When You Are Engulfed in Flames

By David Sedaris. Little, Brown, 323 pp, $28.99, hardcover

Hang around with really funny people and you eventually figure out that as long as they keep you laughing, they usually manage to conceal more than they reveal about themselves.

Unless, of course, you’re talking about David Sedaris, who, in his sixth collection of personal essays, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, upholds his familiar, hilarious confessional style that milks the comic capital out of a seemingly endless stream of humiliation. Even as Sedaris nods at his own
celebrity, his fame only invites further humiliation when a fan recognizes him in the locker room of a pool: “When I say I was changing out of my swimsuit, I mean that I had nothing on. No socks, no T-shirt. My underpants were in my hand. I guess the guy recognized me from my book jacket photo.”

In “That’s Amore”, Sedaris recalls one of his neighbours, a particular variety of New York tenement hag, stopping by to visit him and his boyfriend, Hugh: “The woman unfurled a few thick fingers, the way you might when working an equation: 2 young men + 1 bedroom – ugly paneling = fags.” As usual, Sedaris rides the comic arc of each new indignity: he has a flat bum, so he wears a prosthetic arse for a time, even though it’s a pear-shaped model designed for women; in Paris, he finds himself in a hospital lounge clad only in his briefs while everyone around him is fully clothed.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames has come out for summer—so unless you’ve already read these essays, most of which previously appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, and Esquire, take Sedaris to the beach with you, get sand in his crack, and annoy your friends by reading snippets out loud to them. But give yourself over in advance to the fact that many of these comic vignettes will haunt your thoughts well past summer. Sedaris may appear to turn the mirror on himself, but what he catches in the reflection most brilliantly is not how weird he is, but how weird the world is around him.