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.
Themes
Complicated Family Dynamics
Much of Naked centers on David Sedaris’s childhood and his relationship with his family. The Sedaris family is portrayed as large and eccentric. The myriad relationships among parents, children, and grandparents are portrayed as both antagonistic and supportive; the Sedarises are loving and supportive at times, but they can also be genuinely dysfunctional—and even abusive.
Sedaris notes that both of his parents had traumatic youths. In “Get Your Ya-Yas Out!” he notes that his father grew up in extreme poverty, a discomfort compounded by Ya Ya’s abnormal “spooky love,” which is implied to be emotionally abusive. Sharon is the daughter of a severe alcoholic who was committed to a psychiatric hospital when she was 16. While in the hospital, he was subjected to extensive shock treatments and experienced psychosis. This experience left him so profoundly disabled that he was unable to recognize Sharon when she visited. In that condition, “Once, thinking she was a nurse, he attempted to slip his hand beneath her skirt” (61). Sharon and Lou’s experiences lead to lifelong emotional dysfunction that affects their parenting.
Sedaris’s portrayal of his father is relatively straightforward and uncomplicated: Louis is emotionally distant, irresponsible, and occasionally abusive. His portrayal of Sharon is more complex. In “A Plague of Tics,” his mother notices his compulsive behaviors but doesn’t intervene. Instead, she incorporates derisive impressions of him into her “routine” and openly mocks his strange behavior with his teachers. In “The Drama Bug,” however, her ribbing is more good-natured. She encourages David’s interest in theater and supports him by attending his performance; even though his role is extremely minor, she insists that he stole the show: “You were the best in the whole show […] I mean it, you walked onto that stage and all eyes went right to you” (84). Although he portrays his mother as gruff, sarcastic, and occasionally mean-spirited, the author frames Sharon’s presence in Naked as an ultimately positive one.
In childhood, Sedaris presents himself and his siblings as a unified group. When they notice that their parents are fighting more than usual, they organize themselves into a functioning team: “The children formed a committee, meeting in the driveway to discuss our parents’ certain divorce” (30). This is similar to the way the children unanimously welcome Dinah into their home and the conspiratorial way that Lisa, David, and Gretchen organize around the discovery of the novel Next of Kin. Less detail is given about their relationships to one another as adults, although their sibling dynamic is implied to be positive, as all the siblings attend Lisa’s wedding and support one another in the wake of Sharon’s cancer diagnosis.
Neuroticism, Anxiety, & Self-Examination
Sedaris portrays himself as a lifelong neurotic. He is plagued by tics, self-loathing, and anxiety from an early age. As an adult, he dubiously wonders, “What kind of a person would I be if I were naturally happy?” (213). Memoirs as a genre call for self-scrutiny, serving as a form for indulging the tendency to overanalyze or fixate on one’s own actions.
David’s neuroticism first appears in the form of OCD. As a child, he is compelled to perform extensive ritualized compulsions which are motivated by uncertainty and a desire for exactitude. As he describes in “I Like Guys,” David’s self-loathing as he struggles to accept that he is gay also causes his compulsivity to spike. His adolescent terror in regard to sexuality extends past his own identity: After reading an erotic novel about incest, he (along with his siblings) becomes fixated on the idea that his parents will sexually prey on him. This, along with his propensity to lie and create fake identities for himself, reveals a consistent defensiveness, desire to conceal himself, and fear of violation. This is evident in his bedtime behavior after the discovery of the novel: “We waited. I’d always made it a point to kiss my mother before going to bed, but not anymore. The feel of her hand on my shoulder now made my flesh crawl” (40). Sedaris’s desire for privacy and his conflicted attitudes toward sex are central themes of Naked and culminate in his reluctant exploration of nudism.
Sedaris initially treats nudism as a nuclear option intended to cure him of his body image issues. His first few days at the nudist park are characterized by his horror at being confronted by the nudity of others and his fear of being exposed. Initially, he is unwilling to be naked even when alone and in private. On his first day outside in complete nudity, he spies his reflection in another park guest’s sunglasses and beholds his own “fidgety nakedness.” Ultimately, inuring himself to nudism is a trial by fire for his anxiety around privacy and self-image.
The Blurring of Reality and Fantasy
Sedaris blends reality and fantasy throughout Naked. His purposeful muddying of fact and fiction connects to his childhood desire for simultaneous truth—as in the certainty he pursued through performing his compulsions—and obscurity—as in his feverish attempts to conceal being gay. It is also the antithesis of the literal and figurative nudity he explores in “Naked,” wherein the truth is unflinchingly bared. Perhaps most importantly, this theme intertwines with the motif of performances. David is a serial liar as a youth, a behavior that he retroactively associates with his interest in theater, TV, performance, and fiction. He even connects this interest to his need for truth: “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” (85). Sedaris’s active disregard for factual accuracy in these essays renders Naked a performance of a memoir; thus, Naked metatextually mirrors its subject, the always-performing young David.
Sedaris explicitly recounts his performative behavior in Naked, but he also gestures to this performativity through his literary craft. His essays present hyperbolic accounts from his life with rich metaphorical and thematic import.
Sometimes, the blurring of falsehood and truth in Naked is explicit. He portrays himself and others lying frequently in medias res. For example, while hitchhiking, David improvises fake life stories just to amuse himself; his sister adopts a new persona at summer camp; and his father tells endless gory lies in “Cyclops.” The author portrays himself and the people in his stories as unrepentant liars.
Sedaris also uses hyperbole as an obvious literary device. In “Cyclops,” he describes the sight of a dying cat in fantastical terms: “‘You killed me,’ the cat said, pointing at my mother with its flattened paw. ‘Here I had so much to live for, but now it’s over, my whole life wiped out just like that.’ The cat wheezed rhythmically before closing its eyes and dying” (44). While this section is not explicitly about playing with the truth in the same way as his depictions of lies in medias res, it is an overt example of stretching the truth. Sedaris writes of the dying cat’s final words as if they really happened, but it is clear that this passage is exaggerated for comedic effect.
Sedaris’s use of hyperbole also veers into the territory of taking authorial liberties and even outright lying. For example, journalist Alex Heard takes issue with his description of being bitten by a patient at Dix Hill, who doesn’t let go until another employee beats her with his shoe. Heard remarks:
[The events in “Dix Hill” seem] beyond the boundaries of comic exaggeration. It's fine to use absurdly embellished descriptions for laughs—this is an essential tool for any humorist. If I write, ‘I was so hung over, I threw up my own skeleton,’ you know I'm kidding. It's not fine to pretend—in a long and detailed scene—that you performed outlandish, dangerous tasks at a mental hospital when you didn't. And Sedaris definitely didn't. When I asked him about his duties at Dix, he said, in that gentle voice so many people know and love, ‘It would have been more like helping set up parties.’ That cleared it up. Everything in Naked was true, except for the parts that weren't. (https://newrepublic.com/article/63463/american-lie-midget-guitar-teacher-macys-elf-and-thetruth-about-david-sedaris)
Unlike the stories about lies and the overt use of comedic hyperbole, examples like the Dix Hill incident are both harder to identify and harder to parse. Heard managed fact check “Dix Hill” to a certain extent because the hospital is a real place with records of its history, but private incidents—such as the events of “Get Your Ya-Yas Out!” “C.O.G.,” and “Dinah, the Christmas Whore”—are impossible to verify. It is possible that Sedaris’s life really is as zany as he makes it out to be; it is possible that these events are “exaggerated” and partly-true; it is also possible that some of the events described in Naked are completely fictional.
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