When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it’s impossible to take a vacation from yourself.

With Calypso, Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. Make no mistake: these stories are very, very funny – it’s a book that can make you laugh ’til you snort, the way only family can.

Betty Carter singing “Beware My Heart.” The hair on my arms would stand up, and everything else would recede—my shitty life at school, the loneliness and self-loathing I worried every day might drag me under—all of it replaced by unspeakable beauty.

Sedaris’s writing has never been sharper, and his ability to shock readers into laughter unparalleled. But much of the comedy here is born out of that vertiginous moment when your own body betrays you and you realize that the story of your life is made up of more past than future.

This is beach reading for people who detest beaches, required reading for those who loathe small talk and love a good tumour joke. Calypso is simultaneously Sedaris’s darkest and warmest book yet – and it just might be his very best.

Why the 1 star you ask? I didn’t find it funny. Each chapter in this book is devoted to different incidents from David’s life. There is no link between the various chapters. David’s partner and his extended family appear in these chapters based on the subject. Using these chapters, David highlights the interruptions and drivers in our life. He also covers happiness and loss.

As far as memoirs go, I was skipping through chapters, looking for something interesting. There’s a bit but not enough and the narrative is extra fluffy without any content. Example:

“What’s the absolute worst thing you’ve ever heard?”
People lined up with answers, and I learned that, as in all Catholic and Eastern Orthodox countries, the most popular target when on the attack is the other person’s mother. Thus: “I fuck your mother’s dead, I fuck your mother’s Christ, I fuck your mother’s icon, I fuck your mother’s Easter, I fuck your mother’s onion, I will make skis out of your mother’s cross,” and “I fuck your mother’s memorial cake.” This is something you bake when a loved one dies, and there’s a lot of cursing centered around it, the absolute worst being “I dragged my balls across your mother’s memorial cake, from cherry to cherry, and to each of the candles.”
A young woman told me this, and when I repeated it to the fellow who drove me to the airport the following morning and who had previously been chatty, he fell silent.

and

     My father lives on his Social Security. He won’t touch his savings or investments, which are substantial, as he wants to leave as much as possible to his children. It’s what kept him alive during the Obama years, the hope that whoever succeeded him would eliminate the estate tax. It would be the perfect irony, then, for him to get into an accident and lose everything in a lawsuit. Lisa’s fear is that he’ll kill a child. None of the rest of us have gotten that specific, though I suppose she has a point. Killing a toddler sounds a lot worse than killing a fellow ninety-four-year-old.

It just didn’t do it for me.