The Best of Me - David Sedaris

I just finished (most of) The Best of Me by David Sedaris.

Oh, man! This guy writes such amazing personal essays.

Sedaris so good at taking seemingly disparate meaningless events in life, cramming them together into a single story and giving them meaning. Mostly everything is pretty unserious but it’s him letting us in to moments that had a role in his development as a human. These are the stories that we all forget about in our own history, but that we find ourselves later in life trying to unroot with therapy or positive affirmations.

It’s possible I’ve read Sedaris before — I certainly know the name — but if I have, I have no recollection of feeling so impressed and moved by his stories.

This is an anthology of his best writing over his career. It includes stories you’ve heard of like Me Talk Pretty One Day and others you haven’t. Because it’s an anthology don’t expect every story to hit hard but nothing is bad.

You gotta read this book

Maybe this goes for all Sedaris books, but they are great bedside table books. You don’t need to be actively engaged with them like an epic novel. It’s a book for reading between other books. Or for when you need a palate cleanser or some fresh air from whatever else you might be reading. (This book saved me when I needed a break from reading about the despicable banana industry in The Fish That Ate The Whale.) You can dip in, get a hit of tightly structured writing, maybe a couple chuckles, and then dip back out.

Caveat: if you have never read Sedaris before, I wouldn’t start with this book. Not because it’s not great, but because it’s an anthology. Like other anthologies, I feel like it’s better for pre-existing fans. Some of the pieces seem like very deep cuts from his archive. They are a little stale for being decades old and the flow of the book as a whole is disjointed because of it. But again, it’s an anthology, so it’s supposed to be that way.