I’ve been reading Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris and it is doing a wonderful job of making me feel totally inadequate. He talks about his oddball family and some of the oddball things that they do. I can kind of let his voice whine through my mind, as I have listened to him on NPR enough to have him in the sound effects library in my head. But really, like any book that strikes a cord with me, I think in my own voice. . I am not gay, but I did have a mother and a father and brothers and sisters, so I can relate, at least a little bit, to what the stories being told. Having said that, I have nothing even remotely in common with David Sedaris. Except that when reading about his madhouse of a family, and how he is as mad as they are but thinks he is normal, to that I can relate.
The main feeling I get from the book is one of a profound and deep jealousy, not at the life being described, as no one would choose to live the life described, but that he used it as a means to becoming a successful writer.
Since this is my blog and not David’s I will tell you to go and read the book as it is very interesting and funny and sad-and I will talk about my own life.
When I first got the notion to write, my family was the perfect subject matter. Out of seven kids, two are gay, one has been certified as insane and locked up a number of times, most of the others are at the very least borderline bipolar to full blown nuts themselves-and two are sort of normal. There were stores of death and loss and sterilization of one kind and another. The usual love and hate that brothers and sisters have for each other. A father that was seldom there and a mother that was always working.
Now I am sure that a David Sedaris could look at the raw material and write deeply funny and deeply tragic bits of business from them. There might have been a time when I could have done the same. My insane sister warned me that she would sue me if I ever wrote about her, but that was thirty years ago. There was some writer that wanted to wait till all his loved ones were dead before he wrote about them, but then found that they all seemed to have a propensity for living, so he went ahead and wrote about them anyway.
I found that everyone’s family is crazy, to one extent or another, and that we all, even the crazy ones, think we are the normal one in the bunch. In my work as a photographer I have been surprised by how many people have mentally retarded family members that live at home their entire lives and will likely only leave home once their caregivers die and they end up in a home of some kind. Some of these people are in their fifties when I see them and their mom’s still straighten their hair for them. Kind of creepy that.
Anyway. . .
I tend to think of my own little family dramas as a bit boring now. Just things in the past. But maybe, just maybe there are a couple of short stories in there somewhere.
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