When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

If you're a memoirist and you're not eighty years old, chances are at some point that you're gonna run out of humorous life anecdotes. You've mined your childhood and your family. You've exposed the quirks of your friends. You've framed every traumatic event for comedic value. So what do you do then?

If you're David Sedaris, you keep plugging along anyway. His latest book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames is light on Sedaris family doings. It relies instead on the kind of stories you turn to when you've known someone forever, and don't need to discuss the big stuff anymore. He talks about his partner, his job, and daily struggles to quit smoking and interact with normal people. At this point, he seems to be going on trips (there are two airplane stories) and learning new languages just to be able to write about it. Some of the essays have distinctly enhanced qualities, but at this point I don't care if stuff is fudged. I just want him to churn out his patented funny-poignant essay collections every few years.

Some of the pieces are familiar. My favorite, "Solution to Saturday's Puzzle," was in the New Yorker a couple of years ago. But somehow even the recycled essays feel fresher, brighter than in the magazine. It may be the fresh, bright paper. Or the fact that I'm predisposed to love anything I've seen in the New Yorker. Either way, definitely worth the $15 on Amazon. (Even David Sedaris can't get me to pay full cover price.)

Favored parts:

"And there's an elderly Frenchwoman, the one I didn't give my seat to on the bus. In my book, if you want to be treated like an old person, you have to look like one. That means no facelift, no blond hair, and definitely no fishnet stockings. I think it's a perfectly valid rule, but it wouldn't have killed me to take her crutches into consideration."

"In the grocery section of a Seibu department store, I saw a whole chicken priced at the equivalent of forty-four dollars. This seemed excessive until I went to another department store and saw fourteen strawberries for forty-two dollars. Forty-two dollars--you could almost buy a chicken for that."

"It's pathetic how much significance I attach to the Times puzzle, which is easy on Monday and gets progressively harder as the week advances. I'll spend fourteen hours finishing the Friday, and then I'll wave it in someone's face and demand that he acknowledge my superior intelligence. I think it means that I'm smarter than the next guy, but all it really means is that I don't have a life."