David Sedaris

David Sedaris isn’t ready to give his father the benefit of the doubt just because the old man is now dead, said Terry Gross in NPR.org. Lou Sedaris, according to his son, told outrageous lies, beat his kids, cheated them the same way he cheated other people who worked for him, and made sexual comments about his own daughters. “My father was a perfect preparation for having Donald Trump as president,” David says. “It’s been the driving force in my life: the animosity, the war that my father and I started when I was young and fought every day of our lives.” But when Lou died last year, at 98, David didn’t celebrate. As certain as the best-selling humorist was that his father was not truly a good man, he also didn’t hate him. “It’s more nuanced than that,” he says. “You can still love a mean person.”

Several of the essays in Sedaris’ new book, Happy-Go-Lucky, address that fraught relationship, said Tyler Malone in the Los Angeles Times. “It’s tricky because you don’t want to be a 65-yearold man whining that your dad was mean to you,” he says. “So here I am, 65, and hopefully it’s not whining.” He knows he could have chosen to end the book with the title piece, in which he describes how his father became a cheerful pleasure after dementia struck. “It’s kind of a lovely essay—the best thing I’ve written,” he says. Instead, he followed it with a piece that includes the line, “I think I’ll miss him the same way I missed getting colds during the pandemic.” A complicated subject, obviously. “I could easily spend the rest of my life,” he says, “trying to sort through the feelings that I had for my dad.”