Calypso

Families Are Made Of This

David Sedaris writes in a funny way about everyday things that most people won’t notice—like shops at the airport trying to sell you stuff you don’t need, but he can expertly blend humour with empathy and pathos when he writes about subjects like aging, depression, suicide. His family and long-time partner Hugh appear in many of the essays in Calpyso—pieces that are part fictional, and always engaging. 

His regular readers know about his large brood—there was his loving but alcoholic mother who died years ago, his old and tetchy father, who lives alone in a messy house, but won’t move out or accept help; there is a bunch of siblings, their spouses, a supersmart niece, and enduring memories of sister Tiffany, who committed suicide. (At some point on the book Sedaris confesses that he slammed the door on the troubled and troublesome Tiffany and never saw her again.)

Calypso, Sedaris’s tenth collection of story-essays has a lot more of his family in it; the joyous times spent in the amusingly named beach cottage, Sea Section, on the North Carolina coast, where the clan gathers regularly for holidays—the house that that Sedaris and Hugh purchased to fulfill the wish that,  “one day I would buy a beach house and it would be everyone’s, as long as they followed my draconian rules and never stopped thanking me for it”. There are anecdotes around the house—like the time his sister Lisa and he went for a walk on the beach and could not figure which of the near-identical sea front cottages was theirs.

Sedaris writes about getting obsessed with his fitness device and spending hours walking (“Before, once we’d eaten dinner, I was in for the evening. Now, though, as soon as I’m finished with the dishes, I walk to the pub and back, a distance of 3,895 steps”), and cleaning up trash on the way while he is out and about, so that a garbage truck is named after him. In another hilarious episode, a reader, who claims to be a doctor, removes a tumour under Sedaris’s skin, which he then collects to feed to a turtle.

If he writes with humour about his family's belief in ghosts, his sister's encounter with a psychic of his father's admiration of Trump, he can turn the smiles to tears when he writes about the shame of incontinence. There is a fine balance of light and darkness in Calypso to make it amusing as well as deeply poignant.

Calypso

By David Sedaris

Publisher: Little, Brown

Pages: 288