“Twenty-one essays organized around Sedaris's purchase of the Sea Section, his Emerald Isle beach house, where he gathers the Sedaris siblings as their father ages and one sister's suicide remains the unprocessed family event the essays keep circling back to.”
What's in this book
- David Sedaris's 2018 essay collection — twenty-one essays organized around the Emerald Isle beach house
- Late-career return to form and Sedaris's most ambitious work after Me Talk Pretty One Day
- 272 pages threading the family-grief material through apparently casual essay register
- The death of his sister Tiffany Sedaris (2013) operates as the unresolved structural event the collection circles
- David Sedaris audiobook (author-narrated) is the definitive audio production
- For readers of Me Talk Pretty One Day, Happy-Go-Lucky, and contemporary American humor essay writing
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Calypso is David Sedaris's 2018 essay collection, his most ambitious work after Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000) and the late-career return to form that the broader Sedaris readership had been waiting for. The structural device is the Sea Section, the Emerald Isle North Carolina beach house Sedaris purchases at the opening of the collection and uses across the next year to gather the Sedaris siblings (Lisa, Gretchen, Amy, Paul, and the late Tiffany) and the surviving Sedaris father Lou. The collection runs twenty-one essays across approximately three years, with the late-family-vacation register threading through the entire volume and the death of Tiffany Sedaris (the youngest sister, by suicide in 2013) operating as the structural emotional event that the essays keep circling back to without resolving cleanly.
Sedaris's structural method is the patient layering of the apparently casual essay register (the Fitbit-walking pieces, the Hugh-cooking pieces, the airport-conversation pieces) over the actual emotional material the collection is doing (the family grief, the aging father, the inheritance question that runs through the back third). The Why Aren't You Laughing essay in the middle of the volume is the structural moral center of the collection and is some of the most carefully written contemporary American non-fiction prose about an alcoholic mother. The Stepping Out fitness essay is the funniest piece Sedaris has written in twenty years. The death-of-Tiffany essays (handled across multiple pieces, never directly in a single essay) operate as the structural payoff the collection has been building toward.
Recommended as required contemporary American humor essay reading, as the right Sedaris entry point alongside Me Talk Pretty One Day, and as the late-career Sedaris work the broader readership most often cites as their favorite. Read Happy-Go-Lucky (2022) and Theft by Finding (2017, the diary collection) next. The David Sedaris audiobook is the definitive audio production and the right format for first reading. Five stars without reservation.
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