It was just about how he used to ram other cars at the supermarket when somebody took his parking space and the comments that he made to people and how nobody understood his jokes. He'd asked me to do it and so I read a little something and there was not a single good thing in what I read. And my father said, 'I want you to do that when I die.'. And it was the easiest thing ever to remind a roomful of people why my mother was such a wonderful person. I wrote something about my mother and I read it out loud. The way I've always made sense of things is to write about it.

Your mind as an adult should be big enough to hold all of these things. 'But I felt so fortunate that I was able to be in the presence of that lovely person.' that was his little core finally shining through,' Sedaris says. Instead, Sedaris likens his elderly father to a 'little cheerful gnome.' Nothing bothered him he no longer criticized everyone and everything. At that point, Sedaris says, his dad seemed to forget that he was a difficult person. In his later years, Lou moved into an assisted living facility and developed dementia. Sedaris always felt like Lou disliked him and wanted him out of his life. Sedaris describes his dad as a mean man who was buried in 'layers of rage and disappointment.' He stiffed contractors, made sexual remarks to his daughters and, when Sedaris was young, would often shove and hit him. 'It's been the driving force in my life: the animosity, the war that my father and I started when I was young and fought every day of our lives,' he says. Is it possible to love a hateful person? That's the question humorist David Sedaris grapples with when he considers his combative relationship with his late father, Lou. Sedaris likens this photo, taken in the Los Angeles County Library Children's Department before they opened, to a Playboy magazine author photo.

Happy go lucky book cover