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Naked is the title of one of the pieces in this collection; one where Sedaris visits a nudist camp:

”Coming from New York it is heartening to walk into a room and know you’re not being judged by your clothes. Still, though, as bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character.��

But it also serves as an apt titled for the collection. Sedaris strips himself nearly defenseless as he uses his own life, childhood, and family drama as his subjects. He delivers sharp, caustic humor that is frequently served along side genuine sadness and pain.

In A Plague of Tics Sedaris paints his childhood self as an absolute wreck �� little more than a collection of nervous tics stacked inside a raincoat. In Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out, he tells of his unlovely grandmother who came to live with his family. Of her he says:

I saw her as a benign ghost, silent and invisible until you needed a little spending money.

Upon learning of her demise while he was away at college, his grief was strictly performative:

My sobs sounded as if I were reading them off a page.

Cyclops was by far the funniest piece here, in which his father has a tale of a different mutilated friend for every dangerous activity he wishes to discourage his children from. There’s the friend whose eye he shot out with a BB gun, the kid he knew who had a table saw blade fly off and split his face, the guy he knew who cut off his own foot with the lawn mower and drove himself to the hospital with his foot in his lap.

But along with the humor, Sedaris delivers real pain. In I Like Guys he discusses growing up in the South gay, with all its accompanying humiliations and shame. And in Ashes his clever, sardonic mother takes center stage with her terminal cancer.

”The cancer, though, I realize it’s my own fault. I’m just sorry that your father’s still around to remind me of that fact every goddamn fifteen seconds.

As with any Sedaris book, make sure to listen to the audiobook. These pieces are meant to be performed, to be heard. Sedaris and his sister Amy do the reading.