HappyGoLucky, David Sedaris
HappyGoLucky, David Sedaris
46 Rating(s)
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Happy-Go-Lucky

Bestseller

Author: David Sedaris

Narrator: David Sedaris

Unabridged: 7 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/31/2022


Synopsis

An Audie Award Winner

David Sedaris, the “champion storyteller,” (Los Angeles Times) returns with his first new collection of personal essays since the bestselling Calypso.

Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask—or not—was a decision made mostly on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things. 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.
 
But then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he’s stuck in lockdown, unable to tour and read for audiences, the part of his work he loves most. To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. He vacuums his apartment twice a day, fails to hoard anything, and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine.
 
As the world gradually settles into a new reality, Sedaris too finds himself changed. His offer to fix a stranger’s teeth rebuffed, he straightens his own, and ventures into the world with new confidence. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone’s son. And back on the road, he discovers a battle-scarred America: people weary, storefronts empty or festooned with Help Wanted signs, walls painted with graffiti reflecting the contradictory messages of our time: Eat the Rich. Trump 2024. Black 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. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.

About David Sedaris

American comedian, David Sedaris, decided to put his good humor and social critiques to pen and has we authored several books and short essays that slice through cultural inadequacies and political correctness. He has been deemed a master of satire and an expert observer of the current human condition. He was born in 1956, and has many titles......humorist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. He gives credit to radio host, Ira Glass, for discovering him in a Chicago club and giving him the invaluable opportunity to appear on his weekly radio program. He said it was life changing.

One of his most important accomplishments would be receiving a Grammy nomination for his audio version of, Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls. There are over ten million copies of his books, and they have been translated into 25 languages.

In collaboration with his sister, Amy Sedaris, David has written six plays that have been produced at such places as LA Mama, Lincoln Center, and The Drama Department in New York City. Three have been nominated for Grammys for Best Spoken Word and Best Comedy Album. A recent work is David Sedaris: Live for Your Listening Pleasure. He has also had a film adaptation of his story C. O.G., which was presented at Sundance Film Festival. The various books about him and by him are numerous. Calypso, a book of essays, was punished in 2018, and a second volume of diaries is expected in summer of 2019.

His older Santaland Diaries was a huge success for listeners, so much so, that the New York Times dubbed him "a minor phenomenon".


Reviews

Goodreads review by Carlos Peguer on September 08, 2024

cuando estaba pensando en leer este libro le pregunté a una amiga que qué tal y me dijo: es un viejo gay y rico contando sus excentricidades de viejo gay y rico, te va a gustar. y no estaba equivocada......more

Goodreads review by Krista on February 22, 2022

As for my dad, I couldn’t tell if he meant “You won” as in “You won the game of life,” or “You won overme, your father, who told you — assured you when you were small and then kept reassuring you — that you were worthless.” Whichever way he intended those two faint words, I will take them and, in d......more

Goodreads review by Theresa on July 06, 2022

This book, like all of Sedaris’s books, has laugh-out-loud moments that caused me to make a spectacle of myself when I was on the Light Rail. Beneath the humor are elements of sadness. It’s been a while since I’ve a book by Sedaris, so I’d forgotten just how cruel his father could be. In this memoir......more


Quotes

Praise for Happy-Go-Lucky:

“Sublimely funny… Sedaris is back, doing the thing his readers have come to adore: offering up wry, moving, punchy stories about his oddball family… The pieces range widely, following the path of Sedaris’s travels and his eccentric mind, but a through line involves his nonagenarian father… This is one of the more complicated relationships of Sedaris’s life, and he is unflinching as he tries to understand who his enigmatic father was, and how living with him altered the shape of his own existence.”—Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic

“Sedaris’ signature wit has always thrived on the macabre, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that Happy-Go-Lucky is some of his darkest—and most astute—writing yet… No topic is out of bounds for Sedaris’ acerbic humor and sharp observations.”—Time

“Sedaris is funny—invariably. That’s his gift… Even amid the overwhelming gloom of the pandemic, a summer of unrest and the death of a father toward whom he still has complicated feelings, Sedaris never loses his wit or his crack timing.”—Tyler Malone, Los Angeles Times

“Consistently funny… when you’re dealing with a talent as outsize as Sedaris’s, even the missteps are fairly negligible… Rather, the lasting impression of “Happy-Go-Lucky” is similar to that of Sedaris’s other books: It’s a neat trick that one writer’s preoccupation with the odd and the inappropriate can have such widespread appeal.”—Henry Alford, New York Times Book Review

“Comically blistering… David Sedaris is the standard against which all other humor essayists are judged, the overwhelming heavyweight of the genre… Happy-Go-Lucky could serve as a textbook to readers dealing with the end times of their own parents with whom they don’t get along.”—Brian Boone, Vulture

“A new collection of poignant, honest and funny essays… Sedaris is simultaneously amusing and brutal while unflinchingly exposing the ironies of his family and life in general.”—Anita Snow, Associated Press

“Sedaris has long been frank about his lifelong disconnect with his father, but he has reflected more openly — and movingly — about it since his father reached his nineties… Happy-Go-Lucky is more somber than Sedaris' usual fare, but there are some fresh, funny bits wedged between the weighty boulders.”—Heller McAlpin, NPR

“Engaging… Sedaris recounts his lockdown experience with his customary blend of wry self-deprecation and affable misanthropy.”—Houman Barekat, The Guardian

"Hilarious… much of Sedaris’ humor comes from saying the quiet parts out loud—writing frankly about things most of us never mention."—Collette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times

“Sedaris, a perennial contrarian, has entered into a comfortable late-middle age that could sink a less determined writer… Happily for Sedaris’s fans, it will take more than prosperity to mellow him out: His trademark black humor and puckish misanthropy remain.”—James Tarmy, Bloomberg