David Sedaris - Naked

Why did I wait so long to read this book? Been on my list for years, finally decided to forego my usual desires to read 40s/50s Euro lit and delve into some contemporary memoirs. Rather than giving A-B-C event timelines, Sedaris focuses on specific events in his life and elaborates to the fullest extent on each one. Despite a brief internet search, I’m still unsure as to the actual validity of these stories, but as Tim O’Brien was the one who got me into literature, answering that question is the low man on this totem pole. Considering the imagination of Sedaris, it is not important if these are actual events. The meaning lies in digging out every piece of dark humor possible, from deceiving the world with a quadriplegic to getting high with his siblings while their mother sits alone on the cusp of death. The callousness of the protagonist can only be conveyed in a book titled Naked. No, his mother wasn’t the sweetest, but he recognizes his own naivety about his cold emotions without changing them. And he shares them. He lets us put on his X-ray specs by putting these words on pages between the covers. The back and forth between imagination (Chipped Beef) and straightforwardness (I Like Guys) creates a surreal landscape, populated by vulgar and awful people (C.O.G., Something for Everyone).

Of course, the point would be missed if we were to pass any judgment on these characters. What this book does is allow us to think of ourselves naked, to bring to our conscious the things we’re afraid to admit to anyone but ourselves. And this is where the book becomes most meaningful to me. I’ve become increasingly aware that I will never be a true writer. Writing involves such a strong foundation of honesty that I will never be able to achieve. As an internalizer, it’s difficult for me to express true feelings to anyone else and (amazingly) this difficulty is true for print as well. While I find no difficulty expressing my opinions on the work of others, why this book is great or why that band sucks or why I have so little interest in a lot of movies everyone clamors for, I view what I feel as so meaningless as to not even look at the map of that train line. And perhaps this is only a continuation of a path I’ve been following since high school, the rationalist vs. the empiricist, the big-picture of the world and the small timeframe that my life takes up. Either way, I will never write a Naked. I may write Winter Clothing, in which I continue to hide by never putting my Self out there. Playing it safe is dangerous territory for an aspiring writer. Alas, don’t expect me to quit my job and go play in the street.

Music: Braids – Set Pieces EP, Radar Eyes – S/T