A bag full of my Benton House Book Sale purchases sits on a bench at the foot of my bed; the mouth of the bag yawns, and books peek out from the maw. I rise from bed in the morning and pass the bag, ignoring the books. I can almost hear the voice of Audrey II (“Little Shop Of Horrors”) moaning “Read me, Seymour,” until one day, my curiosity must be satisfied and the knothole face on the cover of David Sedaris’ book demands that I lift it, open it, and read it. When I finished “Calypso,” I wondered what Sedaris’ family members thought of his unsparing depiction of their affairs.
A few years ago, a reader told me that she felt that my columns were written from an “intensely personal” viewpoint. I write of the things that I observe, the people with whom I interact, and, as I wrote in “Intensely Personal” (Weekly View, January 2020) “the misery of my anger-blasted childhood.” I wrote of my sister, an award-winning writer and producer, who had 4 children by the age of 19, my youngest brother’s schizophrenic voices, and my mother’s climb from welfare to nurse, and descent into a chosen death. My eldest child used to be able to add to her family history by reading her father’s column: “Wait: You were engaged to someone before Mom?” But none of my published reminiscences reach the level of brutal — albeit humorous — disclosure as what Sedaris reveals. He writes of his grumpy 91-year-old father, a man he never felt close to, until the later years. There were four girls and two boys in the Sedaris family, and those six children were given the responsibility of finding their mother’s shoes, among other tasks.
The six Sedaris children were reduced by one when his troubled sister Tiffany committed suicide in May 2013. David’s remembrance of the last time that he saw her prior to that date was at the stage door of a theater where he was giving a reading. He was so disconnected from her that he had the security guard close the door in her face. “She was … someone else’s problem.”
When Sedaris’ doctor finds that he has a lipoma just below his ribcage, he asks to be given the mass when it has been excised from his body. He is denied the right to be able to take home the meat — “It is against federal law for me to give you anything I’ve removed from your body” — so he finds a woman in El Paso, Texas who claims to be a doctor, to cut the harmless fatty tumor from his body. Sedaris has a plan for the tumor, one that I will leave you to discover in the book, if you have not, already.
Sedaris’ vacations and shopping trips with his sisters are hilarious; he writes of Amy’s fascination with a carved anatomical representation and a clothing store in Japan. He lies on the beach beside his sister Gretchen, who is already “the burnished chestnut of a well-worn saddle,” and who will light a cigarette and “(take) a deep draw” before she expresses an opinion about something. It isn’t until the 9th chapter of the book that I discerned the origin of the title; it wasn’t until I sat down to write this that I figured out what a disfigured snapping turtle (oops!) had to do with a family’s history.
I cannot imagine what kind of peace a family must achieve to be comfortable with seeing itself in the raw and unfiltered way that Sedaris highlights his family’s affairs.
cjon3acd@att.net