Review of The Land and Its People: Essays by David Sedaris

Sedaris's first collection of essays in four years offers his delightfully jarring observations and rejection of social niceties, including a hilarious emotional reliance on Duolingo, various entertaining and nerve-racking encounters, and powerfully poignant reflections on his decades-long friendship with his best friend.

In David Sedaris's latest book of essays, The Land and Its People, his first in four years, he brings his offbeat humor, acerbic observations, and surprising heart to recounting stories about travel, adventures, mishaps, shortcomings, true friendship, love, families, loss, aging, and the complicated, fascinating, sometimes disappointing nature of human beings.

The author takes a striking or absurd situation and follows it through an uncomfortable series of twists and turns, or pushes it to its limit; this is wonderful. In The Land and Its People, he specifically dives into his emotional reliance on Duolingo and its AI character; recounts his unwilling, unreliable, and abandoned caregiver role after his husband Hugh's surgery; shares the circumstances surrounding meeting the pope, which peripherally involved Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Sedaris's order for a custom vestment; and offers a strange and lovely account of his decades-long best-friendship with Dawn.

This year Sedaris revealed for the first time that his longtime partner Hugh has secretly (even from Sedaris's family) been his husband for ten years, and here, he notes the dry financial reasoning for the official union alongside wry observations about their relationship.

As always, Sedaris delivers enough edge to keep me feeling slightly, delightedly nervous about what's to come, yet much of the time he manages to end essays on a thoughtful or surprisingly heartwarming note. Some of the poignancy in his essays shows up when you read between the lines, which feels only fitting for his sharp observations and his often-barbed voice. The final lines of the essays felt at times a little bit sentimental or cute, but he does have to wrap these up, after all.

I listened to The Land and Its People as an audiobook through my library and Libby. The percussion between his essays (all recorded at live performances) in the audiobook felt jarring to me; I wondered if my "cut out that racket" reaction was simply full old-ladydom setting in and/or if it was a deliberately mischievous move designed to induce it.

More Sedaris and Other Essays

David Sedaris is also the author of Happy-Go-Lucky, The Best of Me, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Santaland Diaries, and other books.

You might also like these Bossy reviews of other collections of essays.