Happy-Go-Lucky

David Sedaris, the “champion storyteller,” ( Los Angeles Times ) returns with his first new collection of personal essays since the bestselling Calypso David Sedaris went about his everyday life, back when paper restaurant menus were still in use and whether or not to wear a mask on Halloween was a choice that was basically decided. As Happy-Go-Lucky opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes.

Then the epidemic strikes, and like so many others, he is unable to travel and perform for audiences—the aspect of his career that he enjoys the most—because he is placed in lockdown. To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. He does not keep anything, vacuums his flat twice a day, and wonders how acupuncturists and sex workers can be making ends meet while under quarantine.

Sedaris finds himself transformed as well, as the world gradually comes to terms with a new reality. After being turned down for fixing a stranger's teeth, he straightens his own and walks out into the world with renewed self-assurance. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone’s son. Once he is out on the road, he finds a battered America: exhausted individuals, vacant or garlanded shops with Help Wanted signs, walls covered with graffiti that reflects the conflicting signals of the day: Eat the Rich. 2024, Trump. Ebony Lives Matter.

In Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. The great David Sedaris is the best person to capture these fascinating times if we must live in them.