There’s a reason why David Sedaris has his own Radio 4 series and regularly sells out Carnegie Hall in New York: as a performer of his own prose he’s unmatched. Which is to say, the best way to enjoy Sedaris’s waspish and funny essay collection Happy-Go-Lucky is to hear it read by its author.
Sedaris devotees will be familiar with the family members who inhabit his stories, each portrayed in all their flawed glory. There is his bellicose father, who died in 2021, and who is recalled here in the essay Father Time. Visiting him one day, Sedaris finds him bleeding after his eponymous grandfather clock has fallen on him. “When you’re 95 and Father Time literally knocks you to the ground, don’t you think he’s maybe trying to tell you something?” Sedaris wonders.
There’s his sister Gretchen, who idly Googles Sedaris and tells him: “A lot of people can’t stand you”; and Hugh, his temperamental partner whom he sees through his siblings’ eyes on holiday after he reprimands them for feeding candy to the ants. “Don’t listen to Hugh,” Gretchen tells her brother. “He doesn’t know shit about being an ant.”
Sedaris delivers all this with impeccable comic timing, his tone moving between amused and indignant. There are moments of pathos, too, such as when he finds Hugh sobbing after their holiday house is damaged by a hurricane, reminding him of the homes he’d lived in growing up in Beirut and Kinshasa that were destroyed. Real love, Sedaris notes, is when “you realise you’d give anything to make that other person stop hurting, if only so he can tear your head off again”.
• Happy-Go-Lucky is available via Hachette Audio, 7hr 30min
Further listening
The God Desire
David Baddiel, William Collins, 2hr 1min
The comic and author of Jews Don’t Count reads his passionate yet sympathetic polemic in which he argues against the existence of God.
Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband?
Lizzie Damilola Blackburn, Penguin Audio, 11hr 18min
Ronke Adékoluejo narrates this entertaining tale of 31-year-old Yinka, whose mother and aunties “are praying over her love life as if [she’s] terminally ill”.
