Calypso

Calypso (2018) is a collection of creative nonfiction essays by humorist David Sedaris. Known for his misanthropic humor and keen observations of humanity’s greatest ironies and hypocrisies, this book is one of his darkest and most personal to date. In Calypso, Sedaris adds a beach house on Emerald Isle to his already impressive international real estate portfolio and expects to spend his time there enjoying his family and playing games but realizes that personal problems are not banished by sand and sun. Thematically, the collection of 21 stories and sketches is both haunted and haunting as Sedaris deals with the unexpected suicide of his estranged sister, witnesses the indignities of old age in his father, and realizes that he is getting older as well. With a blend of regret, humor, and a touch of acknowledged cruelty, Sedaris contemplates the past and present family dynamics.

Threaded throughout many of the stories in the collection is Sedaris’s sister Tiffany. The second story, “Now We Are Five,” opens with the line: “In late May 2013, a few weeks shy of her fiftieth birthday, my youngest sister, Tiffany, committed suicide.” Sedaris goes on to mention that while Tiffany was dirt poor, she left a will cementing the estrangement when, “she decreed that we, her family, could not have her body or attend her memorial service.” The story of Tiffany’s estrangement unfolds slowly, but Sedaris never truly comes to terms with the death or any of the reasons why Tiffany lived like she did. He tries, and fails, to understand the nature of the distance between the family and Tiffany, the way she lived defiantly cash-poor and proud of it. His sister’s death rattles him, and in “The Spirit World,” he drops one of the most gut-wrenching bombs that seems to bother him the most: the image of the last time he saw his sister. After four years of no contact, she comes to his book signing in Boston with Starbucks and wants to talk to him, but he has the porter close the door in her face.

His fractious relationship with his father also preoccupies some of the stories. In “The Comey Memo,” he reflects on his father’s old age, and the last time he visited the house. His father lives like a hoarder and a pauper, even though he has plenty of money saved up and could afford to hire a maid or a driver. It is easy to draw connections between the father’s slow, unimpeded slide into that sort of life and the dissolution of Tiffany and Sedaris’s mother: like Tiffany, he refuses to touch money and lives off as little as possible, and like their mother’s alcoholism, the surviving children let him live alone and keep driving—even though he is no longer fit to do either, anymore—because they are not brave enough or know how to intervene. In “A Number of Reasons I’ve Been Depressed Lately,” he recounts the events leading up to and following the 2016 election, including “a great screaming fight” they have about Donald Trump being president. His father is a diehard Republican, and Sedaris later admits that there is a list of things he avoids talking to his father about, including politics: “He’s always operated on the assumption that I don’t know anything, can’t know anything.” The reason why he avoids these topics now is informed by a creeping sense of mortality and that every time he sees his father could be the last time. He does not want his last interaction with his father to be a fight, or something that will haunt him, like the last time he saw Tiffany.



Sedaris also reflects on the gay experience. “A Modest Proposal” is about gay marriage and the way he never imagined himself marrying or even getting a civil partnership: “the one irrefutably good thing about gay men and lesbians was that we didn’t force people to sit through our weddings.” Nevertheless, he proposes to his partner Hugh when it becomes apparent that there are legal and financial benefits to getting married, particularly if one or the other of them dies. Hugh refuses, and only relents to get Sedaris to let him alone about it—but once Sedaris has time to think about the implications of marriage, the impulse fizzles out and they return to their status quo. In another story that is little more than a two-page sketch, “The One(s) Who Got Away,” Sedaris realizes that he and Hugh have been incredibly lucky over their three-decade relationship. He asks Hugh how many people he slept with before Sedaris, and while Hugh is contemplating a number north of 50 people, Sedaris thinks of the AIDS epidemic and wonders how they both had sex with so many people and still avoided the disease, even before there was a name for it.

Animals also feature throughout the collection. There is a snapping turtle with a tumor on its head that Sedaris is enchanted with. When Sedaris has a tumor removed in “Calypso” (not by a proper doctor, who refuses to give the tumor back to Sedaris, but by a woman with only a year of med school training who does give Sedaris the excised tumor to keep), he wants to feed it to that particular turtle. Later, he finds out that the turtle died, so he feeds his tumor to a bunch of other turtles instead. A fox named Carol that lived around his cottage in Sussex is the star of “Untamed.” He fed her chicken bones and often waited for her to visit, and once went for a walk accompanied by the fox. One day she stops coming around the cottage, and although Hugh maintains that the fox is probably dead, Sedaris prefers to think that someday she’ll come back.

Family is central to Sedaris, and all his stories feature his parents, partner, or siblings in some way. “Boo-Hooey” is about Sedaris’s irritation towards people who talk about ghosts, even though he routinely dreams that he talks to his mother or sister. He grapples with his mother’s alcoholism in “Why Aren’t You Laughing?” Sedaris also showcases his relationships with his sisters Amy and Gretchen during a shopping trip in Japan in “The Perfect Fit.”