I went to a reading recently. The author was young, earnest, and talked about her “grief work” for twenty minutes. I wanted to like her book. I didn’t. I thought about David Sedaris instead. He would have made the whole thing funny somehow. That’s his trick, isn’t it? He takes the heavy stuff and somehow it doesn’t feel heavy when he hands it back to you.
The Land and Its People is Sedaris’s first collection since Happy-Go-Lucky. It’s also his best in maybe a decade. I’ll be honest: I thought he was losing steam. The last couple books felt tired. Like he was going through the motions. This one is different. This one has teeth.
What a Grumpy Old Man Teaches Us About Grief
Sedaris has always been the guy who tells the ugly truth about himself. The petty thoughts. The mean observations. The things we all think but don’t say. In this collection, he’s older. His partner Hugh just had hip surgery. Sedaris becomes a caretaker, and he’s terrible at it. He buys his sister a very expensive cashmere cape. He argues with a Duolingo bot about his brother. He gets bitten by a dog in Portland.
The portrait that emerges is of a man who knows he’s running out of time. He scrolls through his address book and realizes so many names belong to dead people. He visits old friends. He remembers old lovers. He walks forty miles in a day with his friend Dawn and challenges her to eat a truck tire. She tries. That’s the thing about Sedaris’s world: the people in it are weird and loyal and they really will try to eat a truck tire if you ask nicely.
But here’s what gets me. Sedaris never tells you to feel sad. He just shows you the thing. The empty chair. The friend who died. The lover who cheated. And then he makes a joke. Not to hide from the sadness, I think. More like to prove he can carry it.
The Art of Looking Sideways
The core theme here is attention. Sedaris pays attention to everything. The way a woman on the street talks to him late at night. The way a train passenger vomits in his face. The way his father was a monster and also somehow not a monster. He notices the small things because the small things are where life actually lives.
The key imagery in this collection is walking. Sedaris walks everywhere. Twenty miles. Thirty miles. Forty-three miles in one day. He walks through cities and countryside and his own memories. Walking is how he thinks. How he processes. How he keeps moving even when everything in his life is telling him to stop.
There’s a moment where he describes walking with his dying friend. They don’t talk about death. They talk about the weird bird they saw. The terrible coffee at the rest stop. The way the light falls through the trees. Sedaris understands that the big stuff is too big to look at directly. You have to look at it sideways. Through the corner of your eye.
I realized something reading this book. Sedaris isn’t really a humorist. He’s a philosopher who happens to be funny. He’s asking the same questions as the earnest young author at that reading. He’s just asking them better.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Alive
What makes this collection special is how it holds two things at once. The grief and the joke. The cruelty and the kindness. The knowledge that everyone you love will die and also that the cashmere cape is really, really nice.
Sedaris visits the Vatican with a group of famous funny people. He buys a priest’s cassock. He goes on safari in Kenya and takes no photos. He gets sexually harassed on a street corner—or maybe he doesn’t. “Look how hard it is to be alive,” he writes. And he means it. Not as complaint. As observation.
The book’s title is The Land and Its People. It sounds like a textbook. A boring geography assignment. But that’s the joke, I think. Sedaris is giving us a report on the only geography that matters: the messy, ridiculous, heartbreaking terrain of being human. The land is the world. The people are everyone he’s ever loved and lost.
I finished this book on a Sunday morning. I sat in my kitchen and didn’t move for a while. I thought about my own address book. The people I should call. The people I can’t call anymore. I thought about how Sedaris makes me want to pay better attention. To walk farther. To notice the weird bird. To try to eat the truck tire if someone asks.
That’s what he does. He makes you want to live your life more fully. Not because he tells you to. Because he shows you how it’s done. With all the mess and the grief and the laughter. Especially the laughter.
Maybe that’s what a good book does. It doesn’t fix anything. It just shows you that someone else is carrying the same weight. And that it’s okay to laugh while you carry it.
