In “Dinah, the Christmas Whore,” Sedaris shows how he reacts to his mother: “Whore. That lady is a whore.” “I’m not certain what reaction I was after, but shock would have done quite nicely.” Instead, my mother said, “Well, then, we should probably offer her a drink” (117). This is a surprising account of Sedaris learning his mother response towards his sister friend who was prostitute. He realized that “ We were the only family in the neighborhood with a prostitute in our kitchen ” (120). Sedaris realizing that his mother is not upset by the fact that there is a prostitute in the house make him feel that there is something wrong with his family.
In the essay “Ashes,” he reasons the reality of his mother’s illness to a chain smoker dying of cancer: “I’d heard of people who had survived cancer…with the aid of whole grains and spiritual publications that encouraged them to sit quietly in a lotus position ” (237). In fact, quite the opposite, she greeted the dawn chain-smoking and saw it off with a bottle of hard. “In her own way, she had already begun to check out…” he writes, “it was her hope to die before one of us landed in jail” (239). At the end of “Ashes,” he seriously questions his rejection of the world by recounting a moment of critical failure on his own part. He attempts to comfort his suffering mother by trapping her in a last moment affectionate comfort by saying, “I’ve heard what you’re going through and I know that you’re frightened. You’re frightened because you think you’re alone” (242). His mother’s response confronts Sedaris comfort: “I’m frightened because you’re crushing what’s left of my goddamned lungs,” she says (243). In this extract from Ashes we can see that Sedaris balances humor with a touching tenderness about his mother's fatal struggle with cancer. He uses words like “You’re frightened because you’re alone” to his mother at the brink of the death makes his humor totally irreverent.
In terms of the relations among the family members, he recalls one of the most memorable moments was when his sister attempted to play some old videotape the late Mrs. Sedaris had left her and learns that golf tournaments had been recorded over by the father. This clearly shows that the father had no feeling towards Sedaris’s mother. The whole family was into some big crisis as nobody was sincere with another. They all acted differently and showed that they were all just living together and no one had any feeling towards each other.
In the essay “Get Your Ya Ya Out,” Sedaris showed the relationship to be divided among the family members. He mentions his mother and grandmother not getting along too well because his mother was not of Greek origin. This showed indifferences among them to the extent that they all struggled to survive the abandoned state of their relationships. Sedaris puts an acid spin on it and makes it funny, from his painful-to-read struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder that he eventually cures with a cigarette addiction, to his inability to find work after college. His sense of humor can also be seen in the essay “I like guys,” where he challenges his sexuality. He looks into himself as a person who is confused about his sexual identity, even though after sleeping with a boy at the camp he is still not sure about his sexual orientation whether he wants to be a gay or just a straight guy.
Sedaris tried through narration to become a master, at least of interpretation. He narrated
an unforgiving state of his disordered home and his relationship with his family members
by using a humorous approach which showed no respect towards the problems faced by
the family as a whole.
