She regarded her grandchildren as if we were savings bonds, something certain to multiply in value through the majesty of arithmetic. Ya Ya and her husband had produced one child, who in turn had yiel...
She knew what my mother did not: either you want a clean floor or you want to use a mop, but you can’t have both.
May I bring you a drink to go with those warm nuts, Mr. Sedaris? this woman looking after me asked - this as the people in coach were still boarding. The looks they gave me as they passed were the loo...
Making it worse, I had to sit through another endless preview for Titanic. Who do they think is going to see that movie?
Low ceiling, stone walls, a dirt floor stamped with paw prints. I never go in without announcing myself. 'Hyaa!' I yell. 'Hyaa. Hyaa!' It's the sound my father makes when entering his toolshed, the cr...
I’m sure my father said plenty of normal things to me when I was growing up, but what stuck, probably because he said it, like, ten thousand times, was Everything you touch turns to crap. His other ca...
It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it.
If you aren't cute, you may as well be clever.
If I'd been burned alive because of bad grades, my parents would have killed me, especially my father, who meant well but was just a little too gung ho for my taste.
I felt betrayed, the way you do when you discover that your cat has a secret secondary life and is being fed by neighbors who call him something stupid like Calypso.
He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father.He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples.He nice, the Jesus.
Half the people I know have dead animals in their freezers: reptiles, birds, mammals. Is that normal?
After a year, you realize it takes time to rail against injustice, time you might better spend questioning fondue or describing those ferrets you couldn't afford. Unless, of course, social injustice i...
Identify
Yes, I am talking about boat trailers, but also I am dying.
When I bleat here on page seventeen, do you want me to just bleat or to really let go and ‘bleat, bleat’? I asked. I feel like ‘bleat, bleating,’ but if Mother/Destroyer is going to be crawling throu...
What you call your personality, you know?—it’s not the actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It’s more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be exti...
We’re forever blaming the airline industry for turning us into monsters: it’s the fault of the ticket agents, the baggage handlers, the slowpokes at the newsstands and the fast food restaurants. But w...
Were they to charge you ten cents per napkin, they would undoubtedly make them much thinner so you'd need to waste even more in order to fight back the piping hot geyser forever spouting from the litt...
Well, where did it come from? I asked. How did I get it?