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They are three unlikely stars of American letters – their unsteady, vulnerable voices can be heard through their writing and on the radio – but David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, and David Rakoff are the crowned triumvirate of humor prose. Their published memoirs wrought with witty failure and anxiety have charmed and amused the in-crowd. 

At some point in their creative and professional life, each of the three discovered the most rewarding things they could write about are themselves. Their work has appeared in a variety of print and on-line magazines catering to first-person essays, and their most significant claim to fame has been their regular appearances on the public radio program “This American Life.” On Monday, April 29 they will be reading and speaking for the already sold-out audience at Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. 

That these people can write well is evident in their books; the question of whether they can speak well is another issue. Their appearance on a public radio program is anomalous, considering Sedaris’ high-pitched whine, Vowell’s low, droning delivery, and Rakoff’s brittle sarcasm make them ill suited in the public radio tradition of warm, earnest tones. But “This American Life” and it’s ringleader Ira Glass have been striving to lower pubic radio down from its own lofty petard, and the dry irony of these three writers and their unique voices are instrumental to that end. 

The star of the show is headliner David Sedaris, whose best-selling collections “Barrel Fever,” “Naked,” and “Me Talk Pretty One Day” have made him a literary celebrity. Once a professional housecleaner by trade, a North Carolina transplant in Paris via Manhattan, a one-time Santa’s helper, Sedaris’ writings create an image of a pitiable man profoundly out of synch with his surroundings. He so gracefully stitches together the ugly and idiotic antics human beings are prone to, so sparkling is his own defacement, that authenticity is called into question. While reading “Me Talk Pretty One Day” one cannot help but wonder, while chuckling, if his sister really wore padded “fat pants” home for Thanksgiving, or if his redneck brother really greets his aging  

father with a hearty slap on the back and an affectionate, "How are ya, Bitch?" 

His first book, "Barrel Fever," does include pieces of short fiction, but even if all details aren’t the gospel truth his adventures in the strange and the mundane eke out humor from bizarre habits and banal eccentricities. Bathroom adventures included. During a "This American Life" broadcast he related a story from his youth during a Greek summer camp, wherein his pre-adolescent social awkwardness did not allow him to empty his bowels for weeks. Eating in the mess hall, he said, was like "packing a musket." In "Me Talk Pretty One Day" an entire essay, "Big Boy," is about trying to discretely flush "…this long coiled specimen, as thick as a burrito." 

In the essay "A Shiner Like A Diamond," Sedaris writes that his nonplussed father says to him, "What you don’t know could fill a book," and that’s just what Sedaris seems to have done. "Me Talk Pretty One Day" chronicles his inability to teach a writing class, to learn French, to do crossword puzzles, to draw upon an interesting childhood for inspiration (the memoirist tells us "…compared to [his boyfriend] Hugh’s, my childhood was unspeakably dull"), and, amazingly, to speak. From a speech impediment in the fifth grade to his leaden-tongued French, the man who owes his popularity in some degree to his appearance on a syndicated radio program admits his voice is no great shakes, really. 

The voice of Sarah Vowell is not a dollop of honey, either. The young writer who works as a contributing editor on "This American Life," and whose cynical, colloquial prose has been published as "Take The Cannoli" has the voice of a bad hangover. Her grouchy, unenthused delivery has spread the post-hip "This American Life" sound to an array of disaffected imitators.  

Her writing is closest of the three to the spirit of the radio show’s title. Vowell’s essays are often personal struggles to come to terms with the state of American life and how it evolved. Many of the writings in "Take The Cannoli" are investigations of the state of the American timeline, with one hand clutching historical reverence and the other reaching out for cheeseburgers and radio-friendly pop songs. Dashing between glib irony and sober history lessons (see "Michigan and Wacker" – a history of American as seen from a Chicago intersection, or "What I See When I Look At The Face On The $20 Bill") Vowell strikes a note of apology when she admits to crave the pap of pop culture in the middle of her well-informed cultural observations. 

"I’m a meaning junkie," she writes. Her essays have a relentlessly seeking quality, and to read them is to witness her brain stretching to eke out significance from every experience. And while that sometimes makes for interesting writing, it makes her, by her own admission, and irritating travel companion. "I can’t go for more than a few miles without agonizing and picking apart every symbolic nuance of every fact at my disposal." 

From Oklahoma and coming up through Bozeman, Montana and later San Francisco, Vowell’s vision of American is informed by historical curiosity and the ache of a restless country girl. She sets off to stand on the places where, like oracles, the seeds of our culture have spoken: the Chelsea Hotel in New York, the birthplace of Frank Sinatra (Hoboken, NJ), the Sicily of Martin Scorcese, the genocide along the Cherokee’s Trail of Tears, and Walt Disney World. 

Vowell visited Walt Disney World with her friend and stage partner David Rakoff, and the experience comes up in both of their writings. The factory of mouse-ear skullcaps is easy prey for jaded pot shots by culturati, but both Vowell and Rakoff eventually come to a sidelong appreciation for the land that Mickey built.  

See SEDARIS/Page 22 

Like Vowell, Rakoff’s essays are often personal accounts of his travels, but unlike his friend Rakoff is an accidental tourist. The urban, gay, Jewish Manhattanite is constantly going to places where he will feel most uncomfortable and disoriented. 

Preparing to go mountain climbing on Christmas Day, an activity causing him no little consternation, he fixes his ire on his new hiking boots. "I have come to hate these Timberlands with a fervor I usually reserve for people." His cold cynicism produces streams of snide insults and dismissive eye-rolling which is carried in his droll, world-weary voice one comes to expect from an urban, gay, Jewish Manhattanite. 

The title of his collection of writing, "Fraud," is explained in the first essay when he admits the central drama of his life is being a fraud, and then immediately rescinds the remark: "Actually, the central drama in my life is being lonely and staying thin, but fraudulence gets a fair amount of play." With a taste for Xanax and kitsch – as long as it’s ironic (pillows embroidered with golfing slogans must be presented with a wink) – Rakoff is not so biting or so fraudulent as to miss the fascinating and the sublime. 

During a week-long Buddhist retreat for mostly white, mostly middle-aged New-Agers, hosted by questionably authentic Buddhist Steven Segal (star of the action films "Marked For Death" and "Exit Wounds") Rakoff takes time to admire the actual intelligence and humor of the retreat’s ego-centric master. The Christmas Day mountain climbing adventure, after much fretting with his country hosts ("I have very little patience for what is generally labeled ‘charming’"), culminates in a lengthy appreciation for the beauty of unabridged nature; a New Yorker standing on a summit: "the air is clear and cold as vodka." 

While American culture is not wanting in irony and cynicism, nor self-indulgence, these three first-person writers strive, and sometimes succeed, at uncovering their own dualities and vulnerabilities cowering underneath the snappy punch lines capping the ends of their paragraphs. That flicker of warmth in their flawed voices has contributed to their popularity.