Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
2004
- section 8
- essays
- american humorous stories
- humorous stories, american
- literary criticism
- nonfiction
- humor
- family
- american short stories
- americans
The story
David Sedaris plays in the snow with his sisters. He goes on vacation with his family. He gets a job selling drinks. He attends his brother’s wedding. He mops his sister’s floor. He gives directions to a lost traveler. He eats a hamburger. He has his blood sugar tested. It all sounds so normal, doesn’t it? In his newest collection of essays, David Sedaris lifts the corner of ordinary life, revealing the absurdity teeming below its surface. His world is alive with obscure desires and hidden motives — a world where forgiveness is automatic and an argument can be the highest form of love. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is another unforgettable collection from one of the wittiest and most original writers at work today.
What it’s like
Dry, conversational sentences that sound like a funny friend talking across a kitchen table, with the comedy built from precise observation and sudden swerves into candor. The essays move in short, brisk bursts, each one a small domestic episode (a wedding, a shift at a drink stand, a blood sugar test) that tilts toward the absurd just as the reader settles in. The mood is wry and affectionate rather than cutting, with a steady undertow of loneliness and family bickering that never quite turns sad. It suits an afternoon with a mug of tea, a commute where you can dip in and out of a single piece, or an evening when you want to laugh quietly alone. The language is frank about bodies, sex, and bad habits, with plenty of profanity, but there is no real violence, and nothing here is frightening or graphic in a harsh way. The rhythm is quick and digressive, and the emotional register stays light even when a memory stings. It is for readers who enjoy observational humor, sharp dialogue, and the sense of being let in on a family's private oddities, and who want something amusing and unhurried rather than dramatic.
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