The Land and Its People

This collection of 28 autobiographical essays follows humorist and writer David Sedaris across multiple countries, decades, and relationships as he reflects on family, friendship, aging, sobriety, and the texture of daily life. The essays move between Sedaris's homes in New York and Sussex, England, and the cities he visits on frequent book tours, with flashbacks to his childhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, and his early adulthood in Chicago.

The collection opens with "Care and Feeding," in which Sedaris's partner, Hugh, underwent hip replacement surgery in New York after a year and a half of escalating pain. Sedaris arranged for Hugh's older brother John to fly in from Washington State and handle the caregiving, effectively outsourcing responsibilities he dreads. Hugh bonded closely with John during recovery, shutting Sedaris out, and Hugh's sister Ann texted to call Sedaris "self-involved." Hugh recovered quickly, cooked an elaborate Christmas dinner, and by the time Sedaris returned from a winter tour, Hugh was fully restored. The essay closes with a reflection on how the space once filled by Hugh's pain gradually filled with the pleasantness of their shared life.

Several essays center on Sedaris's long-standing friendships. "Goodyear" profiles Dawn, his oldest friend, whom he met as a college freshman at Kent State University in Ohio. The two walk together obsessively, their record being 43 miles in a single day. Dawn makes her own clothes, has not used an ATM since 1990, and can produce yarn, paper, and ink from scratch. She was briefly Sedaris's college girlfriend, and he expresses lasting guilt over hurting her when he came out as gay. He describes their bond as proprietary: They knew each other before Hugh, before Reagan, before AIDS. In "Friends," Sedaris learns that Dan Thompson, his childhood best friend and next-door neighbor, died of throat cancer. He reconstructs their friendship from age 9 through its rupture at 15, when Dan began dating a girl Sedaris was infatuated with. Sedaris connects the heartbreak to his dawning awareness of his own homosexuality. Dan later served time for selling drugs and drifted through life. Studying a photograph of the dead man, Sedaris reflects that Dan allowed him to feel some part of himself was likable.

"The Doctor Is In" traces Sedaris's only experience with therapy, which took place in late-1980s Chicago during a relationship with a strikingly handsome boyfriend who serially cheated on him. Sedaris describes the boyfriend as an indisputable 10 while rating himself a tentative 6, and recalls feeling more like a jailer than a partner. After discovering the full extent of the infidelities, Sedaris left, stayed in a friend's laundry room, and resolved to move to New York. A year and a half later, he met Hugh, whom he describes as equally handsome but without the capacity for cruelty.

Family is a recurring subject. "My Finances, in Brief" catalogs his late father's financial deceptions. For years after Sedaris's mother died, his father promised annual tax-free cash gifts, and Sedaris dutifully sent thank-you letters. He eventually learned from his banker that his father never deposited a dime. An IRA promised at graduation was likewise never established, and Sedaris was excluded from the will. "Cool Mom" is a tribute to his late mother, Sharon, structured around the criteria of an online article defining a "cool mom." Sedaris describes the hours-long dinner-table sessions the family called "group therapy," where pretension was mocked and sincerity was the greatest target. He also acknowledges her bulimia, understood by the children only in retrospect, and her final years working at a consignment shop until chemotherapy made her too sick to continue.

"Good Grief" finds Sedaris scrolling through his digital address book and noting how many contacts are now dead, including his first literary agent, his German translator, and the writer David Rakoff, whom he loved like a brother but could not bring himself to hug at their final meeting. The essay pivots when his sister Gretchen was diagnosed with cancer in the same location as their mother's. Sedaris minimized the news on the phone while fighting tears, then rushed to Bergdorf Goodman and bought Gretchen a $2,400 cashmere cape for her treatments. A follow-up scan revealed the cancer was only a tiny speck in one lung; surgeons removed it, and no further treatment was needed. Sedaris was relieved but admits he wanted the cape back.

Travel animates much of the collection. "Trophy Room" recounts a safari in the Maasai Mara, a vast wildlife reserve in southwestern Kenya, where Sedaris and Hugh observed lions, elephants, and hippos from an open-sided vehicle guided by Dalton, a young Maasai tribesman. The highlight was standing near a herd of elephants and hearing tall grass torn from the ground by their trunks. A disappointing extension to Zanzibar, Tanzania, where aggressive vendors and the relentless phrase hakuna matata (Swahili for "no worries") soured the experience, provides a sharp contrast. "The Hem of His Garment" describes an invitation to a papal audience with Pope Francis. Sedaris attended a dinner organized by Stephen Colbert, told two God jokes to underwhelming responses, and shook the pope's hand the next morning in the Apostolic Palace, the pope's official residence in Vatican City. Afterward, he purchased a priest's cassock at Gammarelli, a tailoring shop that has dressed popes since 1798. "A Long Way Home" follows Sedaris and Hugh from a no-devices weekend at a friend's island house in Maine through a stressful overnight drive back to New York after their flight was canceled. Sedaris invited a stranded fellow traveler named Susan Du to share the ride, and they bonded at a late-night McDonald's.

Several shorter essays address public behavior and modern irritations. "Little America" moves from a fantasy about enforcing manners to a train confrontation with a young man playing music without headphones. When Sedaris overheard that the man had just left court-ordered rehab and watched him buy a beer, his anger turned to protectiveness, colored by his own 25-plus years of sobriety. "And Your Little Dog, Too" recounts being bitten by a dog belonging to people smoking fentanyl out of a baby carriage in Portland, Oregon, and Sedaris's frustration that everyone he told redirected sympathy toward the dog. "Punching Down" challenges the concept of the same name, arguing that fewer siblings and more parental praise have produced a generation unprepared for discomfort.

Other essays round out the collection's range. "Say It Like You Mean It" describes a family beach vacation structured around Sedaris's obsessive use of the language-learning app Duolingo, particularly his AI video calls with a character named Lily, to whom he reports daily activities in French and grows unexpectedly invested in impressing. "I Did" reveals that Sedaris and Hugh have been secretly married since 2016, a courthouse ceremony done solely for financial reasons; Sedaris has told no one, not even his sisters. "The Godfather" captures Sedaris's frustrated relationship with Tommy, his 14-year-old godson, who answers questions with shrugs; Sedaris recognizes the uncomfortable parallel between his efforts to engage Tommy and his own father's attempts to mold him into a different kind of son. "The Violence of the Rams" describes the aggressive Icelandic rams on Sedaris's Sussex property; when a five-month-old lamb separated from its mother cried all night, the sound triggered memories of childhood separation for both Sedaris and Hugh. "My Cousin Melvin" compares a ChatGPT-generated passage supposedly written in Sedaris's voice with his own darkly comic version of the same premise.

The collection closes with "Cash and Carry," in which Sedaris helped a Puerto Rican woman carry a found cabinet down a New York avenue and flashed back to 1990, when he was 34, broke, and sharing a rent-stabilized apartment for $350 a month. He recalled nearly returning to Chicago in defeat after failing to land a writing assignment. What kept him in New York, he reflects, was the belief that luck cannot be bought or arranged but rewards those who go out where it can find them. After parting with the woman, a man outside a liquor store told Sedaris to burn in hell. Sedaris walked on, reasoning that helping a stranger carry a cabinet ought to earn him some points.