from sentimentality. A dying or aging person is never transformed into a purely noble image because physical life remains inconvenient, embarrassing, smelly, exposed, and materially specific. Yet those details can intensify tenderness rather than cancel it.
Objects perform a parallel function. Clothes, houses, art, appliances, taxidermy, shopping bags, furniture, food, and gifts constantly reveal what characters want others to think about them. Material taste becomes biography.
Sedaris is especially good at allowing an object to begin as a joke and end as emotional evidence. A house becomes a childhood fantasy of status. A strange outfit becomes evidence of sibling continuity. A stuffed animal becomes evidence of a relationship tolerant enough to survive incompatible tastes. A shirt taken from Lou’s closet in “Unbuttoned” carries the smell of his house into the family’s dinner.
The result is a world in which emotion rarely arrives in purified form. Love attaches to ridiculous objects; grief appears beside bodily comedy; vanity survives moral insight; dead animals can be disturbing and aesthetically fascinating at once. Sedaris’s materialism, in the literal sense of attention to physical things, keeps his abstractions grounded.
How Sedaris’s Comedy Works
Sedaris’s reputation rests on comic observation, but the collection shows that observation alone is not enough. The writing depends on structure: what information appears first, what is withheld, when the narrator becomes implicated, how dialogue changes the power of a scene, and where the piece ends.
One of his most reliable techniques is escalation. “Christmas Means Giving” begins with recognizable suburban competition and pushes it until people destroy their bodies through competitive charity. The premise works because every step follows the same emotional logic as the first. The events become impossible while the motivation remains consistent.
The fictional monologues use dramatic irony. Glen, Ronda, Thaddeus Bristol, and other speakers believe they are controlling the reader’s interpretation. Sedaris gives them enough specificity to destroy that control. The more they explain, the less credible their self-image becomes.
In memoir, the technique often changes from unreliable speaker to strategically delayed self-implication. Sedaris starts by making another person interesting or ridiculous, encourages the reader to share his judgment, and then introduces a detail that makes his own behavior equally questionable. “Us and Them” is almost a model of the form.
Dialogue matters because it allows relatives to resist the narrator’s authority. Paul’s language immediately establishes a personality Sedaris could not create through neutral description. Hugh’s responses often puncture David’s enthusiasms. Amy, Lisa, Lou, and Sharon remain memorable because they say things the essayist cannot entirely domesticate into exposition.
Sedaris also has an unusually strong ear for lists. Accumulation allows him to take a premise through several variations without stopping for explanation. A sequence of objects, insults, purchases, customs, complaints, or behaviors establishes both rhythm and social world.
Specificity keeps those lists alive. The comedy rarely depends on saying that a person looks strange or owns too much. Sedaris describes the particular object, garment, food, bodily gesture, or phrase that makes the strangeness visible. General judgment is converted into an image.
Bathos—the sudden descent from elevated feeling into something trivial, bodily, commercial, or ridiculous—is another central mechanism. A meditation on history becomes real-estate desire. Family grief shares space with shopping or jokes. A father’s physical decline is followed by fascination with a naked stranger. The fall in register prevents emotion from hardening into solemnity.
The endings are especially important. Sedaris frequently closes not by stating what the essay means but by adding one final image that rearranges the meaning. Understanding the French teacher’s insult becomes linguistic triumph. Paul’s declaration that Lou is his best friend changes decades of apparent conflict. The naked woman at the end of “Unbuttoned” turns adult siblings back into excited children.
This structure helps explain why the collection’s origin as an audio-oriented project matters. Sedaris told WBUR that he selected pieces he still enjoyed reading aloud, and many of the choices reward performance. They have clear voices, rhythmic repetition, carefully timed revelations, and endings whose force depends on the listener remembering the emotional position established minutes earlier.
His sentences also tend to remain conversational even when highly engineered. The narrator sounds as though he is telling a story across a table, but the apparent casualness conceals extensive shaping. Digressions usually return. A ridiculous detail introduced for humor often acquires thematic weight later.
The risk of this technique is that everything can become material. Grief, poverty, disability, addiction, prejudice, death, family privacy, political disagreement, and strangers’ embarrassment may all be subjected to the same comic attention as a bad outfit or absurd greeting card. Sedaris’s mature work becomes more compelling when the structure acknowledges that danger rather than assuming comic precision automatically justifies its target.
From Big Premises to Small Observations
The retrospective becomes most interesting when read as evidence of artistic development. Sedaris himself distinguishes between earlier essays built around large, dramatic premises and later work drawn from increasingly small observations. The difference can be seen directly across the collection.
Much of the early fiction begins with a concept that can be summarized before the story starts: a self-pitying newsletter writer, an adult critic reviewing children’s Christmas plays, neighbors competing through generosity, greeting cards for grotesquely specific emotional situations, citizens offering absurd plans for government money. The pleasure lies in watching Sedaris exhaust the premise.
These pieces often create a sealed comic machine. Once the reader understands Glen or Thaddeus Bristol, the entertainment comes from variation and escalation. The narrators do not need deep psychological transformation because their refusal to transform is the point.
The later essays more often begin without such a machine. A swim leads to a memory of paternal approval. A kookaburra and a dinner conversation lead to questions about sacrificing family for work. A shopping trip becomes an essay about sibling identity. Waiting for Hugh to laugh at a manuscript opens into alcoholism and grief. Visiting an ailing father produces a belated resolution to a lifelong struggle for recognition.
The narrative engine is therefore discovery rather than execution. Sedaris does not appear to know, at least at the level of the storytelling persona, exactly where the anecdote will lead. Meaning accumulates through association.
That change should not be confused with a move from comedy to seriousness. “Unbuttoned” is filled with jokes, obscenity, bodily indignity, petty judgments, and an ending built around voyeuristic family delight. The difference is that comedy now shares the page with emotional consequences it does not erase.
Contemporary critics noticed this developmental effect. A roundup of reviews collected by Book Marks shows several reviewers responding to the way juxtaposition reveals Sedaris changing across decades. The retrospective allows older modes and newer modes to critique one another.
Early fictional pieces demonstrate how effectively Sedaris can expose other people through voice. Later memoir shows him learning to place his own persona inside the same machinery. Once that happens, the reader no longer receives a stable satirist standing outside the world. The satirist becomes another character whose judgments require judgment.
The evolution also affects emotional scale. A large premise tells readers where the joke is. A small observation allows significance to emerge gradually. The final pieces can therefore move among humor, anger, regret, love, guilt, and grief without announcing a change of genre.
This is one reason The Best of Me works better as a retrospective than as a simple sampler. The weaker and stranger early experiments have contextual value because they show where techniques came from. A reader can see the unreliable fictional monologue evolve into autobiographical self-indictment and the extravagant premise evolve into the carefully observed ordinary moment.
Sedaris has not become less judgmental with age. If anything, the observational machinery is sharper. What changes is the number of directions in which judgment travels.
The Ending Explained: Why “Unbuttoned” Closes the Collection
“Unbuttoned,” which first appeared in The New Yorker before the book’s publication, is an unusually effective final selection because it gathers themes that the retrospective has been developing for hundreds of pages without turning them into a formal conclusion. Family, bodily indignity, aging, judgment, memory, paternal approval, sibling difference, death, and comedy all converge.
Literally, the essay places Sedaris beside his severely weakened father. Lou can no longer inhabit the identity through which he judged other people. He is physically dependent, surrounded by medical equipment and assistance, and aware of how dramatically his condition has changed.
David responds with characteristic irreverence. He corrects his father, jokes about his condition, notices unflattering details, and continues litigating their old relationship even when death feels close. The scene avoids the familiar literary transformation in which approaching death instantly purifies a difficult parent-child relationship.
Lou’s acknowledgment of David’s accomplishments therefore matters because it arrives inside unresolved history. He does not become a different father, and David does not forget decades of resentment. The recognition is valuable precisely because it is late, incomplete, and open to interpretation.
Sedaris decides to accept it rather than keep demanding a more perfect version. That choice resolves one of the collection’s longest emotional threads. “Memory Laps” showed the child trying to win under his father’s gaze; “Unbuttoned” shows the old son deciding that the contest can finally end.
Paul supplies another resolution. His statement that Lou is his best friend reveals a form of filial love that David and the sisters have often misread because its language sounds hostile. The family has spent decades interpreting Paul’s profanity as aggression, yet he has maintained a bond with Lou that may be less psychologically burdened than theirs.
Then the essay leaves the father and goes to dinner. That movement is important. Life does not stop at the bedside because the family still has to eat, talk, plan, gossip, and negotiate the practical future.
The naked woman across from the restaurant completes the collection without solemnity. Amy points her out, the siblings crowd together, whisper, stare, and marvel. Their reaction sounds almost exactly like children encountering something forbidden and astonishing.
The body has changed meaning one final time. Lou’s body has represented mortality, dependency, and humiliation. The stranger’s body becomes absurd spectacle. The collection passes from death anxiety back into curiosity.
That ending does not deny loss. Sharon remains dead, Tiffany remains absent, Lou remains gravely diminished, and none of the siblings can return to childhood. What survives is the relational pattern that childhood created.
This is why “Unbuttoned” does more than conclude one essay. It gives the retrospective its final definition of family. People age out of their original roles physically, but the old constellation can reappear the moment they are together. A father can become dependent, children can enter their sixties, and one ridiculous sight can still activate the ancient sibling chorus.
Critical Review: What The Best of Me Achieves—and Where It Falls Short
A retrospective should be judged differently from a new, unified collection. Its questions are not only whether the individual pieces succeed but whether the selections justify being gathered again, whether their arrangement produces new understanding, whether the author’s self-curation reveals or distorts a career, and whether older material continues to work when removed from its original moment.
The Best of Me succeeds most strongly when juxtaposition creates meanings that individual essays could not produce alone. The book allows readers to watch Sedaris’s comic techniques persist while his subjects and moral positioning change. It is therefore both sampler and inadvertent artistic autobiography.
What the Collection Does Exceptionally Well
The first major achievement is comic control. Sedaris understands how long a premise can be extended before it exhausts itself, how a detail can be withheld until it changes a scene, and how a final sentence or image can alter the reader’s judgment without requiring an explanatory moral.
His fictional voices remain among the clearest demonstrations of that control. Glen, Ronda, Thaddeus Bristol, and the other invented speakers are funny because Sedaris rarely interrupts to announce the joke. Their language convicts them.
The memoiristic narrator becomes more interesting because he inherits the same technique. Sedaris increasingly constructs “David Sedaris” as another unreliable or at least compromised consciousness. Readers learn to expect that the person he finds ridiculous may not remain the only target.
That self-implication gives the family writing unusual durability. Sedaris does not need to pretend that his relatives are lovable in conventional ways. Lou can be infuriating, Sharon can be alcoholic, Paul can be obscene, siblings can exploit and judge one another, and Hugh can be irritated or baffled. Affection emerges through continuity rather than idealization.
The sibling material is particularly strong because the family accumulates across essays. A person introduced through one comic trait can become different decades later. Paul changes from foul-mouthed younger brother into the son most devoted to Lou. Tiffany changes from one of six children into an absence around which the surviving family reorganizes itself.
Sedaris is also unusually effective at combining emotional seriousness with anti-sentimental detail. “Now We Are Five,” “Why Aren’t You Laughing?,” “The Spirit World,” and “Unbuttoned” are moving because grief never cleans the world up. Bodies remain embarrassing, family members remain funny, resentments remain available, and shopping or restaurant gossip can coexist with death.
This resistance to emotional purification is one of the collection’s greatest strengths. Many memoirists move toward grief by increasing solemnity. Sedaris often moves toward grief while maintaining the same appetite for grotesque detail that he uses everywhere else.
The book also works well as an introduction for readers who know only the public Sedaris persona. Its range is wider than the stereotype of the urbane essayist reporting on strange relatives. The fictions demonstrate his interest in constructed voice, while the animal stories show how readily he can move from social satire into fable.
The language and travel pieces remain accessible because they dramatize cultural estrangement through concrete situations. A French classroom, medical waiting room, Dutch holiday tradition, Japanese store, Australian meal, or airport becomes enough to destabilize the narrator’s sense that his own assumptions are universal.
Most importantly, the retrospective reveals development without requiring Sedaris to announce a grand theory of himself. Several contemporary professional reviews collected by Book Marks responded to this sense that the selected pieces show a writer becoming more intimate and more complicated over time. The collection earns that interpretation because readers can see the change rather than merely being told about it.
Where the Selection and Humor Are More Uneven
The title inevitably creates an expectation the book cannot objectively satisfy. No author-selected “best of” can establish that these are definitively the strongest pieces in a career. Sedaris himself makes the subjectivity obvious by omitting “Santaland Diaries,” perhaps his most culturally recognizable essay, because fame was not his selection criterion.
That makes the book more personal but also less canonical. A newcomer could reasonably finish The Best of Me without encountering pieces another reader considers indispensable. The volume is best understood as Sedaris’s preferred retrospective rather than a neutral anthology of consensus masterpieces.
The shorter early fictions are also uneven beside the mature memoir. Pieces such as “Card Wired,” “Girl Crazy,” or “How to Spend the Budget Surplus” can be inventive and sharply executed without carrying the emotional or structural richness of “Repeat After Me,” “Laugh, Kookaburra,” “Now We Are Five,” or “Unbuttoned.” Their inclusion is valuable partly because they show Sedaris experimenting with forms he later develops more fully.
Some older humor raises harder questions about who gets made ridiculous. Contemporary criticism has specifically pointed to pieces such as “Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol,” “The Understudy,” and “The Girl Next Door” when discussing social, racial, class, or ethical discomfort in the earlier work. Those objections should not be dismissed simply by saying that satire is supposed to offend.
The important distinction is between target and collateral subject. “Front Row Center” clearly constructs the critic’s cruelty as the joke, even though children are described harshly. An essay such as “The Girl Next Door” is less easily insulated because a real vulnerable child remains inside a story controlled by a successful adult writer looking backward from a position of much greater power.
Sedaris’s self-indictment improves such work because it prevents the narrator from occupying unquestioned moral superiority. It does not automatically neutralize every representation. Readers are entitled to ask whether awareness of one’s own snobbery changes the impact on the person described.
The mixture of fiction and memoir can also create confusion. The book identifies fictional pieces, but readers moving rapidly through forty-six selections may not continually remember which speaker is invented. That matters most in pieces built around extreme prejudice or authoritarian rhetoric, where attributing a fictional persona directly to Sedaris would collapse the satire.
His cultural observations require similar care. Sedaris is a comic traveler, not a comparative sociologist. Essays about French medicine, Dutch traditions, national habits, language learning, or political behavior derive power from anecdote and personal perception. They become weaker if treated as factual generalizations beyond the experiences actually described.
The collection’s family focus can also create a peculiar asymmetry. Because Sedaris controls the page, relatives sometimes become known primarily through moments he considers narratively useful. “Repeat After Me” acknowledges this problem brilliantly, but acknowledgment cannot remove it from the rest of the book.
Still, these limitations rarely destroy the central project. They are partly what makes the retrospective worth analyzing. A collection spanning decades should expose changes in social assumptions, technique, moral awareness, and reader tolerance. If every early piece felt identical to the late work, the career portrait would be much less interesting.
Who Should Read It and What It Offers Now
For a first-time Sedaris reader, The Best of Me is an unusually effective entry point as long as it is understood as self-curation rather than definitive canon. It displays the major modes of his writing: unreliable comic fiction, memoir, family narrative, travel observation, social satire, animal fable, and the later essays in which humor operates beside grief.
Readers interested in literary humor will find a practical education in comic construction. Sedaris demonstrates how voice can expose character, how specificity creates humor, how escalation remains believable when motivation stays consistent, and how an ending can reframe an entire essay.
Readers interested in memoir may find the ethical questions even more valuable than the comedy. “Repeat After Me,” “The Girl Next Door,” “Loggerheads,” “The Spirit World,” and the family essays collectively ask what happens when memory becomes property. Sedaris does not solve that problem, which is one reason the work remains useful.
Longtime readers may benefit most from the retrospective structure. Familiar pieces acquire new meaning when positioned beside later material. “You Can’t Kill the Rooster” becomes richer after “Unbuttoned”; the early unreliable narrators illuminate the self-implicating memoir voice; comic animals prepare for later encounters with actual suffering and death.
Readers who need humor to be morally reassuring may find Sedaris difficult. His work includes obscenity, prejudice, cruel thoughts, class snobbery, bodily disgust, animal harm, addiction, suicide, and jokes built from experiences many writers would approach more reverently. He rarely guarantees that recognizing cruelty will produce redemption.
Those qualities are not incidental to the book’s achievement. Sedaris’s distinctive territory is the place where perception outruns virtue. His narrators can see exactly what is ridiculous about another person while remaining unable to escape their own ridiculousness.
That is why the late work carries more weight than a simple shift toward “serious subjects” would suggest. Sedaris does not become important by abandoning the comic machinery of the early pieces. He becomes more interesting by turning that machinery inward and allowing it to operate even when the subjects are people he loves.
The Best of Me is therefore most successful not as proof that these forty-six pieces are objectively David Sedaris’s greatest writings, but as a self-portrait assembled from the work he chose to keep close. Its range shows the satirist who can invent a monstrous voice, the memoirist who can make a humiliating social encounter structurally perfect, and the family writer who increasingly understands that observation creates obligations as well as jokes.
By the time the siblings stand outside a restaurant in “Unbuttoned,” amazed by a naked stranger as their father declines nearby, the retrospective has arrived at an image that would have been impossible to engineer as a neat moral. These adults have lost people, harmed people, forgiven some things, failed to resolve others, and grown old enough to recognize how little time remains. Yet put them together in front of something absurd and their childhood selves return at once.
That final moment clarifies what Sedaris’s best work has been doing throughout the collection. He watches people mercilessly, including himself, because the ridiculous and the painful are not separate categories in his world. Family members can be infuriating and beloved, grief can coexist with gossip, shame can become comedy without disappearing, and a person can understand his own failings without being cured of them. The Best of Me remains worth reading because Sedaris does not ask humor to make human beings better than they are; he asks it to make them visible.
Last Updated on September 21, 2026 by Aseem Gupta