The Best of Me

The Best of Me is a collection in which David Sedaris gathers what he considers his strongest work, drawing from over two decades of essays, fictional pieces, and fables previously published across his many books and in The New Yorker. The collection includes both fiction and nonfiction.

In a brief introduction, Sedaris describes his lifelong lack of confidence as a writer, noting that any belief in his abilities was planted by teachers, agents, or editors. He recalls the turning point in 1995 when The New Yorker invited him to write a short humor piece, and how seeing his name in the magazine shifted something inside him. He pushes back against the word "dysfunctional" as applied to his family, insisting that his siblings remain close and on good terms. He notes that as he has aged, he has moved from writing about dramatic events to smaller, quieter subjects.

The collection opens with several fictional pieces that showcase Sedaris's satirical range. "Glen's Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 2" features a self-pitying gay man named Glen who labels every inconvenience as homophobia while revealing his own manipulative, aggressive behavior. "Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol" presents a fictional theater critic who savages elementary and middle school holiday plays with professional severity. "Christmas Means Giving" follows a suburban couple whose rivalry with their neighbors escalates from conspicuous consumption to competitive charity until they donate their own children to a convicted sex offender and eventually give away their body parts, possessions, and lives. Three animal fables appear later in the collection, using anthropomorphized creatures to explore human cruelty and self-deception. In "The Motherless Bear," a bear who mines her mother's death for sympathy is eventually captured, muzzled, and forced to tell her story to audiences who cannot understand her.

The autobiographical essays establish the central subjects of Sedaris's work: his family, his insecurities, and his life abroad. "The Incomplete Quad" recounts his college years at Kent State University, where he roomed with students who have disabilities and befriended Peg, a woman with a progressive nerve disease. Together they shoplifted and hitchhiked, exploiting the social invisibility that accompanies disability, until Sedaris grew resentful and abandoned her. In retrospect, he recognizes that Peg understood something he took years to learn: The people who helped them were kind, not foolish.

"You Can't Kill the Rooster" profiles Sedaris's younger brother, Paul, a profanity-laced North Carolina native whose rapid-fire dialect blends deep-country speech with hip-hop slang. Despite dropping out of school and founding a floor-sanding business, Paul stayed in Raleigh, helped their father grieve after their mother's death, and rushed to his side after a hurricane with a gas grill, beer, and a bucket of candy.

Several essays chronicle Sedaris's life in Paris with his partner, Hugh. "Me Talk Pretty One Day" describes his terrifying first day at a French language school, where a sadistic teacher humiliated students for their limited vocabulary. Sedaris spent months paralyzed by fear until one day the teacher insulted him and he realized he understood every word, a small but intoxicating step toward fluency. "Jesus Shaves" follows the same class as they attempted to explain Easter to a Moroccan student, reducing Christianity to broken French: Jesus died on "two morsels of lumber" and came back "for to say hello to the peoples." In "Possession," Sedaris became so conditioned by months of apartment hunting in Paris that he toured the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and experienced it as a real estate opportunity before a quote from Holocaust survivor Primo Levi snapped him out of his fantasy.

Family life is the collection's deepest vein. "Us and Them" recalls young Sedaris's fascination with the Tomkey family, neighbors who did not own a television. When the Tomkeys missed Halloween and arrived trick-or-treating a day late, Sedaris's mother insisted the children share their candy. Sedaris frantically crammed chocolate into his mouth rather than surrender it, and his mother forced him to confront the image of his own selfishness. "Let It Snow" recounts a snow day when his overwhelmed mother locked the children out of the house, and they convinced their youngest sister, six-year-old Tiffany, to lie in the road to punish their parents. Their mother eventually appeared on the hill, having lost a shoe in the snow, and the children's anger dissolved into tenderness. "The Ship Shape" describes the family's annual beach vacations and their father's promise to buy a cottage on Emerald Isle, a promise he gradually whittled down while their mother drifted further away into separate rooms.

"Repeat After Me" finds Sedaris visiting his sister Lisa and confronting the ethics of writing about his family. After Lisa told a devastating, funny story and broke down crying, she grabbed Sedaris's hand as he reached for his notebook and threatened never to speak to him again if he repeated it. The essay ends with Sedaris imagining himself teaching Lisa's parrot to say "Forgive me." "Memory Laps" connects Sedaris's childhood swim-team anxiety to his father's relentless praise of a rival swimmer named Greg Sakas, revealing a lifelong pattern: His father found sparks of potential in others and stomped them out in his own children. When Sedaris reported a number-one New York Times bestseller, his father noted it was not number one on the Wall Street Journal list.

"Why Aren't You Laughing?" addresses his mother's alcohol addiction directly. Sedaris describes her dual nature: the charming woman who could make anyone laugh and the one who, after drinking, called late at night slurring and raging. The family separated her into two people, blaming the alcohol and never confronting her, a collective failure Sedaris deeply regrets.

The collection's emotional center is "Now We Are Five," about Sedaris's youngest sister, Tiffany, who died by suicide in 2013 at age 49. The family gathered at a rented beach house on Emerald Isle, where they traded stories about Tiffany, who had been estranged from various siblings for years. Sedaris's sister Amy collected two boxes of Tiffany's belongings, including torn family photos. During the trip, Sedaris impulsively bought a beach cottage and named it "the Sea Section," over his father's objection that it should be named after Tiffany. In "The Spirit World," Amy visited a psychic who relayed messages from Tiffany, who reportedly said that she and Sedaris "are OK now." Sedaris declined to book his own session, recalling the last time he saw Tiffany alive, at a stage door in Boston, where he had a security guard close the door in her face.

"Leviathan" finds Sedaris at the Sea Section obsessing over snapping turtles while his 91-year-old father declines physically. The family scattered their mother's ashes in the surf. At dinner, their father, wearing a headdress someone placed on his head, silently cried. Sedaris reflects that the old man was succeeding, late in life, at winning their hearts.

"A Modest Proposal" describes the day the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. Sedaris was moved to tears but also ambivalent. When his accountant explained the tax benefits, Sedaris proposed to Hugh 18 times until Hugh relented with the words "I'll do anything just to shut you up."

The collection closes with "Unbuttoned," in which Sedaris flew to Raleigh when his 95-year-old father was hospitalized with heart failure. He found the old man emaciated and barely able to speak. In a lucid moment, his father told him, "You've accomplished so many fantastic things in your life...you won." Sedaris is uncertain whether this means he won the game of life or won against the father who spent decades calling him a "big fat zero." He resolves to set down the burden he has carried for 60 years. The family left a restaurant that evening and spotted a naked woman through a neighbor's window. Their collective delight, Sedaris observes, made them sound almost like children.