![]() ![]() Most of the essays, however, chronicle expatriate life in England, France and Japan with his long-suffering and improbably talented boyfriend Hugh. The author still draws from the well of familial tragicomedy in pieces that dissect his parents’ taste in modern art (“Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool”) and their reactions to what he wrote about them in his first book (“fifty pages later, they were boarding up the door and looking for ways to disguise themselves”). ![]() The author’s faithful fans probably won’t be turned off by his copyright-page admission that these pieces, most seen before in the New Yorker, are only “realish.” They feel real, whether Sedaris is revealing his troubling obsession with a certain species of spider or describing a lift from a tow-truck driver who kept saying things like, “yes, indeedy, a little oral give-and-take would feel pretty good right about now”-the ring of truth adds to the book’s horrified-laughter factor. Older, wiser, smarter and meaner, Sedaris ( Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, 2004, etc.) defies the odds once again by delivering an intelligent take on the banalities of an absurd life. ![]()
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