Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
David Sedaris, 2004
Graphic novels & humour Memoir & biographyEssaysContemporary fiction
David Sedaris turns family grudges, guilt, apartment hunting and a child's hot chocolate into comic essays that are also quietly tender.
Feels like tenderness and wonder. About family, memory and death.
A page from the book
The particular guilt of a well-behaved person in a police state.
I am a person who feels guilty for crimes I have not committed, or have not committed in years. The police search the train station for a serial rapist and I cover my face with a newspaper, wondering if maybe I did it in my sleep. The last thing I stole was an eight-track tape, but to this day I’m unable to enter a store without feeling like a shoplifter. It’s all the anxiety with none of the free stuff. David Sedaris.Sedaris supported himself with odd jobs—including a Macy's Christmas elf—and first read 'The Santaland Diaries' on NPR in 1992.
Books that feel like this
More by David Sedaris
Me Talk Pretty One Day
David Sedaris, 2000
Essays about failing — at French, at work, at being a son — told with a deadpan that makes humiliation sound like the best thing that ever happened to him.
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Questions readers ask
- What is Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim like?
- Feels like tenderness and wonder. About family, memory and death.
- What should I read after Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim?
- If you liked Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, try The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan), The Red Tent (Anita Diamant) and Running with Scissors (Augusten Burroughs).
A taste of the feed
A place at the table, handed down whether or not you asked.
My father has asked me to be the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club.
The Joy Luck Club · Amy Tan
What a parent's accent does to the shape of a sentence.
My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron. Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.
Running with Scissors · Augusten Burroughs
The war between a father's absence and a mother's silence, told by a child.
I wanted my father to be at home laughing with Ma on Saturday afternoons, instead of with Mrs. Masicotte, who had yellowy white hair and a fat little body like Zahra’s. My father called Mrs. Masicotte by her first name, LuAnn; Ma called her, simply, “her.” “It’s her,” she’d tell Daddy whenever the telephone interrupted our dinner.
She’s Come Undone · Wally Lamb
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