Sibling revelry

>> Humourist David Sedaris upstages himself with his crazed family

by JULIET WATERS

I once read a theory that the need to be normal is one of the predominant anxiety disorders of our time. If true, this would make the family of David Sedaris extraordinarily sane. Lou Sedaris's major redeeming quality as a father is that he doesn't put much pressure on his children to be like everyone else. Which is good because they really aren't.

Anyone who's read David Sedaris's previous books, Barrel Fever, Naked or Holidays on Ice, or has heard him narrate his NPR classic about working as department store elf on Christmas, already knows him as an eccentric. A man-child with a high-pitched voice, his brilliant acidic wit shields the petrified innocence of someone incompetent at everything except moving furniture and writing. One of the few men in the history of American literature who regularly gets compared to Dorothy Parker, Sedaris is his own vicious circle.

Unless one counts his family. In Naked, Sedaris wrote primarily about his mother's death from cancer. In Me Talk Pretty One Day, we learn about the rest of the clan.

There's Lou, an IBM programmer who tries to turn his young children into his own personal jazz combo, who inadvertently saves young David's college performance-art piece when his heckling steals the show, and who has an unusual--to be kind--habit of squirrelling away small portions of food until they become rotten, then eating them.

There's David's brother Paul, aka the "Rooster" and "Silly P" of "Silly P's Hardwood Floors." Silly P is the name he would have chosen for himself if he'd been a white rap star, which he could have been given a sensitivity level that makes Eminem look like a Backstreet Boy. Years after his mother's death he continues to help his father grieve. "The past is gone hoss. What you need now is some motherfucking pussy."

And finally, there is the jewel in the crown of this dynasty of abnormality, David's sister, Amy. Although Sedaris doesn't mention this in the book, Amy Sedaris is well on the path to becoming the American version of Tracy Ullman. A couple of years ago, she achieved a ton of critical success, even if the ratings never happened, for writing and starring in a Comedy Central sitcom called Candy From Strangers. A satire of ABC afterschool specials, she played a 46-year-old ex-con returning to highschool.

At a very young age Amy developed what Sedaris describes as "something closely resembling a personality disorder. She's Sybil with a better sense of humour, Eve without the crying jags. 'And who are we today?' my mother used to ask, leading to Amy's 'Who don't you want me to be?'"

Her father's princess, she's pretty enough to do an uncanny imitation of Angie Dickinson as Police Woman. But over the years Amy has developed a wide range of strategies to torture him. At 12 she spent the summer doing a phone impersonation of one of her mother's best friends trying to seduce him. One Christmas she returned home wearing the bottom half of a custom-made fat suit.

In a "Shiner Like a Diamond," Sedaris' essay about his sister, father Lou exhibits his one normal desire. He wants Amy to look pretty for a photo shoot a magazine is doing on interesting young women from New York. He desperately wants her to settle down and get married, and figures a nice picture will get her a few dates.

Instead, Amy asks the make up artist to make her look like "someone has beaten the shit out of me." Amy loves her new look so much that "following the photo shoot, she wore her bruises to the dry cleaner and the grocery store. Most people nervously looked away, but on the rare occasions someone would ask what happened, my sister would smile as brightly as possible, saying, 'I'm in love. Can you believe it? I'm finally, totally in love, and I feel great.'"

Weirdly, after reading this book, so will most everyone else.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, Little, Brown, hc, 272pp, $32.95