The conversations in “ Between-States,” Ann Tashi Slater’s Tricycle Online series, explore bardo concepts like acceptance, interconnectedness, and impermanence in relation to children and parents, marriage and friendship, and work and creativity, illuminating the possibilities for discovering new ways of seeing and finding lasting happiness as we travel through life. The passage from death to rebirth is a bardo, as well as the journey from birth to death. “wondering, as I moved from place to place in this divided, beat-up country of ours, where she was and she what she imagined had become of her panties.In Tibetan Buddhism, “bardo” is a between-state. “I thought of her for months to come,” he wrote. It was a young woman he imagined was the owner of items he spotted in a gutter near a baggage carousel at one airport: among them two pairs of panties, three AA batteries and a brush with long strawberry-blond strands of hair. Going up to a store or a restaurant he’d remembered from an earlier trip, he’d find it “boarded up, or maybe burned out, the plywood that blocked the doors covered with graffiti.”īut the most haunting image was one of a person Sedaris never met face to face. “Its sidewalks were cracked, its mailboxes bashed in.” “The America I saw while on tour in the fall of 2021 was weary and battle-scarred,” Sedaris wrote in one piece in the book, an essay entitled “Lucky-Go-Happy,” published in The New Yorker this spring.

Sedaris also reflects on the little things from pre-pandemic life that he never appreciated before: being handed a restaurant menu, reading banal text messages over a stranger’s shoulder. “What has this world come to?” he wonders. In the airport at Charlotte, North Carolina, he encounters what initially appears to be a fig that turns out to be a turd, most likely a dog’s. Teacher appreciation? Try better pay, more governors say Writing about his teen years, Sedaris is simultaneously amusing and brutal while unflinchingly exposing the ironies of his family and life in general.

In “Happy-Go-Lucky,” a new collection of poignant, honest and funny essays, Sedaris is bothered when he notices the crepe-like skin between one sister’s chest and neck, lamenting that his once beautiful sisters are aging. In one unforgettable piece nearly a decade ago, Sedaris even wrote of his sister Tiffany’s suicide, “Now We are Five.” “Happy-Go-Lucky,” by David Sedaris (Little, Brown and Company)Īlmost everyone has a dysfunctional family, but few expose their relatives’ funny, embarrassing and even disturbing quirks quite like writer and humorist David Sedaris.Īnyone who has read Sedaris’ essays in The New Yorker magazine knows about his large Greek American family and his boyfriend, Hugh, who form an awkward but loving ensemble cast. This cover image released by Little, Brown and Company shows 'Happy-Go-Lucky' by David Sedaris.

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris