num_pages: 272
description: David Sedaris the champion storyteller ( Los Angeles Times ) returns with his first new collection of personal essays since the bestselling Calypso Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper and wearing a maskor notwas a decision made mostly on Halloween David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things. As Happy-Go-Lucky opens he is learning to shoot guns with his sister visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia buying gummy worms to feed to ants and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes. But then the pandemic hits and like so many others hes stuck in lockdown unable to tour and read for audiences the part of his work he loves most. To cope he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city smelling only his own breath. He vacuums his apartment twice a day fails to hoard anything and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine. As the world gradually settles into a new reality Sedaris too finds himself changed. His offer to fix a strangers teeth rebuffed he straightens his own and ventures into the world with new confidence. Newly orphaned he considers what it means in his seventh decade no longer to be someones son. And back on the road he discovers a battle-scarred America: people weary storefronts empty or festooned with Help Wanted signs walls painted with graffiti reflecting the contradictory messages of our time: Eat the Rich. Trump 2024. Black Lives Matter. In Happy-Go-Lucky David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected hilarious and poignant about these recent upheavals personal and public and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. If we must live in interesting times there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.
language: English
title: Happy-Go-Lucky
publisher: Little, Brown and Company