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4.1 AVERAGE
4.1 AVERAGE
emotional
funny
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
funny
fast-paced
funny
hopeful
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Suicide, Medical content, Suicide attempt
Moderate: Grief
David always makes me laugh.
His partner seems farty so I'd be interested in seeing their dynamic in person. Opposites attract I guess.
Naming the beach house...
And the flasher...
Amusing stuff.
His partner seems farty so I'd be interested in seeing their dynamic in person. Opposites attract I guess.
Naming the beach house...
And the flasher...
Amusing stuff.
emotional
funny
fast-paced
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
lighthearted
medium-paced
Oh how I love David Sedaris...
As David Sedaris gets older, his wit remains just as caustic (and hilarious), but he grows more reflective and even more searingly honest. In this group, he grapples with aging (his and that of his siblings, as well as his ninety-something father), his late mother's alcoholism, and the suicide of his sister Tiffany. It's as poignant and funny as you'd expect it to be, with a layer of philosophical rumination that just makes his writing deeper and more powerful. My heart aches for his losses, but delights in the joy he finds in the simplest of moments - whether it's a conversation with a cab driver or with a fox in his backyard. I'm already dying to read his next book and hope he finds happiness in writing it.
funny
reflective
fast-paced
emotional
funny
medium-paced
Quotes:
- Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting.
- Our vacation over, now there’d be nothing to live for until Christmas. My life is much fuller than it was back then, yet this return felt no different.
- Walking twenty-five miles, or even running up the stairs and back, suddenly seemed pointless, since without the steps being counted and registered, what use were they?
- a man across the aisle tried to open his overhead bin. It was stuck for some reason and he pounded on it, saying to anyone who would listen, “This is like Obamacare: broken.” Several of the passengers around me laughed, and I noted their faces, vowing that in the event of a crisis, I would not help lead them to an emergency exit. <i>You people are on your own</i>, I thought, knowing that if anything bad <i>did</i> happen, it would likely be one of them who’d save me. It would be just my luck. I had passed judgment, so fate would force me to eat my words.
- At what point had I realized that class couldn’t save you, that addiction or mental illness didn’t care whether you’d taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe?
- “Lisa’s the master. I left her at a Starbucks for ninety seconds last year, and when I returned the woman behind the counter was saying to her, ‘My gynecologist told me that exact same thing.’”
- Is it my fault that the good times fade to nothing while the bad ones burn forever bright? Memory aside, the negative just makes for a better story: the plane was delayed, an infection set in, outlaws arrived and reduced the schoolhouse to ashes. Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.
- I just wanted to get a rise out of her, to feel some kind of pulse. I knew that the young woman had a life. She’d gone to school somewhere. She had friends. I didn’t need a fifteen-minute conversation, just some human interaction. It can be had, and easily: a gesture, a joke, something that says, “I live in this world too.” I think of it as a switch that turns someone from a profession to a person, and it works both ways. “I’m not just a vehicle for my wallet!” I sometimes want to scream.
- … to tap into the comfort and outrage that only my family can provide…
- Staring at the ceiling, wide-awake, I suddenly think of Cher and realize that what I’m feeling, she’s feeling as well. So are millions of other people, of course: Hugh, my sisters, all my friends except for the conspiracy theorist. Oddly, it’s this woman I’ve never met or even seen in person who brings me comfort. The next morning I wander the city in a daze, my eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, thinking, <i>I’m not alone. I’ve got Cher.</i>
- Regardless of whether you voted for him, I thought the president-elect’s identity as a despicable human being was something we could all agree on. I mean, he pretty much ran on it.
- “She said she’d misunderstood you and that lately she’s been working on herself.”
“You have to work on yourself after you’re dead?” I asked. It seemed a bit much, like having to continue a diet or your participation in AA. I thought that death let you off the hook when it came to certain things, that it somehow purified you.
- Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting.
- Our vacation over, now there’d be nothing to live for until Christmas. My life is much fuller than it was back then, yet this return felt no different.
- Walking twenty-five miles, or even running up the stairs and back, suddenly seemed pointless, since without the steps being counted and registered, what use were they?
- a man across the aisle tried to open his overhead bin. It was stuck for some reason and he pounded on it, saying to anyone who would listen, “This is like Obamacare: broken.” Several of the passengers around me laughed, and I noted their faces, vowing that in the event of a crisis, I would not help lead them to an emergency exit. <i>You people are on your own</i>, I thought, knowing that if anything bad <i>did</i> happen, it would likely be one of them who’d save me. It would be just my luck. I had passed judgment, so fate would force me to eat my words.
- At what point had I realized that class couldn’t save you, that addiction or mental illness didn’t care whether you’d taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe?
- “Lisa’s the master. I left her at a Starbucks for ninety seconds last year, and when I returned the woman behind the counter was saying to her, ‘My gynecologist told me that exact same thing.’”
- Is it my fault that the good times fade to nothing while the bad ones burn forever bright? Memory aside, the negative just makes for a better story: the plane was delayed, an infection set in, outlaws arrived and reduced the schoolhouse to ashes. Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.
- I just wanted to get a rise out of her, to feel some kind of pulse. I knew that the young woman had a life. She’d gone to school somewhere. She had friends. I didn’t need a fifteen-minute conversation, just some human interaction. It can be had, and easily: a gesture, a joke, something that says, “I live in this world too.” I think of it as a switch that turns someone from a profession to a person, and it works both ways. “I’m not just a vehicle for my wallet!” I sometimes want to scream.
- … to tap into the comfort and outrage that only my family can provide…
- Staring at the ceiling, wide-awake, I suddenly think of Cher and realize that what I’m feeling, she’s feeling as well. So are millions of other people, of course: Hugh, my sisters, all my friends except for the conspiracy theorist. Oddly, it’s this woman I’ve never met or even seen in person who brings me comfort. The next morning I wander the city in a daze, my eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, thinking, <i>I’m not alone. I’ve got Cher.</i>
- Regardless of whether you voted for him, I thought the president-elect’s identity as a despicable human being was something we could all agree on. I mean, he pretty much ran on it.
- “She said she’d misunderstood you and that lately she’s been working on herself.”
“You have to work on yourself after you’re dead?” I asked. It seemed a bit much, like having to continue a diet or your participation in AA. I thought that death let you off the hook when it came to certain things, that it somehow purified you.