Is It Satire?

Since I've been spending so much time wallowing in the mud lately, I decided to pick something funny off Audible for my daily driiiiive. Grammar Girl, aka Mignon Fogarty, had tweeted about David Sedaris's "When You Are Engulfed In Flames", which she read recently while ill for a week. I started listening to it yesterday.

I find it very clever and very well written. But I do not find it side-splittingly funny, as Mignon reported. Maybe it's just too close to home. Mr. Sedaris writes about being a gawky kid. I was such a gawky kid and haven't yet, even at 58, gotten to the point where I can laugh about it. He writes about choosing glasses and thinking they were oh-so-cool until he walked through a flea market and seeing a 20-year-old Mrs. Beasley (remember the TV show "Family Affair"?) doll wearing the same glasses.

I realized I had to share with you my eighth grade graduation photo.


Why, oh why, didn't someone save me from myself? I'm sure I was the only person under age 53 in 1964 wearing these gawd-awful plastic gold-tone metallic frames with the wings. Did some automobile designer also design the glasses? Actually, there was another photo I saw a couple of days ago I was going to scan for you, but I couldn't find it tonight. It was from the same time period. I saw sitting on a bench in front of a bush, my eyes turned heavenward. My girlfriend, Merilee (remember - the one my mother lumped me with when she said, "all you adopted kids had problems"), told me if I'd turn my eyes upward I'd look more dreamy. I looked dreamy alright—like I was dreaming of being dead!

Back to David Sedaris. I have never really enjoyed satire (if that's what this book is) because I just don't get it. I think I'm too straightforward in my approach to life to really understand satire. But I am enjoying this book, even if my heart aches for him in all the little traumas he's encountering.

I normally don't undertake two books simultaneously, but a package arrived from The Traveler yesterday. It's Kate Brennan's "In His Sights: A True Story of Love and Obsession." He had told me about it in one of our drive time conversations. He had heard Terry Gross interview this author on Fresh Air and bought the book. He enjoyed it so much he ordered a copy for me. Now I can't put it down. So anytime I'm stationary, I'm reading Kate Brennan book, and anytime I'm driving, I'm listening to David Sedaris.

I highly recommend both books for their peeks into two very different lives, and for the appreciation you will gain of your own normal little life.

And what are you reading?