45 pages • 1 hour read
David SedarisNaked
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
David Sedaris
David Raymond Sedaris (1956-) is an American humorist and author best known for his collections of wry personal essays, memoirs, and contributions to The New Yorker magazine. His writings are often concerned with his Greek ethnicity, his sexual identity as a gay man, his family life, and travel. Sedaris is the second eldest of six children and the older brother of comedian Amy Sedaris. Although he was born in Johnson, New York, Sedaris grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Coming of age in the suburban Southeastern United States had a significant impact on Sedaris’s life and writings. At the time of writing, he resides in West Sussex, England, with Hugh Hamrick, who has been his partner since the early 1990s. Sedaris holds a bachelor’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an honorary Ph.D. from Binghamton University.
Sedaris came of age in the 1950s-1970s. In the United States, the mid-20th century was a time of economic stability for the middle class and a time of great social change. When Sedaris was a child, racial segregation was still in effect, women were expected to be homemakers, “homosexuality” was classified as a psychiatric disorder, and state psychiatric hospitals were overcrowded and underfunded. Much of Naked focuses on young David’s relationship to himself: his social class, his gender, his sexuality, his race, and his psychiatric history.
Sedaris portrays himself as navel-gazing and egoistic. Each essay in Naked is an isolated incident from his life that he reviews and comments upon. Taken as a whole, Naked is Sedaris’s exploration of his pretenses and skewed relationship with reality. Hyperbolic and outright fictionalized accounts proliferate in Naked, both for comedic effect and as an ironic metatextual example of his complicated relationship with truth and facts. This has resulted in accusations of fakery from critics and journalists; some argue that his accounts are so overblown that they cannot actually qualify as nonfiction. Journalist Alex Heard comments:
The Library of Congress called it biography, and Sedaris assured several interviewers over the years that the book was essentially factual. ‘Everything in Naked was true,’ he told the webzine Getting It in 1999. ‘I mean, I exaggerate. But all the situations were true’ (https://newrepublic.com/article/63463/american-lie-midget-guitar-teacher-macys-elf-and-thetruth-about-david-sedaris).
This blurring of genre may mean that Naked is not a “true” memoir focused on earnest self-exploration. From this perspective, Sedaris is not a true memoirist, but he uses the idea of memoirs as a metanarrative device to comment on truth, storytelling, memory, and self-examination.
Sharon Sedaris
Sharon Leonard-Sedaris (1929-91) was the wife of Louis Sedaris and the mother of all six Sedaris children. She was a homemaker as well as a heavy drinker and chain-smoker. She died of lung cancer in 1991, a culminating event in Naked that is central to Chapter 16, “Ashes.” Although she often appears harsh and cold in Naked, a childhood friend of David’s reports otherwise: "The sarcasm is a little bit her […] But she was nurturing, she was warm, she cooked dinner every night. I thought she was a marvelous woman" (https://newrepublic.com/article/63463/american-lie-midget-guitar-teacher-macys-elf-and-thetruth-about-david-sedaris).
Throughout Naked, Sedaris characterizes his mother as endlessly sarcastic, blunt, and cranky; she appears to be simultaneously frank and affected. Her relationship to performativity and fiction is similar to his own, but she is also gruff and down to earth. This positions her as both a reflection of and a foil to David. Similarly, Sedaris presents his mother as a hard-working woman “haunted” by trauma. As a young man, David idealizes such tribulations as glamorous and seeks to embody them himself; this leads him to experience genuine hardship at Dix Hill and in the odd jobs described in “C.O.G.” In Naked, Sharon shows a propensity toward angry outbursts of indifference to her family’s feelings. However, details like her kindness toward Dinah, her support of David’s interest in theater, and her willingness to call out dishonesty position her as a moral center for the family.
Louis Sedaris
As Sharon’s husband and the father of all six Sedaris children, Louis "Lou" Sedaris (1923–2021) was the patriarch of the Sedaris family. He was the son of Greek immigrants and an engineer at IMB. David Sedaris characterizes his relationship with his father as strained. Upon Louis’s death, David remarked: “When you’re writing about someone, they’re a character […] The character of my father was irascible, but in real life he was just an asshole […] I was delighted when he died, to tell you the truth” (https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/david-sedaris-i-do-mourn-my-dad-as-a-character-he-was-a-goldmine-40879404.html).
Louis is a comedic figure in Naked, but he is also an antagonistic presence. He is consistently portrayed as a dyed-in-the-wool sexist. He bloodies David’s nose and berates him for his struggles with mental health conditions, drinks while driving, and shows little respect for his wife and children. While Sharon and the Sedaris kids’ kindness toward Dinah is presented as a symbol of their uniqueness and generosity toward social outcasts, Louis is pointedly kept away from her. This suggests that he would have reacted poorly to Dinah, implying that he lacks those positive qualities.
Lisa Sedaris
Lisa Sedaris is the oldest of the Sedaris children. Naked is dedicated to her. Of all David’s siblings, Lisa plays the most prominent role in Naked. She is a focal character in “Dinah, The Christmas Whore,” “The Women’s Open,” and “Ashes,” as well as a pivotal figure in “Next of Kin,” “C.O.G.,” “True Detective,” and “I Like Guys.” Although her childhood relationship with David is sometimes strained and even antagonistic, he praises her strength of character consistently. Most of her appearances in Naked are as a teenager. Sedaris indicates that she had a propensity to be annoyingly peppy and “joyfully normal.” However, in “Dinah, the Christmas Whore,” he discovers that she is tough, selfless, practical, and kind. This stands in contrast to his own teenage propensity toward self-obsession, languor, cowardice, and frivolity.
Related Titles
By David Sedaris
