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.
