The experience teaches Sedaris not to rely on the decisions of adults, who are often more hapless than kids. 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. In the essay “The Ship Shape,” Sedaris recalls his family’s transient interest in buying a beach house. 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. He observes with amazement that they seem to have learned how to entertain themselves with conversation. 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 characterizes his parents and siblings as people who manage to stand out in any community, no matter how liberal or eccentric. The first handful of essays in the collection deal with Sedaris’s early childhood on the East Coast. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim received positive criticism for its vivid portrayal of many peculiarities of suburban American life. The collection, Sedaris’s fifth, focuses primarily on memories of his dysfunctional and eccentric family in North Carolina.
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.
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is a 2004 collection of twenty-two autobiographical essays by American humorist David Sedaris.
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