In 9th grade, I bought the book, Naked, by David Sedaris. Maybe it was 10th grade, or that summer between grades. I was around fifteen, anyway. I was a big reader, but personal essay collections were not on my radar at the time, so I’m not sure how I came to pick it up, let alone buy it. I could rewrite my history right now and pretend I’ve always been a sophisticated intellectual who knew Sedaris from his appearances on This American Life or had read his first collection, Barrel Fever, which had come out when I was eleven. But alas, as introspective and well-read as I was, I would not listen to my first This American Life episode until my first year of college in an Introduction to Personal Essay class that I ended up in largely because of my spontaneous decision to buy Naked four years earlier.

The truth is I probably bought Naked because that was the same year I tried and failed to read Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and had “naked” on the brain. Also true (probably) was the fact that I was fourteen or fifteen and, in addition to the title, the cover was just a close-up photo of men’s boxer shorts (tee hee!). 

That’s what made me pick it up, anyway. I bought it - either with my own money or by slipping it to whichever parent drove us to Borders - because after skimming through it for less than a minute, I was laughing out loud in the store. His sense of humor was dark and dry like my own; his semi-chaotic, large Greek family was not unlike my semi-chaotic, large Italian one. But, where I was smart, he was insightful. Where I was sarcastic, he was witty. In other words, he was a grown up and I was still a ways away. 

At the time, it didn’t feel like that. It only ever felt like he was speaking directly to me. But isn't that how it always feels when something truly changes you? That same year, or close to it, The Perks of Being a Wallflower became a novel that only I knew about. Buffy, the Vampire Slayer was a show only I truly appreciated. Stories, characters, and songs that make you feel seen and heard, that acknowledges the layers no one else around you seems to see, can’t possibly be made for anyone else. Naked became a book like that for me, but in a completely different way. It was the first time I thought, “I could do this too.” 

Soon, I added other essayists to my shelves. Sarah Vowell and Chuck Klosterman, some Paul Feig and David Rakoff too, each voice representing different aspects of who I was but didn't know how to express. I was a quiet person. I said more in my head than I ever did out loud. It hadn't occurred to me, until these writers showed me through their essays, that writing was a form of speaking. In college, Joan Didion, Mary Karr, and JoAnn Beard became my idols; The Art of Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate a bible of sorts. Even after getting two degrees in creative nonfiction, “personal essayist” didn’t sound like a real job title, but I felt like I had gotten closer to who I wanted to be.

Something I did not fully realize until his later collections, where his essays begin to focus on entering, and then exiting, middle age is that David Sedaris was born the same year as my parents. This doesn’t seem like it should be mathematically possible. He was not someone I grew up watching on TV from afar, some obviously adult man performing for me. He was someone who, no matter what stage of life he was writing from, managed to tap into something I was going through too. I grew up alongside him. A peer, who happened to be twenty-eight years younger than he is. Whether it was me recognizing my own family in his as a teen, or my own views on marriage and general humanity in my twenties, we seemed in sync. 

And now here is his newest collection arriving at the end of my thirties. A theme in Happy-Go-Lucky is confronting the surreal realization that his family is aging, and dying, while acknowledging the reality that, more often than not, he is the only one not with them. I read this while on an eight-hour train ride to my boyfriend’s parents’ house where we were to help them prepare for their eventual move to a retirement community. There had been health scares and falls that, once you reach a certain age, become falls. It was our first time visiting together in nearly a year.

A month earlier, my grandfather died, and I found out about it while on a writer’s retreat in the Poconos. Unable to do anything other than finish out my time there, I stayed for two more nights, stopped home in Brooklyn to sleep, and then took a five-hour drive in a rental car to go to the funeral, where I was one of the few family members who had to travel there at all. Most of my family - and there are many of us - live within a twenty-minute drive of each other, if not closer. They had been there through the “turn” he took, had been able to help plan and prepare and comfort each other. Later that same month, partly because of Covid scares, but also because of how taxing and expensive travel can be, I was absent from a graduation party and a wedding. Like Sedaris, I am happy with my life. I live in a city I’ve wanted to be a part of since I was eight years old. I would not want to call anywhere else my home, and I’m not sure I’d even know how. But still. Still. 

Part of the reason I started this newsletter was to get back to my non-fiction roots. Decades after my opinionated and introspective teen years led to a major in creative writing, decades after grad school and the publishing industry made me less confident in what I had to say, I’m finding myself reminded of the club David Sedaris inspired me to join all those years ago. The one that let me believe that my stories, my family, and my thoughts might matter to someone too. “”Becoming an essayist” is a much cloudier dream than it used to be, and “personal essayist” still doesn’t sound like a real job title to me, but maybe now is the perfect time to dust off that old dream. Now that I am someone who is, herself, about to enter middle age and perhaps, finally, knows what she wants to say.