David Sedaris - The Best of Me

Copyright 2020 by David Sedaris
Cover design by Jamie Keenan
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First ebook edition: November 2020

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Barrel Fever and Discontents: Glens Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 2; Holidays on Ice: Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol, Christmas Means Giving; Naked: The Incomplete Quad; Me Talk Pretty One Day and Esquire: You Cant Kill the Rooster, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Jesus Shaves; Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and The New Yorker: Us and Them, Let It Snow, The Ship Shape, The Girl Next Door, Possession, Nuit of the Living Dead; Dress Your Family and Esquire: Repeat After Me, Six to Eight Black Men; When You Are Engulfed in Flames and The New Yorker: The Understudy, In the Waiting Room, Solution to Saturdays Puzzle; Solution to Saturdays Puzzle also appeared in The Best American Travel Writing2006; When You Are Engulfed and GQ: Town and Country; Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: The Motherless Bear, The Faithful Setter; acknowledgment is made to Public Radio Internationals This American Life, on which The Cat and the Baboon was originally broadcast in a slightly different form; Lets Explore Diabetes with Owls: Think Differenter; Lets Explore and The New Yorker: Dentists Without Borders, Memory Laps, Loggerheads, Easy, Tiger, Laugh, Kookaburra, A Guy Walks into a Bar Car, Standing By, Understanding Understanding Owls; A Guy Walks into a Bar Car also appeared in The Best American Essays 2010 and The Best American Travel Writing 2010;Lets Explore and GQ: Just a Quick E-mail; Lets Explore and Prospect: If I Ruled the World; Lets Explore and Esquire: Dog Days; Calypso: A House Divided; Calypso and The New Yorker: Now We Are Five, The Perfect Fit, Leviathan, A Modest Proposal, Why Arent You Laughing?; Calypso and The Paris Review: The Spirit World; The New Yorker: Girl Crazy, Card Wired, How to Spend the Budget Surplus, Undecided, Unbuttoned.

The following were published as fiction: Glens Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3,
No. 2, Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol, Christmas Means Giving, Girl Crazy, Card Wired, How to Spend the Budget Surplus, Dog Days, The Cat and the Baboon, The Motherless Bear, The Faithful Setter, Think Differenter, If I Ruled the World, Just a Quick E-mail.

ISBN 978-0-316-62825-9

E3-20201006-DA-NF-ORI

For my brother, Paul

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Im not the sort of person who goes around feeling good about himself. I have my days, dont get me wrong, but any confidence I possess, especially in regard to my writing, was planted and nurtured by someone elsefirst a teacher, then later an agent or editor. Hey, he or she would say, this is pretty good.

Really? This was my cheap way of getting them to say it again. Youre not just telling me that because you feel sorry for me?

YesI mean, no. I really like it!

Still, I never quite believed them.

What lifted me up was writing for The New Yorker. While this had always been a fantasy of mine, I did nothing to nudge it along. Id always heard that if the magazine wanted you, theyd find you, and thats exactly what happened. I started my relationship with them in 1995, when an editor phoned and asked if I might write a Shouts & Murmurs piece on then-president Bill Clintons welfare reform proposal. I was given one day to complete it, and when I was told that it would run in the next weeks issue, something inside me changed. It wasnt seismic, like an earthquake, but more like a medium-size boulder that had shifted a little. Nevertheless, I felt it. When the magazine came out, I opened it to my piece, arranged it just so on the kitchen table, and strolled past it, wanting my younger, twenty-year-old self to see his name at the top of the page.

Wait a minute.Is thatme? In The New Yorker? Thirty-nine years it had taken the magazine to notice me. Good thing I wasnt in any rush.

If you read an essay in Esquire and dont like it, there could be something wrong with the essay. If its in The New Yorker, on the other hand, and you dont like it, theres something wrong with you. That said, youre never going to please everyone. Its hard to think of a single entry in this book that didnt generate a complaint of one sort or another. And it could be anythingHow dare you suggest French dentists are better than American ones! What sort of monster wont swap seats on a plane? Many were angry that Id inadvertently killed a couple of sea turtles. Granted, that was bad, but I was a child at the time, and dont you have to eventually forgive someone for what he did when he was twelve?

There is literally nothing you can print anymore that isnt going to generate a negative response. This, I believe, was brought on by the Internet. It used to be that youd write a letter of complaint, then read it over, wondering, Is this really worth a twenty-five-cent stamp? With the advent of email, complaining became free. Thus, people who were maybe a tiny bit offended could, at no cost whatsoever, let you know that they were NEVER GOING TO BUY ANY OF YOUR BOOKS EVER AGAIN!!!!

They always take the scorched-earth policy for some reason. Of all the entries in this book, the one that generated the most anger was The Motherless Bear. Oh, the mail I got. How dare you torture animals like this!

Its a fictional story, I wrote back to everyone who complained. The giveaway is that the title character speaks English and feels sorry for herself. Bears dont do that in real life.

That wasnt enough for a woman in England. I urge you not to mock these intelligent and sentient creatures, she wrote, demanding that I atone by involving myself with the two bear-rescue organizations she listed at the bottom of her letter.

Just as we can never really tell what our own breath smells like, I will never know if I would like my writing. If I wasnt myself, and someone sent me one of my essay collections, would I recommend it to friends? Would I stop reading it after a dozen or so pages? Theres so much that goes into a decision like that. How many times have I dismissed something just because a person I didnt approve of found it enjoyable? Or maybe I decided it was too popular. Thats the sort of snobbery that kept my younger self slogging through books I honestly had no interest in, the sorts Id announce had taken me six months to finish but were only two hundred pages long. If something is written in your native language and its taking you