Naked

“I had no notion of the exact mechanics, but from over-hearing the neighbors, I understood that our large family had something to do with my mother’s lack of control. It was her fault that we couldn’t afford a summer house with bay windows and a cliffside tennis court. Rather than improve her social standing, she chose to spit out children, each one filthier than the last.”

This quotation introduces the pervading sexism that colors Sedaris’s childhood recollections. While David is white, able-bodied, male, and a gentile, he catalogues his interactions with prejudice against people of color, disabled people, women, and Jewish people throughout Naked. Sexism is a particularly pernicious problem in his immediate family; Sedaris highlights its subtle and consistent impact on his mother and sisters, although he was sometimes ignorant of it at the time.

“I understood that she needed more than just a volunteer maid. And, oh, I would be that person. A listener, a financial advisor, even a friend: I swore to be all those things and more in exchange for twenty dollars and a written guarantee that I would always have my own private bedroom. That’s how devoted I was. And knowing what a good deal she was getting, my mother dried her face and went off in search of her pocketbook.”

Here, Sedaris characterizes his childhood relationship with his mother: She relied on him for emotional support despite his young age, a fact that he relished. As an adult, Sedaris looks back on this warmly.

“‘It’s not healthy to hit ourselves over the head with shoes, is it?’ I guessed that it was not. ‘Guess? This is not a game to be guessed at. I don’t “guess” that it’s dangerous to run into traffic with a paper sack over my head. There’s no guesswork involved. These things are facts, not riddles.’ She sat at her desk, continuing her lecture as she penned a brief letter. ‘I’d like to have a word with your mother. You do have one, don’t you? I’m assuming you weren’t raised by animals. Is she blind, your mother? Can she see the way you behave, or do you reserve your antics exclusively for Miss Chestnut?’ She handed me the folded slip of paper. ‘You may go now, and on your way out the door I’m asking you please not to bathe my light switch with your germ-ridden tongue. It’s had a long day; we both have.’”

When recounting events from his childhood, Sedaris characterizes the adults in his life as exacting, sarcastic, and patronizing. He exaggerates their behavior for comedic effect, but this exaggeration also captures a hostile atmosphere wherein young David is consistently demeaned, dismissed, and belittled.

“A new home was under construction, but until it was finished we were confined to a rental property built to resemble a plantation house. The building sat in a treeless, balding yard, its white columns promising a majesty the interior failed to deliver. The front door opened onto a dark, narrow hallway lined with bedrooms not much larger than the mattresses that furnished them. Our kitchen was located on the second floor, alongside the living room, its picture window offering a view of the cinder-block wall built to hold back the tide of mud generated by the neighboring dirt mound.”

The description of the Sedaris’s rental home stands in stark contrast to David’s youthful fantasies of wealth and luxury. Emphasizing how dirty the rental unit is also makes his compulsive licking, kissing, and touching of objects around him even more unpleasant.

“At the opening chords of my current favorite song, a voice would whisper, Shouldn’t you be upstairs making sure there are really one hundred and fourteen peppercorns left in that small ceramic jar? And, hey, while you’re up there, you might want to check the iron and make sure it’s not setting fire to the baby’s bedroom. The list of demands would grow by the moment. What about that television antenna? Is it still set into that perfect V, or has one of your sisters destroyed its integrity. You know, I was just wondering how tightly the lid is screwed onto that mayonnaise jar. Let’s have a look, shall we?”

Here, Sedaris personifies his compulsive urges as a voice in his head that urges him to count, touch, and check things. He characterizes the voice as insidious, sarcastic, and persuasive.

“This was part of my mother’s act. She played the ring-leader, blowing the whistle and charming the crowd with her jokes and exaggerated stories. When company came, she often pretended to forget the names of her six children. ‘Hey, George, or Agnes, whatever your name is, how about running into the bedroom and finding my cigarette lighter.’ She noticed my tics and habits but was never shamed or seriously bothered by any of them. Her observations would be collected and delivered as part of a routine that bore little resemblance to our lives.”

Naked is preoccupied with the motif of performance. This preoccupation extends past David’s own performative behavior. Describing his mother’s behavior as an “act” or “routine” performed for a “crowd” suggests that Sharon is also preoccupied with fiction and exaggeration in the same way her son is.

“I recall one visit when she carried on about her recently deceased pet, a common goldfish she kept in a murky jar up on the apartment’s only window ledge. Ya Ya had returned from work and, finding the jar empty, decided that the fish had consciously thrown itself out the window. ‘He no happy no more and think to have a suicide,’ she said.”

Sedaris emphasizes his Ya Ya’s heavy Greek accent, broken English, and eccentric worldview as a comic device.

“Ya Ya stared into the distance and sighed. I imagine she had spoken to the fish, had loved it the best she knew how, but her affection, like her cooking, was devoid of anything one might think of as normal.”

Here, Sedaris expands upon his Ya Ya’s eccentricities. He begins to reveal that Ya Ya is not simply strange, but profoundly abnormal. She relates to others—even her pet goldfish—in a stunted and bizarre way. Her warped relationship with her goldfish exemplifies her tenuous connection to reality and serves as a microcosm for her strained relationship with her family.

“Ya Ya had been diagnosed with diabetes, and it was my mother’s thankless job to prepare a special diet and cart her around town for her numerous doctor’s appointments. It was my mother who practiced injecting insulin into oranges and doled out the pills. She was the one forced to hide the peanut butter and confiscate the candy hidden in Ya Ya’s dresser drawers—all this for a woman who still refused to call her by name.”

This section highlights the gender disparity in the Sedaris household. Even though Ya Ya is Louis’s mother, her care and keeping are exclusively Sharon’s duty, in addition to her responsibilities for six children. Likewise, Ya Ya’s dislike of Sharon, which Sedaris suggests is partly rooted in sexism as well, makes the task thankless and unpleasant.

“My father sighed and shook his head in disappointment. This was the same way he reacted to my mother when anger and frustration caused her to forget herself. Lisa was not a daughter now but just another female unable to control her wildly shifting emotions.”

This passage reveals that Louis is not merely dismissive of his wife, but of all women in general. As soon as Lisa gets her period, he approaches her emotions as if he’s dealing with an irrational woman, rather than approaching them as a father to a child. When he is forced to confront his daughter’s femaleness, he views her as less of a person.

“Theirs was a world of obvious suspects. Looking for the axe murderer? Try the emotionally disturbed lumberjack loitering near the tool shed behind the victim’s house. Who kidnapped the guidance counselor? Perhaps it’s the thirty-year-old tenth-grader with the gym bag full of bloody rope. It was no wonder these cases were solved so quickly. Every clue was italicized with a burst of surging trumpets, and under questioning, the suspects snapped like toothpicks, buckling in less time than it took to soft-boil an egg.”

David finds his mother and sister’s interest in crime fiction and detective stories asinine. He implies that they enjoy these stories so much because they offer little challenge and safe, easy answers. This ties to David’s lifelong desire to “see through” people: he finds crime fiction passé because truth-seeking isn’t as easy in real life as it is on TV.

“‘What do you say to that, missy?’ my mother asked herself. She applied a coat of lipstick and brought her face close to the mirror, cocking her head and arching her eyebrows in a series of expressions that conveyed everything from heart-felt concern to full-throttle rage. Then she stepped away from the mirror, reintroducing herself slowly, as if her reflection were a guest she was meeting for the first time. I often did the same thing myself in the privacy of the bathroom. ‘Who’s he!’ I’d ask, admiring myself with a new shirt or haircut. Most often, my private sessions would end with my pants in a tangle around my ankles. Would my mother now unbutton her blouse? Would she lift her skirt and excite herself? At what point would I call out and put an end to this? How could I live with myself, knowing what she looked like naked? Please, I thought, don’t do it. Don’t be like me.”

Here, Sharon’s performativity reaches a new level: like David, she performs both for others and herself. This bone-deep performativity speaks to a strained relationship with the self that affects all members of the Sedaris family. This section also relates to young David’s neuroticism around his and his parents’ sexualities.

“A regular hospital, with its cheerful waiting room and baskets of flowers, offered some degree of hope. Here, there were no get-well cards or helium balloons, only a pervasive feeling of doom. Fate or accident had tripped these people up and broken them apart. It seemed to me that something like this might happen to anyone, regardless of their fine homes or decent education. Pitch one too many fits or spend too much time brushing your hair, and that might be the first sign. There could be something hidden away in any of our brains, quietly lurking there. Just waiting.”

This passage outlines a cultural double standard around mental health issues: Unlike physical illness, which is treated with empathy, the patients at Dix Hill are merely contained and kept out of the general population’s way. Sedaris notes a culture-wide hypocrisy in this, as he believes no one is immune to psychiatric problems.

“Regardless of their natty attire, these men appeared sweaty and desperate, willing to play the fool in exchange for the studio applause they seemed to mistake for love and acceptance. I saw something of myself in their mock weary delivery, in the way they crossed their legs and laughed at their own jokes.”

As a child, David is able to recognize gay men on talk shows based on the way they behave. He resents their foppish performances of their internal experiences, regarding these acts as misplaced bids for “love and acceptance” that really only further alienate the performers. As a young gay person himself, this makes David feel alienated by proxy. This feeling causes him to mockingly pantomime gayness for his peers as a defense mechanism, perpetuating the cycle of shame and hyperbole.

“The moment we boarded our return flight from Kennedy to Raleigh, Lisa re-arranged her hair, dropped her accent, and turned to me saying, ‘Well, I thought that was very nice, how about you?’ Over the course of five minutes, she had eliminated all traces of her reckless European self. Why couldn’t I do the same?”

David resents Lisa’s ability to toy with new identities. He is unable to perform heterosexuality the way Lisa fakes a Queens accent. More importantly, he is unable to change his internal awareness of being gay in the same way that one can adopt or abandon affectations. This revelation points to a new understanding of what separates the self from the performance of self.

“Acting is different than posing or pretending. When done with precision, it bears a striking resemblance to lying. Stripped of the costumes and grand gestures, it presents itself as an unquestionable truth.”

Sedaris presents acting as an uncanny middle ground between a lie and the truth. When his mother performs without the trappings of theatre, she isn’t just lying—she is supplanting the truth with a new truth she constructed.

“It made me sad and desperate to see so many people, strangers whose sheer numbers eroded the sense of importance I was working so hard to invent. Where did they come from, and why couldn’t they just go home?”

David’s youthful obsession with performance and image results in solipsistic misanthropy. He feels himself diminished by the presence of others. This will later be contrasted with Lisa’s selfless interest in Dinah’s well-being.

“Were I to receive a riding vacuum cleaner or even a wizened proboscis monkey, it wouldn’t please me half as much as knowing we were the only family in the neighborhood with a prostitute in our kitchen. From this moment on, the phrase ‘ho, ho, ho’ would take on a whole different meaning; and I, along with the rest of my family, could appreciate it in our own clannish way. It suddenly occurred to me. Just like that.”

David’s epiphany here creates a satisfying narrative arc that rarely happens in real life. At the beginning of this chapter, David struggles to complete the “It suddenly occurred to me that…” formula because epiphanies are actually uncommon. However, at the end of this chapter, he has an effortless, pertinent, and wholesome revelation. Although the events of the evening are unorthodox and grungy, they still resonate with David in the way he wants episodes of Socrates & Company to resonate with his imaginary audience.

“There was something cold and blunt pressed hard against my jaw, and even before I saw it clearly, I understood it was a gun. Its physical presence inspired an urgency lacking in any of the movies or television dramas in which it plays such a key role. ‘You like that, do you?’ Only a professional maniac could ask such an inane question.”

This moment in the truck with T.W. recalls David’s childhood memory of his father bloodying his nose in the car. Although he offers no comment on his father’s behavior in “A Plague of Tics,” his labeling of T.W. as a “professional maniac” for saying “You like that, do you?” while getting violent behind the wheel provides belated commentary on the incident, because that’s exactly what his father did to him.

“These hardships were played to our favor. We took to wearing overalls, admiring our somber reflections in the candlelit windows as we huddled over steaming bowls of porridge. This would do. We were pioneers. People like us had no need for pillows or towel racks. We wore our bruises like a badge, and every chest cold was a testament to our fortitude. I was on the verge of buying myself a coonskin cap when the season ended and we traveled back home to North Carolina, where I quickly re-adjusted to a life of hot water and electricity.”

While David and Veronica initially dreamed of an idyllic life on the farm, they discover that the realities of migrant labor are much harsher. To quell their disappointment, they romanticize the challenges of their work while ignoring the fact that they could safely leave at any time.

“My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for who I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions who hate you for what you are and you’re likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks. I haven’t got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.”

In this passage, Sedaris explains his aversion to politics in terms of appearances. He allows bigots to hate him and others; to oppose their bigotry would be both ineffective and unbecoming because he doesn’t understand others well enough to “change” them. Sedaris’s objections to being politically outspoken are both practical—he suspects diminishing returns for his efforts—and egoistical—he suspects being vocal about his beliefs will turn him into an “unkempt, sloppy dresser”.

“‘I love you,’ I said at the end of one of our late-night phone calls. ‘I am going to pretend I didn’t hear that,’ she said. I heard a match strike in the background, the tinkling of ice cubes in a raised glass. And then she hung up. I had never said such a thing to my mother, and if I had it to do over again, I would probably take it back. Nobody ever spoke that way except Lisa. It was queer to say such a thing to someone unless you were trying to talk them out of money or into bed, our mother had taught that when we were no taller than pony kegs. I had known people who said such things to their parents, ‘I love you,’ but it always translated to mean ‘I’d love to get off the phone with you.’”

Despite Sharon’s performativity, Sedaris also depicts her as extremely blunt. She and her children, except for Lisa, regard declarations of affection as empty and frivolous. David telling his mother “I love you” is framed as a weak substitute for earnest affection.

“Nudism didn’t cause me to love my body, it simply allowed me to accept my position in what is clearly the scheme of things. Take a seat beside an eighty-year-old man and you can see the sagging, age-spotted body that awaits you. Rather than inciting panic, this truth seems to have a calming effect. Marching toward the clubhouse with a multitude of naked strangers, I felt the proceedings should be narrated by one of those hushed, scholarly voices commonly used for television nature programs.”

Although he was initially anxious and uncomfortable with the prospect of public nudity, this section speaks to Sedaris’s growing comfort with it. While it doesn’t result in any spiritual revelations, it offers him a neutral, unemotional perspective on the cycle of life. He emphasizes this point by comparing himself and the other nudists to animals on a nature documentary narrated by a scientist.