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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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When You
Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Burns There
are twenty two essays in the new collection titled, When You
Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris. I laughed out loud at lines in
some of these essays, and throughout most, I sat back and enjoyed the
pleasure of his writing and ability to pick just the right phrase. Smoking is
a theme for many of these essays, including the impact of the author’s
decision to quit smoking. Here’s an excerpt, , from the beginning of the
essay titled, “The Understudy,” pp. 20-22: In the spring of 1967, my
mother and father went out of town for the weekend and left my four sisters
and me in the company of a woman named Mrs. Byrd, who was old and black and
worked as a maid for one of our neighbors. She arrived at our house on a
Friday afternoon, and, after carrying her suitcase to my parents' bedroom, I
gave her a little tour, the way I imagined they did in hotels. "This is
your TV, this is your private sundeck, and over here you've got a bathroom —
just yours and nobody else's." Mrs. Byrd put her hand to her
cheek. -"Somebody pinch me. I'm about to fall out." She cooed again when I opened a
dresser drawer and explained that when it came to coats and so forth we favored
a little room called a closet. "There are two of them against the wall
there, and you can use the one on the right." It was, I thought, a dream for her:
your telephone,
your massive
bed, your glass-doored
shower stall. All you had to do was leave it a little cleaner than you found
it. A few months later, my parents
went away again and left us with Mrs. Robbins, who was also black, and who,
like Mrs. Byrd, allowed me to see myself as a miracle worker. Night fell, and
I pictured her kneeling on the carpet, her forehead grazing my parents' gold
bedspread. "Thank you, Jesus, for these wonderful white people and all
that they have given me this fine weekend." With a regular teenage babysitter,
you horsed around, jumped her on her way out of the bathroom, that sort of
thing, but with Mrs. Robbins and Mrs. Byrd we were respectful and well
behaved, not like ourselves at all. This made our parents' getaway weekend a
getaway for us as well — for what was a vacation but a chance to be someone
different? In early September of that same
year, my parents joined my aunt Joyce and uncle Dick for a week in the Virgin
Islands. Neither Mrs. Byrd nor Mrs. Robbins was available to stay with us,
and so my mother found someone named Mrs. Peacock. Exactly where
she found her
would be speculated on for the remainder of our childhoods. “Has Mom ever been to a women's
prison?" my sister Amy would ask. “Try
a man's prison,"
Gretchen would say, as she was never convinced that Mrs. Peacock was a
legitimate female. The "Mrs." part was a lie anyway, that much we
knew. "She just says she
was married so people will believe in her!!!!" This was one of the
insights we recorded in a notebook while she was staying with us. There were
pages of them, all written in a desperate scrawl, with lots of exclamation
points and underlined words. It was the sort of writing you might do when a
ship was going down, the sort that would give your surviving loved ones an
actual chill. "If only we'd known," they'd moan. "Oh, for the
love of God, if only we had known." But what was there to know,
really? Some fifteen-year‑ old offers to watch your kids
for the night and, sure, you ask her parents about her, you nose around.
But with a grown woman you didn't demand a reference, especially if the
woman was white. Our mother could never remember
where she had found Mrs. Peacock. "A newspaper ad, "she'd say,
or, "I don't know, maybe she sat for someone at the club." But who at the club would have
hired such a creature? In order to
become a member you had
to meet certain requirements,
one of them being that you did not know people like Mrs. Peacock. You did not
go to places where she ate or worshipped, and you certainly didn't give her
the run of your home. Readers
looking for a good laugh and well-written essays will find a lot of pleasure
on the pages of When You
Are Engulfed in Flames. Steve
Hopkins, July 18, 2008 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the August 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/When You Are Engulfed in
Flames.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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