August 7, 2008
When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
I didn’t deliberately set out to disturb the peace, to shatter the monastic quiet of our home with barking laughter. After all, I did apologize to Michele, who was trying to talk long distance in peace and came out of her office to suggest mildly that I might want to switch to decaf. I did let Ike outside so he’d stop kicking at the back door in a desperate attempt to escape the ruckus. It’s just that when I read David Sedaris, I lose it.
Sedaris’s latest book is When You Are Engulfed in Flames, 22 essays, most of which appeared previously in The New Yorker. He writes about the unusual: a gift of a human skeleton (“If you, don’t like color we can bleach it”), a cranky 70-year-old neighbor whose dentures he retrieves from “da schwubs,” and crazed chaffinches hurling themselves at the window of his house in France. He writes about such ordinary things spiders, boils, and bow ties. Whatever topic he sets his pen to, he makes it sparkle.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames has fewer essays featuring David’s siblings, Amy, Gretchen, Lisa, Tiffany, and Paul, than his previous books. One piece featuring the sibs, “The Understudy,” is reminiscence about Mrs. Peacock, hired to look after the little Sedarises while their parents vacationed for a week. Mrs. Peacock forces the kids to scratch her back with a plastic backscratcher. “The business end was no bigger than a monkey’s paw, the fingers bent slightly inward, as if they had been frozen in the act of begging. It was a nasty little thing, the nails slick with grease, and over the coming week we were to see a lot of it. To this day, should any of our boyfriends demand a back-scratch, my sisters and I recoil. ‘Brush yourself against a brick wall,’ we say. ‘Hire a nurse, but don’t look at me. I’ve done my time.’”
David offers more observations about his life with Hugh in rural France than in previous books. In the most heartbreaking essay in the book, “The Man in the Hut,” he befriends an ex-pedophile. “What I needed was an acquaintance, and what I wound up with was Jackie.” He pays short visits to Jackie, but then the neighbors stop talking to him. Ashamed, David avoids Jackie for three years, until he learns that Jackie has esophageal cancer. A week before Jackie’s death, David visits one last time.
In the longest essay in the book, “The Smoking Section,” Sedaris and his partner, the alarmingly competent and infinitely patient Hugh, relocate from Paris to Tokyo for three months, coinciding with Sedaris’ effort to quit smoking. His efforts to learn the language and assimilate with the culture are funny and interesting, and the struggle to quit smoking will resonate with anyone who’s ever tried to give up a habit.
Readers of Me Talk Pretty One Day will recall David’s epic work to learn French: “I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. ‘Is thems the thoughts of cows?’ I’d ask the butcher, pointing to the calves’ brains displayed in the front window.” In “The Smoking Section,” David’s faces the same struggle. He is easily the worst student in the class, although his teacher tries to encourage him with “a fanciful sticker and the message, ‘Cheers up!!!’” Still, he finds it difficult to criticize the English descriptions on the wrappers on ready-made sandwiches: “We have sandwiches which you can enjoy different tastes. So you can find your favorite one from our sandwiches. We hope you can choose the best one for yourself.”
Snarky, snotty, and moving, David Sedaris is one of the funniest American writers alive. —PD
Change your brain, the rest will follow
I selected My Stroke of Insight: a Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor from the bestsellers display and read it in a few sittings. My eyebrows were in a semi-constant state of elevation as I moved through Taylor’s story of stroke and recovery. Taylor’s stroke, the result of an undiagnosed AVM (arteriovenous malformation; for Six Feet Under fans, this was Nate Fisher’s problem), leaves her unable to walk, talk, read, and write. She recounts the morning of the stroke, the eternally long, frustrating, yet blissful four hours during which different sections of her left hemisphere, gradually becoming more drowned in blood from the hemorrhage, shut down.
I read this book because I wanted to know what it would be like to have a stroke and recover, and what I'd need to know if I were ever a care-giver. This book tells you all of these things in an easy-going, humorous, touching way that is also scientifically accurate. Small, obviously home-spun, illustrations support the explanations of brain function. Also included are a list of danger signs of stroke and helpful information for care-givers, from being “aware that your body language and facial expression are communicating to me” to using “age-appropriate (toddler) educational toys and books to teach me.” For example, I now know that the reason Taylor was able to read tomes into body language was because her right brain was functioning very well. She did not stop understanding the world, but began understanding it with her right brain, which interprets by feeling rather than by reason.
Taylor’s book delves more deeply into brain chemistry in the last chapters. 
Operating primarily from her right brain, Taylor felt a sense of peace and connection to everything, and she reluctantly chose to turn on the left-brain chatter. She also speaks of the fantastic plasticity of the whole brain, which has the ability to burn new neural pathways, thereby affecting behavior and allowing opportunities to remold emotionally charged reactions. In short, it’s an invitation to change your brain and change your life.
Prior to her stroke, Taylor was elected to the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI). While working at the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center (Brain Bank), she was campaigning to increase brain tissue donors so that research in understanding mental illness could advance. Not many of us want to donate our brains to science, alas. But, moving around the country with her guitar and Brain Bank jingle, Taylor increased donations remarkably in the two years she’d been on the trail. She’s picked up her work again, and is getting even more press with her book, and hopefully more brains to study. It also doesn’t hurt that the book is listed in Oprah’s Soul Series. —MV
