Summer Reads: True Confessions
What could be tantalizing than a few true confessions to while the hours away. Salon’s staff is recommending summer books that transport you to new places without making you go through airport security. {Amen!} Previous weeks featured thrillers and chick lit.
In this third installment, the spotlight is on first-person narratives: a young reporter sets out on ill-advised “American safari” across the West; David Sedaris humorously dabbles with the darker sides of his life; a former British punk recounts her musical youth; an alcoholic leads us through his recovery process; and a writer describes his attempts (via knitting, musical theater and sex) to be the gayest man ever.
The Pacific Crest Trail, which stretches 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada, is one of the longest and most scenic hiking trails in North America. It winds through California, Oregon and Washington, and passes through some of the most rugged terrain in the country. As Dan White’s travel memoir, “The Cactus Eaters,” makes clear, it’s not for the faint of heart or tender of foot: Hikers can go up to 200 miles without encountering signs of civilization, and because of the trail’s length and difficulty, only about 120 people complete it every year. More than half of those who begin the trip do not finish it.
“The Cactus Eaters” is White’s spirited and amusing account of his journey along the Pacific Crest — equal parts adventure story, history lesson and relationship log. For White, the ruggedness of the trail offered an escape hatch from the doldrums of adult life. Before embarking on the trip, he was dreadfully bored with his job as a reporter at a newspaper in Torrington, Conn., where the paper’s lax editorial standards allowed for, among other errors, the printing of two consecutive Wednesday issues in the same week. Upon hearing about the trail, he persuaded his girlfriend, Melissa, to join him as he quit his job, abandoned his apartment and set out on what he called “an American safari.”
The trip, however, seemed troubled from the start. Setting out in Southern California, the two were clearly overpacked — their baggage included a John McPhee anthology and a kite. They were also frightfully inexperienced: Their previous hiking experiences had involved little more than day trips and an aborted attempt to walk the Connecticut section of the Appalachian Trail. Most ominous, Melissa succumbed to food poisoning on the journey’s first day and quickly began throwing up. In the weeks that followed, the couple’s fortunes improved. But they still managed to run out of water, get lost and have their water filter sexually assaulted by salamanders. They also spent an inordinate amount of time bickering about each other’s commitment. To his credit, White paints a remarkably unflattering portrait of himself, as a childish companion and boyfriend whose grand visions of the hike often threaten to tear the duo apart. It doesn’t help that he’s a frightfully poor decision maker, who, at one point, tried to extract water from a cactus (an attempt that ended with several dozen spikes embedded in White’s face).
Although the act of walking doesn’t often recommend itself as a topic of long-form nonfiction, “The Cactus Eaters” manages to be both eminently readable and fun. White breaks up his narrative with colorful tangents about the trail’s history, and describes the couple’s misadventures with witty, vivid prose. Although some of his epiphanies (about the spiritual nature of hiking, for example) seem a bit contrived, his breezy tone keeps his momentum from sagging, and the couple’s happier moments balance out their more dire predicaments. All in all, “The Cactus Eaters” is the perfect summer read for those of us who love being outdoors, but don’t mind, every once in a while, letting somebody else do the walking.
“When You Are Engulfed in Flames” by David Sedaris
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.
