Excerpt from Calypso by David Sedaris, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Three of my sisters visited us in Sussex the Christmas of 2012, so Gretchen and Amy took a guest room each. Hugh and I gave Lisa the master bedroom and moved next door to the converted stable I use as my office. One of the things he noted during their stay was that, with the exception of Amy and me, no one in my family ever says goodnight. Rather, they just leave the room—sometimes halfway through dinner—and reappear the following morning. My sisters were considered my guests, but because there was a group of them and they could easily entertain one another, I was more or less free to go about my business. Not that I didn't spend time with them. In various pairings we went on walks and bike rides, but otherwise they sat in the living room talking, or gathered in the kitchen to study Hugh at the stove. I'd join them for a while and then explain that I had some work to do. This meant going next door to the stable, where I'd switch on my computer and turn to Google, thinking, I wonder what Russell Crowe is up to.

One of the reasons I'd invited these three over—had gone so far as to buy their tickets—was that this felt like a last hurrah. Except for Paul, who has no passport but tells me with great certainty that, according to an electrician he met on a job site, it is possible to buy one at the airport, we are all in our fifties now. Healthwise, we've been fortunate, but it's just a matter of time before our luck runs out and one of us gets cancer. Then we'll be picked off like figures at a shooting gallery, easy targets given the lives we've led.


I'd counted the days until my sisters' arrival, so why wasn't I next door, sitting with Hugh in our perfect-couple sixteenth-century kitchen with its stone floor and crackling fire? Perhaps I worried that if I didn't wander off, my family would get on my nerves, or—far more likely—I would get on theirs, and that our week together wouldn't be as ideal as I'd told myself it would be. As it was, I'd retreat to my office and spend some time doing nothing of consequence. Then I'd head back into the house and hear something that made me wish I'd never left. It was like walking into a theater an hour after the picture has started, thinking, How did that kangaroo get his hands on those nunchakus?

One of the stories I entered late concerned some pills my sister Gretchen had started taking a year and a half earlier. She didn't say what they were prescribed for, but they were causing her to walk and eat in her sleep. I saw this happen the previous Thanksgiving, which we spent together in a rental house in Hawaii. Dinner was served at seven o'clock, and around midnight, an hour or so after she'd gone to bed, Gretchen drifted out of her room. Hugh and I looked up from our books and watched her enter the kitchen. There, she took the turkey out of the refrigerator and started twisting off meat with her fingers. "Why don't you get a plate?" I asked, and she looked at me, not scornfully but blankly, as if it had been the wind talking. Then she reached into the carcass and yanked out some stuffing. This was picked at selectively, one crouton mysteriously favored over another, until she decided she'd had enough, at which point she returned to her room, leaving the mess behind her.

"What was that about?" I asked her the next morning.

Gretchen's face adjusted itself for bad news. "What was what about?"

I told her what had happened, and she said, "Goddamn it. I wondered why I woke up with brown stains on my pillow."

According to the story I walked in on late, Thanksgiving had been a relatively good night for Gretchen. One morning a few weeks after the turkey episode, she walked into her kitchen in North Carolina and found on the countertop an open jam jar with crumbs in it. At first she thought they were from a cookie. Then she saw the overturned box and realized she had eaten something intended for her painted turtles. It was a nutrition bar, maybe four inches long and made of dead flies, pressed together the way Duraflame logs are. "Not only that," she said, "but when I was through, I ate all the petals off my poinsettia." She shook her head. "I noticed it on the counter next to the turtle-food box, and it was just a naked stalk."

Excerpted from Calypso by David Sedaris. Copyright © 2018 by David Sedaris. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.