The Best of Me

by David Sedaris

If you read an essay in Esquire and don’t like it, there could be something wrong with the essay. If it’s in The New Yorker, on the other hand, and you don’t like it, there’s something wrong with you.

There is literally nothing you can print anymore that isn’t going to generate a negative response. This, I believe, was brought on by the Internet. It used to be that you’d write a letter of complaint, then read it over, wondering, Is this really worth a twenty-five-cent stamp? With the advent of email, complaining became free.

Just as we can never really tell what our own breath smells like, I will never know if I would like my writing.

There’s an Allan Gurganus quote I think of quite often: “Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they’ll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you’ve changed into that very simple shape.”

Following a brief period of hard-won independence she came to appreciate the fact that people aren’t foolish as much as they are kind. Peg understood that at a relatively early age. Me, it took years.

my heart expanded to encompass all the wonders and possibilities of the universe. A bell, though—that’s fucked up.

It was a kind of test, as was the okra.

Bedroom suites were fine for people like my parents, but as an artist I preferred to rough it. Poverty lent my little dabblings a much-needed veneer of authenticity, and I imagined myself repaying the debt by gently lifting the lives of those around me, not en masse but one by one, the old-fashioned way. It was, I thought, the least I could do.