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

I returned to my office more convinced than ever that this would be our last Christmas together. I mean, flies! If you're going to eat your pets' food in your sleep, why not think preventatively and exchange your turtles for a hamster or a rabbit, something safe and vegetarian? Get rid of the houseplants while you're at it—starting with the cactus—and lock up your cleaning supplies.

Later that evening, I found the sisters stretched out like cats in front of the woodstove. "It used to be that whenever I passed a mirror, I'd look at my face," Gretchen said, blowing out a mouthful of cigarette smoke. "Now I just check to see if my nipples line up."

Oh my God, I thought. When did that start happening? The last time we were all together for Christmas was 1994. We were at Gretchen's house in Raleigh, and she started the day by feeding her bullfrog, who was around the same size as her iron and was named Pappy. He was kept in a murky, heated thirty-gallon aquarium on her living room floor, next to three Japanese newts who lived in a meatloaf pan. It was a far cry from a normal Christmas, but what with our mother recently dead, it seemed better to break with tradition and try something completely different: thus my sister's place, with its feel of a swamp rather than the house we had grown up in, which now felt freighted with too much history. Gretchen's waist-length hair has gone silver since that Christmas, and when she walks in her sleep, she limps a little. But then, we're all getting older.

On our first day together in Sussex, we piled into the Volvo and rode to the town with the thirty-seven antique stores. Hugh drove, and I crawled into the way-back, thinking happily, Here we are again, me and my sisters in a station wagon, just like when we were young. Who would have imagined in 1966 that we'd one day be riding through southern England, none of us having realized the futures we'd predicted for ourselves? Amy was not the policewoman she'd so hoped to become. Lisa was not a nurse. No one had a houseful of servants or a trained proboscis monkey, yet we'd turned out OK, hadn't we?

In one of the antique stores we visited that afternoon, we saw a barrister's wig. It was foul, all the colors of dirty underpants, but that didn't stop Amy, and then Gretchen, from trying it on.

"That's OK," Lisa said when it was handed to her. "I don't want to get y'all's germs on my head."

Their germs, I thought.

The sun set at around four that afternoon, and it was dark by the time we headed home. I fell asleep in the way-back for a few minutes, and when I awoke, Lisa was discussing her uterus, specifically her fear that its lining may have grown too thick.

"What on earth gives you that idea?" Amy asked.

Lisa then mentioned a friend of hers, saying that if it could happen to Cynthia, it could just as easily happen to her. "Or to any of us," she said.

"And what if it does?" Gretchen asked.

"Then we'll have to get them scraped out," Lisa reported.

I lifted my head over the backseat. "What's a uterus lined with, anyway?" I imagined something sweet and viscous. "Like whatever it is that grapes are made of."

"That would be grape," Amy said. "Grapes are made of grape."

"Actually, it's a good question," Lisa said. "What is a uterus lined with? Blood vessels? Nerves?"

"Your family," Hugh said. "I can't believe the things you talk about when you're together."

I later reminded him of the time his sister, Ann, visited us in Normandy. I walked into the living room after returning from a bike ride one afternoon and heard her saying to her mother, Joan, who was also staying with us, "Don't you just love the feel of an iguana?"

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.