ESSAYS
Victoria Segal
Happy-Go-Lucky
by David Sedaris
Little, Brown £18.99 pp272
There is a moment in
David Sedaris’s latest essay
collection when he discovers
his dad, Lou, has just been
crushed by the grandfather
clock, nicknamed Father
Time, that accompanied him
into his assisted living facility.
“When you’re ninety-five and
Father Time literally knocks
you to the ground,” Sedaris
later says to his partner, Hugh,
“don’t you think he’s maybe
trying to tell you something?”
Happy-Go-Lucky darkens
his writing further. While
there are comic graduate
addresses, and a misfire about
being chased by his French
neighbour’s adolescent
grandson, it is Lou who
dominates this book. His
decline is threaded through
the collection, his death
finally forcing Sedaris to
navigate orphanhood at 64.
Lady Marmalade, the most
disturbing essay, leaves you
wondering what else Sedaris
might now be forced — or free
— to explore. He describes
Lou’s deeply inappropriate
behaviour with his children:
Sedaris being summoned for
an intimate examination for
“piles”, or Lou’s request to
take “tasteful” toplessThe pendulum’s relentless
swing is heard throughout
Happy-Go-Lucky. Since his
1992 breakthrough Santaland
Diaries, an account of working
as a Macy’s Christmas elf,
Sedaris has been renowned
for hilarious stories of his
Greek-American family, his
various moral failings and a
rococo range of obsessions
(litter-picking, wax anatomical
models, Japanese fashion).
His previous book, 2018’s
Calypso, was tempered by
sadness, however: yes, he
fed his own lipoma to the
snapping turtles at his North
Carolina holiday home, yet
there was also sombre
reflection on his relationship
with his sister Tiffany, who
killed herself in 2013 aged 49.FICTION
Francesca Angelini
Nonfiction A Novel
by Julie Myerson
Corsair £16.99 pp288
In 2009 Julie Myerson
unleashed the Furies. She
published a memoir, The Lost
Child, detailing — and there
was a lot of detail — how her
eldest child Jake’s skunk
addiction led to her and her
husband kicking him out of
the family home. Jake, then 17,
sold his side of the story to a
tabloid, eloquently accusing
his mother of being addicted
to writing about her children.
Columnists were outraged at
her betrayal. Myerson had
committed a cardinal crime
against motherhood, according
to the gospel of Mumsnet.
Clearly this old wound has
been giving Myerson trouble.
Nonfiction is a comeback of
sorts. Set next to The Lost
Child, it reads as a justification
So what’s peculiar is how
unmoving Nonfiction is. The
main problem is that Myerson’s
prose is boiled down to the
point that all emotion has
evaporated, rather than been
distilled. The narrator says
she is sick of crying — but the
reader isn’t even close.
A significant strand is the
narrator’s midlife affair with an
ex-lover. This apparently isn’t
autobiographical. Maybe that’s
why it sticks out as deeply
unconvincing. Their meet-ups
are so banal I found myself
longing to get back to the
needles. Far more engaging is
the narrator’s relationship with
her mother. She is expertly
drawn, her unique cruelty
brought to life in spiteful
incident after spiteful incident
— she’s not, for instance,
above posting her daughter
her baby photos because she’s
having a clear-out of things
she doesn’t want any more.
Woven through all of
this are revealing, meta
conversations about the cost of
being a writer who chronicles
their most devastating
experiences no matter how
much they stand to lose by
describing them. It’s not so
much therapy, a writer
confides, but a compulsion to
come to an understanding of
sorts. Nonfiction is certainly
a bold two-finger salute to
Myerson’s attackers — you
can’t fault her bravery. But
it leaves you wondering
whether it was worth tearing
off the scab for this. cBOOKS
The toxic truth of David Sedaris’s ‘eccentric’ family
Addicted to
public pain
Julie Myerson’s memoir ruined relations
with her son — here’s her defence, in fiction
pictures of Sedaris’s elder
sister Lisa. As an adult, Tiffany
claimed her father sexually
abused her. “In the wake of
#MeToo, I know how brutal
this sounds,” Sedaris writes,
“but it was hard to believe
much of what our sister said.”
Sedaris has spent his career
branding his family as
eccentric — here, that
eccentricity becomes toxic,
very unfunny.
The pandemic, too, pushes
him from his well-established
Sedaris-world and into a
communal experience of
masks and lockdowns. In
Fresh-Caught Haddock he
writes about Black Lives
Matter, telling a terrible story
against himself in which he
mistook a film star’s wifefor his maid, before analysing
the mechanisms by which
well-meaning activism can
become defanged.
During the pandemic
Sedaris worried he would
never return to live readings.
It’s true Happy-Go-Lucky dusts
the edges of grumpy old
manhood, raising an eyebrow
at mobile phones, or young
people named after trees. Yet
even with this uneasy
collection Sedaris feels as if
he could still write his way out
of any crash. At his father’s
funeral, his sister Amy told
him off for taking notes during
the service. You might as well
rebuke a squirrel for emptying
a bird-feeder, he says: “The
squirrel and me — it’s in our
nature.” It’s what he does. ccircling back to the moments
when she feels she most badly
let down her daughter, a futile,
painful exercise.
As a stark, direct account
of the toll of addiction on
parents, much of this is well
handled. There’s no doubt
that the material is harrowing.
“I cannot think of a better
definition of parental agony,”
the narrator writes, “than to
be forced to turn away from
your own desperate child.”of her actions. Narrated by a
mother who, like Myerson, is
a writer with a considerable
backlist, it follows a married
couple’s struggles to deal with
their nameless only child’s
addiction to heroin — which is
what came next for Jake. And
there’s a lot of grappling with
the ethics of writing from life.
A legal foreword claiming that
any resemblance to real
persons is “coincidental”
effectively screams: “Alert —
heavy autofiction.”
The novel is addressed to
the narrator’s daughter in the
second person, and jumps
back and forth in time as the
narrator goes over her
daughter’s life of addiction.
It is a nightmarish cycle of
stealing, violence, overdosing,
breaking down, being barred
from home, trying to get clean.
Myerson’s narrator is taunted
by her daughter’s eye-opening
accounts of selling her body.
She and her husband lead a
“dead kind of life”: music,
cinema, socialising, everything
normal is gone. She can’t stopOld wounds Julie MyersonVICKI COUCHMANA couple deal
with their
child’s heroin
addiction
26 5 June 2022