Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is a 2004 collection of twenty-two autobiographical essays by American humorist David Sedaris. Each of the essays reflects on a different part of his early life, blending his trademark cynicism with an acute sensitivity to the absurdities of seemingly banal experience. The collection, Sedaris’s fifth, focuses primarily on memories of his dysfunctional and eccentric family in North Carolina. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim received positive criticism for its vivid portrayal of many peculiarities of suburban American life.

The first handful of essays in the collection deal with Sedaris’s early childhood on the East Coast. He characterizes his parents and siblings as people who manage to stand out in any community, no matter how liberal or eccentric. In the first essay, “Us and Them,” Sedaris spies on a neighboring family, the Tomkeys, to try to understand how they manage without television. He observes with amazement that they seem to have learned how to entertain themselves with conversation. Ironically, the young Sedaris concludes that the family is pathetic for failing to adopt a technology that would help them think beyond the contingencies of their own lives.

In the essay “The Ship Shape,” Sedaris recalls his family’s transient interest in buying a beach house. His father deliberates ad infinitum, ultimately talking himself out of his own idea and leaving his children hanging with unfinished idealizations of their beach house. The experience teaches Sedaris not to rely on the decisions of adults, who are often more hapless than kids. At the same time, he relates that his is not the kind of family that would have derived happiness from a beach house anyway. Another essay, “Full House,” touches on Sedaris’s difficulties as a gay teenager. When his father tells him to go to the all-male sleepover of a classmate named Walt, Sedaris struggles with being in the closet around a group of boys. At the party, his friends decide to play strip poker, and one of them sits on Sedaris’s lap while nude. Sedaris recalls the mixed joy and sorrow of the intimate (though mostly illusory and non-sexual) adolescent moment. He realizes that showing affection for his male classmate might cause him years of ostracism, but risks it just for the temporary relief.



“Hejira” deals with the weeks after Sedaris’s father kicks him out of the house. His mother, sympathetic and sobbing, but feeling entirely powerless, drives him to his sister’s place to stay until he finds his own place. Sedaris realizes only in the aftermath of the fight that his father had kicked him out for being gay, rather than jobless and unmotivated. “The Girl Next Door” takes place after the abandonment that was such a formative experience for Sedaris. While trying to make it as an artist in a derelict apartment, he meets a neglected child named Brandi. As he attempts to kindle a friendship and educate her about a better way of life, he develops what he later recognizes is a problematic savior complex. His plot fails: Brandi robs him, and her mother only blames him for being so stupid as to trust the girl. Experiences like these teach Sedaris that there are people much worse off than he ever was, who cannot even conceive of a parent as a nurturing figure.

Sedaris closes with an essay entitled “Nuit of the Living Dead.” Now an adult with a life partner, Hugh, he enjoys a rural life in France for part of each year. One night, when Hugh is out of town, Sedaris fears a zombie invasion. He decides to stay awake through the night, talking himself out of auditory hallucinations by focusing on the sounds of mice in the attic. Soon, he grows fixated on the mice and even saves one from a painful trap by “mercifully” drowning it in his kitchen. Just as this happens, a lost Dutch family knocks on his door to ask for directions and witnesses the morbid scene. After his partner returns, restoring peace, Sedaris fills the drowning bucket with hydrangeas.

The ending of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim aptly summarizes the ambivalence of each of Sedaris’s stories. The essays never arrive at an ultimate thesis, or finally lift the weight off its narrator’s shoulders. Rather, they have intense therapeutic value, capturing Sedaris’s existential anxiety in a difficult and complex modern world.