Summer reads

More than a few times I've alarmed my fellow passengers on airplanes and subways by loudly guffawing -- OK, more like barking -- over some passage in a David Sedaris essay. Once, some years back, I nearly fell out of bed (seriously!) laughing at the description of a French class Sedaris was taking, in which he and classmates from all over the world compared Easter customs in stilted translations that brought their absurdity into sharp relief. And whenever a new essay of his arrives in Esquire or the New Yorker, I gobble it up like ... well ... candy from "the rabbit of Easter," who "come in the night when one sleep on a bed."

In his latest pointedly funny book, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames," Sedaris covers familiar terrain: his quirky childhood in North Carolina; his feckless early adulthood; his life as an expat, living in France with his long-suffering boyfriend, Hugh. Yet as he does, a distinct preoccupation with death -- specifically, with his own mortality -- emerges, along with a certain wistfulness about the choices he's made. Nowhere is this theme more apparent than in "Memento Mori," in which Sedaris describes his response to a 300-year-old skeleton he has given Hugh as a present. "You are going to die," the skeleton repeatedly intones.

"I'd always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call 'understanding' is basically just fantasizing," writes Sedaris. "I think about death all the time, but only in a romantic, self-serving way, beginning, most often, with my tragic illness and ending with my funeral. I see my brother squatting beside my grave, so racked by guilt that he's unable to stand. 'If only I'd paid him back that twenty-five thousand dollars I borrowed,' he says."

The particulars of Sedaris' life may not match our own (do you travel first-class around the country reading your books? Have homes in Paris and Normandy and a boyfriend who can cook, fix or put up with anything?), but his wry observations nevertheless evoke that "Me too!" rush of recognition. Here he vents his irritation with a bereaved seatmate keening too loudly for his dead mother: "It was as if he were saying, 'I loved my mother a lot more than you loved yours." There he describes the delight he takes in the ice cream sundae that comes free with his pricey business-class plane ticket, "each crumb of cashew or walnut eaten separately, the way a bird might." Elsewhere he gloats about beating a 9-year-old kid and an overweight woman with Down syndrome in a swim race. And as he confesses to this vice and that personal failing, Sedaris points us to our own and, in allowing us to laugh at them, absolves us. -- Amy Reiter

"The Importance of Music to Girls" does not resemble a standard memoir -- or at least not the kind in which a writer makes a smooth, easy tale out of half-remembered anecdotes, plucking meaning and lessons from the scattershot mess of daily existence. No, Lavinia Greenlaw's approach to her own coming-of-age story is disorienting and wonderful; she relates the basic details of her experience with such precision and intensity, it almost feels like an alien describing the strangeness of being human.

Growing up in a bohemian British family in the 1960s and '70s, Greenlaw never seems quite at home anywhere. The world's rituals and rules often baffle her, from playground games to the strange hippie clothing that London teenagers are wearing. "I thought that the music must be the key to becoming like them," she muses. Greenlaw latches on to records as a lifeline that carries her through childhood: At 10, she "declares an allegiance" to Donny Osmond; a few years later she is going to local clubs with her girlfriends, dancing to Abba and Bowie, her face daubed with makeup as she tries to figure out how to be "a real girl." When punk hits town in 1977, Greenlaw is inspired to lop off her own hair, and suddenly finds herself in step with a youth culture that treats being weird as a perfectly acceptable aesthetic choice. Music, she writes, "could change the shape of the world and my shape within it, how I saw, what I liked, and what I wanted to look like."

"The Importance of Music to Girls" veers off at crazy angles, a cascade of sensations and observations that is exhausting, but also exhilarating. The book perfectly evokes the sense of release and rebellion of a teenage girl driving through the countryside with boyfriends, blasting heavy metal on the car radio -- "the only thing that could tear a hole in the silence of a Sunday afternoon" -- as well as the pleasure of lying around in a bedroom with a boy you like, listening to melancholy records.

How anyone can remember the contours of childhood consciousness in such detail I don't know; it's either an amazing feat of inventiveness or a terrifying display of total recall. Greenlaw does exhibit a kind of autistic detachment, and there's a maddening vagueness when it comes to some of the major events in her life. Her entire school career is a blur (though she reprints some hilariously disapproving teachers' notes in the margins of one chapter), her virginity is lost but not depicted, and her first love? He's in there, all right, but this is her impressionistic description of their initial encounter at a party: "The usual things happened. Someone was sick. Someone stood on the smoked-glass coffee table and it gave way beneath him ... I could not speak, so I sat and smiled while he talked. Eventually he stopped talking and put his hand on my thigh. I put my hand on top of his and we kissed, but quickly in case someone noticed and we became part of the circus." Once you stop expecting to be titillated by the juicy intimate details of a woman's life, "The Importance of Music to Girls" will sweep you up in much more unexpected ways.

-- Joy Press

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