David Sedaris

I’m not sure how it is in small families, but in large ones relationships tend to shift over time.

What can I do to make him like me? I used to wonder. The harder I tried to mold myself into the sort of son I thought he wanted, the more contemptuous he became, and so eventually I quit trying and founded the opposition party, which I still lead to this day. Whatever he’s for, I’m against. Almost.

Who does this—goes to the shows of people they’re supposed to be proud of and counts the empty seats?

“Actually, it’s a good question,” Lisa said. “What is a uterus lined with? Blood vessels? Nerves?”
“Your family,” Hugh said. “I can’t believe the things you talk about when you’re together.”

When visitors leave, I feel like an actor watching the audience file out of the theater, and it was no different with my sisters.

The show over, Hugh and I returned to lesser versions of ourselves.

thinking all the while about my ever-shrinking family.

All of us had pulled away from the family at some point in our lives—we’d had to in order to forge our own identities, to go from being a Sedaris to our own specific Sedaris.

Perhaps she was more forthcoming with her friends, but her family got things only in bits and pieces.

She didn’t talk with us so much as at us, great blocks of speech that were by turns funny, astute, and so contradictory it was hard to connect the sentence you were hearing with the one that preceded it.