“Oh, you know,” I said to my friend Adam, who produces a good number of my events and who rode with me to the airport an hour or so after I had finished my breakfast. Then I couldn’t remember the guy’s name for the life of me. They’re on the carpet and look as if they belong to a wealthy ghost who’s just scooted over to make room for you. I’m never the one paying for the room, so I’m spared the part where you lie awake and wonder if it’s really worth six or seven or eight hundred dollars just so someone can creep in while you’re out and arrange a pair of slippers beside your freshly turned-down bed.

The audience was lovely, though, and I liked my hotel, which, at the end of the day, is really what it’s all about. The last show I did before COVID-19 robbed me of my livelihood was in Vancouver, British Columbia, in a theatre I didn’t much care for, a rock house with a grim, cramped lobby and the sort of dressing room you see in movies about performers who overdose on drugs because their dressing rooms are so depressing. I always loved my work, or at least the part of it that was public and involved reading out loud. Many felt that they had taken their jobs for granted, but not me. A few months later the Sandy Hook massacre happens.Throughout the worst of the pandemic, I, like everyone, thought of the many things I’d failed to appreciate back when life was normal: Oh, to be handed an actual restaurant menu to stand so close to a stranger that you can read the banal text messages that are obviously more important to him than his toddler stumbling off the curb and out into traffic. The experience leaves Sedaris cold (although Lisa displays natural aptitude). He describes a visit years ago to a shooting range with his sister Lisa, who decides on a whim they should learn how to use guns. The book’s first essay, “Active Shooter,” is certainly more timely than Sedaris might have hoped. Seeing Hugh’s sorrow, though, is “When you realize you’d give anything to make that other person stop hurting, if only so he can tear your head off again.” Sedaris, raised in hurricane country, isn’t much surprised.

But it turns poignant when the Sea Section, the vacation home on Emerald Isle, North Carolina, they all share, is destroyed by Hurricane Florence. The first part of “Hurricane Season” is a funny account of his relationship with Hugh and the bickering between Hugh and the Sedaris family. He writes about other kinds of loss as well. Lou was a character, Sedaris realizes, but that’s what created the tight bond among his children - having to deal with him. They have to tackle the condition of their childhood home, where Lou has been hoarding for several decades - his clothes, some so old they’re rotting, “filled seven large closets, one of them a walk-in, and hung off the shower-curtain rods in all three bathrooms.” Some of the essays reveal less than wonderful details about Lou, like his sometimes cruel or creepy behavior toward his kids.

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris