Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

This is my third and maybe final David Sedaris book that I'm going to listen to for a while. Not that I didn't enjoy them, because I did. They are especially funny to listen to, since he reads them and his voice is really distinctive and he does excellent accents for his siblings and places the emphasis on things so well (hopefully so, since he wrote these essays). Some of his essays were so funny I laughed out loud, and some were funny but also a mix of depressing. I feel like I should be able to explain it better, but he is so honest and up front about his family and his upbringing and the flaws in his family and himself that it makes me a little sad. He tells a story about when his dad said they would buy a beach home on the coast of North Carolina and how excited and happy his whole family was, but then his dad changed his mind and didn't want to spend the money on it and how disappointed all of the kids were and his mom. He tells it so well and I could feel all of their emotions, which makes it such a great story, but it was kind of gut-wrenching to sense all of their deep disappointment (especially the mom's).

I also couldn't listen to most of these stories without wondering how his family feels about how he portrays them. He doesn't just write about when they were kids in the seventies in North Carolina, but he writes about them today and seems like he exposes quite a lot about their lives and their relationships. He addresses this specifically in a few of his stories, but doesn't quite resolve it and I know that I definitely would not be happy if I were his sister and he were doing that to me. Mostly his essays expose more of his flaws and his realizations about himself, which he learns through his interactions with his sisters, but it still feels like a violation of privacy.