Naked

Book 66 of my 2018 Reading Challenge

Naked by David Sedaris 

Summary (via Goodreads)
Welcome to the hilarious, strange, elegiac, outrageous world of David Sedaris. In Naked, Sedaris turns the mania for memoir on its proverbial ear, mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his unique worldview—a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and deeply charitable. A tart-tongued mother does dead-on imitations of her young son's nervous tics, to the great amusement of his teachers; a stint of Kerouackian wandering is undertaken (of course!) with a quadriplegic companion; a family gathers for a wedding in the face of imminent death. Through it all is Sedaris's unmistakable voice, without doubt one of the freshest in American writing.

My Opinion
I'm glad I've read other books by him because the read got off to a slow start for me and it wouldn't have been a good first impression.  Since I know I like his writing I will continue to read his books but won't be recommending this one.

Personal red flags for me for the use "retarded" and "mongoloid".  There's a difference between quoting someone or using language that was acceptable at the time (which is why I understood him using the 'n' word at one point even though I don't like it) but that wasn't the case here; he used them as descriptors ("I might be viewed as eccentric instead of just plain retarded", for example) and, especially with describing someone as a "mongoloid teenager", that wasn't okay when this book came out in 1997 and is even less okay when reading it today.

I laughed when he described someone as "either...suffering a terrible case of gas or he had a pint-size child practicing the trumpet in his back pocket" and when he described his luck as "If my shirt was pressed, it was more or less guaranteed that my fly was down".

Best out-of-context line: "You know you're living in a small town when you can reach the ninth grade without ever having seen a mime."

Quote from the Book
"Health, be it mental or physical, had never been her family's strong suit. The Leonard family coat of arms pictured a bottle of scotch and a tumor."