Review: David Sedaris's "When You Are Engulfed in Flames"

and about writing on the off-chance that everything is going to make sense in the end

Anybody can like David Sedaris. I was certain of this once I finished LOL-ing through the opening essay It’s Catching, featuring people’s common fear of germs and David's total disregard for it, catching crabs from unwashed thrifted pants, a worm hatching from someone's mother's leg, and statistics of children being startled to death. Envision this: you fall asleep listening to the waves gently crashing onto shore and wake up to find that the sun is almost gone. You pick up the book and read a chapter. A chuckle escapes once every few lines, and everything feels lighter somehow.

David makes something out of the ordinary nothingness and makes you want to call him by his first name. I thought to myself that it must be nice to look at life through his lens, that in this mixed bag of family drama, travel adventures, romance, death, cringey teenage stories and cringey adult stories that he's chosen, he finds humor and manages to send us on a wild chase every time, letting every random ridiculous event unfold and then finishing on a shrewd remark, tying the end of the essay neatly back to the beginning.

I can't help but admire good prose that encapsulates the reader, and wonder whether I should try to write about my own life in all its hilarity. Perhaps if I word it well enough, everything too will start to make (at least literary) sense. I can see how UTIs, my comical inability to find a job, and the trivial tragedies of everyday life are funny. But about the way the only pro-democracy news agency in print in Hong Kong disappears overnight and the world just goes on turning, life remaining strangely normal - a friend borrows a beach mat from me, we eat huge ass burgers and I post a picture of it, we sing dumb shit rap songs and laugh about it - all I can think of now is how chaos is quiet and decay creeps up on you, that being why the terrible things happening are so hard to write about and you can only look back someday and realize that nothing is the same.

The reviewer from a back cover blurb says that she sounds like a laugh track when she reads David Sedaris. I concur. But it only saddens me to think that some things, no matter how cleverly interpreted and transcribed, can never make clear what they mean.