4.) Different Perceptions

Book Title: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
Pages: 180-257 since last week; 257 since semester

David visits his younger sister Tiffany and at the end of the novel he's back at his home in France, wide awake in the middle of the night, when some tourists come through his neighborhood lost asking for directions. At that moment, David looks as if he is a creepy character, and he keeps finding things in his house that help add to this potential creepiness.

Tiffany is the most eccentric person we've met so far. Every person we meet along the way just gets more and more interesting. We first meet her when she's digging through other people's garbage, salvages a whole turkey, and takes it home and cooks it up and proceeds to eat it. Her floor is pulled apart because she sold the linoleum and it looks as if the elements outdoors were in her own home. I can picture exactly what her house looks like, because I've seen similar homes like this on Animal Cops! The same people who neglect their pets and have 50 cats running around also live in a completely filthy home, and it just opens my eyes to how many different people there are living like that in this world. At the very end of the novel, we're at David's home, and when tourists come up to him for help, he can't help but think about how creepy and serial killerish he seems to his guests. He finds a knife in the map drawer, some string lying around in the front yard, and he just keeps imagining himself looking like a crazy person. And I think this is his way of showing us that there is no one perception of a person. Even though he's written all of these stories about his family and the people he's met, that doens't mean that's just who they are. They are only his own perceptions of these people, and they'll always change to fit his mood.