The Best of Me - Thoughts & Reactions

CJ Laux
Dr. Ellis
EN446-01
8 February 2023

The Best of Me Reflection

    The sections of David Sedaris’s The Best of Me that resonated with me the most were the ones that revolved around his relationship with his family. Sedaris is part of what he refuses to describe as a “dysfunctional” family—he says, arguing against the term, “I like to think that the affection I have for my family is apparent. Well into our adulthoods…we’re still on good terms. We write one another, we talk. We take vacations together. I just can’t see the dysfunction in that” (Sedaris 6). The dynamic he describes, a family with many oddities and points of friction but still very tight-knit and loving, is quite similar to how I would characterize my own family. Indeed, throughout my reading of his work, I found myself struck time and time again by the amount that his stories resonated with me, which one might not expect given how specific he is in his anecdotal style of storytelling. In fact, his specificity only serves to make his writing more relatable to me as a reader: while there were many instances where I didn’t have an exact experience to compare with instances Sedaris brought up, such as his culture shock experiences of moving across states, this made the effect more impactful when I did see my own family in the stories Sedaris tells.
    Personally, my favorite chapter was “Repeat After Me,” in which he details the relationship between himself and his eldest sister, Lisa. Lisa is a paranoid, intellectual oldest child with a tendency to ramble and a soft spot for animals—her nervous disposition is not told to the reader outright so much as it is shown clearly, and repeatedly. She leaves an incredibly thorough note for Sedaris when he house-sits for her for less than an hour, a note that “reflected a growing hysteria…She left her work number, her husband’s work number, and the number of the next-door neighbor, adding that she didn’t know the woman very well, so I probably shouldn’t bother her unless it was an emergency” (Sedaris 116). This paragraph alone made me laugh out loud, as well as transported me several hundred miles north to Saratoga Springs. This woman was a spiritual relative of my godmother. Seeing my own experiences reflected in Sedaris’s made the humor all the more effective for me, as well as the genuine emotional beats of the story.