Good Reads: From Two Of The Best
What’s old is new again, as David Sedaris and Joan Didion, arguably two of the most recognizable essayists, have published new books within weeks of each other: Sedaris’s “The Best Of Me,” released in November, and Didion’s “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” was published this month.
Their latest books are new collections of their previous works. Each author famously draws extensively from their personal lives to illuminate their topics in unexpected ways. They share similar sentiments about their writing. Didion states, “Writers are always selling somebody out,” and Sedaris comments, “As a writer, you’re sort of exploiting everybody you come into contact with.” As readers, we get to enjoy the results.
“The Best Of Me”
I’ve read every Sedaris book. Perhaps “The Best of Me” didn’t need to be on my reading list, but if you’re not familiar with his work, it should be on yours. He’s been called “brilliant,” “original,” and “the funniest man alive.”
This 25-year career-spanning collection of his essays conveniently handpicks works selected by the author. The book is not so much his “greatest hits” but has been likened to a film’s director’s cut, whereby Sedaris has chosen the stories that he felt were “most memorable and have weight.”
The essays and short stories chronicle his life phases, travels, and personal encounters, with cynical wit. In the essay, “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, he recounts the challenge of trying to learn French in Paris from a hostile teacher. I laughed out loud at his questionable pride when he finally fully understands her, as she singles him out in class to say, “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.”
He grapples with themes of family and love under unconventional conditions. His complicated family relationships are fodder for darkly honest stories that manage to find humor in some of life’s painful circumstances.
In “Memory Laps”, he’s an eleven-year-old average swimmer who is forced by his father, whom he could never please, to don an orange speedo, and swim through a chlorine “chemical bath” for the club swim team. In other essays, he remembers his alcoholic mother fondly by “the rattle of ice cubes.” And, in “Now We Are Five”, he shares the poignant family aftermath of a sibling who commits suicide.
Frankly, you may find some of his unhinged story characters a little too bizarre, but maybe not surprising, as he freely admits of himself, “as far as my family is concerned, I’m still the one most likely to set your house on fire.”
“Let Me Tell You What I Mean”
The first Joan Didion writing I read was her 2005, National Book Award-winning, “The Year of Magical Thinking.” Written late in her career about the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, it was critically acclaimed as the definitive book on mourning and loss.
At 86 years old, her legendary career in journalism, writing features and essays for leading magazines, made her a “voice of her generation” and one of the most important writers of her time.
Fans of Didion are looking forward to the soon-to-be-released “Let Me Tell You What I Mean.” This “never before published-together” collection of twelve essays from 1968 to 2000, is a slim volume that showcases her perceptive, signature writing.
In her 1968 essay “On Being Unchosen By The College of One’s Choice”, she laments, “getting into college has become an ugly business.” The 2019 college admission scandal set off by the FBI investigation, “Operation Varsity Blues,” corroborates how pertinent that sentiment still is today.
A rejection letter from the admissions director asserting, “[the committee is] unable to take favorable action upon your application to Stanford University,” sent her fleeing to her room to sob privately. When she tells her father, he shrugs and offers her a drink. Looking back, she questions the pressures and expectations of others, and asks herself (and us) whose script was she trying to follow anyway?
While in “Everywoman.com” written 20 years ago, Didion unexpectedly doesn’t criticize Martha Stewart’s “feminine domesticity”, an unattainable lifestyle she sells to women, she recognizes that her story “is one that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it threatened men.”
She credits Stewart with drive, business acumen, and building an empire in her name. In 2020, Stewart stays relevant by programming with Snoop Dogg and launching a line of CBD edible products. Even back then, Didion applauded Stewart’s female power as “the woman who sits down at the table with men, and still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”
Didion’s essays are prescient, thought provoking, and intelligently rendered. As narrative non-fiction writers, she, and Sedaris, write true stories in the style of fiction. Their essays are to be admired for their revealing, observational skill. These new books are worthwhile introductions to their work, and some of the best, from two of the best.
