What’s BookieMonster reading? When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

Ah, the spectacular run had to end some time. I picked up WYAEIF due to some good recommendations (waaah! Other people liked it, why can’t I?) and previous reading experiences – I’ve enjoyed Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (one thing you can guarantee with a Sedaris book: great titles) as both funny and with that little tinge of sadness that can elevate proceedings and with an all important subtlety.

One of the promo blurbs attached to WYAEIF goes like this: “David Sedaris’s ability to transform the mortification of everyday life into wildly entertaining art,” – to which I have to ask – whose everyday life?? My everyday life does not consist of taking a month out from my life in Paris and the countryside of Normandy to spend in Tokyo so I can give up smoking. And herein lay the problem for me with WYAEIF – while I could laugh at some of it, not one piece engaged me and really provided that “small detail provides larger general life revelation” that I kind of usually like with this sort of playing-the-personal-life-for-laffs collection. And so much of it seemed oblivious to the fact that it was all coming across as terribly self-indulgent.

And not enough of it was as funny as this:

As a young man, I saved up my dishwashing money and bought a seventy-five-dollar copy of Medicolegal Investigations of Death, a sort of bible for forensic pathologists. It shows what you might look like if you bit an extension cord while standing in a shallow pool of water, if you were crushed by a tractor, struck by lightning, strangled with a spiral or nonspiral telephone cord, hit with a claw hammer, burned, shot, drowned, stabbed, or feasted upon by wild or domestic animals. The captions read like really great poem titles, my favorite being “Extensive Mildew on the Face of a Recluse.” I stared at that picture for hours on end, hoping it might inspire me, but I know nothing about poetry, and the best I came up with was pretty lame:

Behold the recluse looking pensive!
Mildew, though, is quite extensive
On his head, both aft and fore.
He maybe shoulda got out more.

In the end this was a bit like being stuck next to someone on a plane who insists on telling you every detail about their life that you don’t find that interesting but still feel vaguely envious of, and only occasionally are amused by. They’re not rude or aggressive or off-putting, but you do feel like the time is dragging and wonder when they’ll shut up.

P.S. If anyone knows where I can get a cheap copy of Medicolegal Investigations of Death you can be my new best friend!