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The writer’s affable misanthropy and self-deprecation are on display in a new set of reflections on life and deathDavid Sedaris lives in West Sussex – where he has attained local treasure status thanks to his proclivity for late-night litter-picking – but spent the Covid lockdowns in New York. As a self-confessed attention junkie, the enforced hiatus hit him hard. Of the live audiences he misses, he writes: “It’s not just their laughter I pay attention to but also the quality of their silence” – and you can’t replicate that over Zoom. In this new memoir, Sedaris recounts his lockdown experience with his customary blend of wry self-deprecation and affable misanthropy. He recalls how the pandemic prompted an outbreak of competitive piety – a “new spirit of one-downmanship” – among ordinary Americans: “It was a golden era … for the self-righteous.”Happy-Go-Lucky is made up of 18 short essays, several of them set in the very recent past, others reminiscing about earlier times: a late-90s sojourn in Normandy; amusing exchanges with taxi drivers in eastern Europe; a visit to a shooting range in his native North Carolina with his sister, Amy. At a graduation address to students of Oberlin college in Ohio he urges the assembled youngsters to reject priggish philistinism: “The goal is to have less in common with the Taliban, not more.” Continue reading...