When You Are Engulfed in Flames

by Courtney Hilden

When You Are Engulfed in Flames is the latest from David Sedaris, one of the most popular creative nonfiction writers out there. Sedaris writes mostly out of personal experiences, and this book takes us into his childhood, all over the world, and with some of the weirdest humans you’ll ever meet.
The beginning of the book is filled with zippy, short and funny pieces. “The Smoking Section,” the last piece in the book and from where the title derives from, is the hardest section to work through, and is a bit of a slough until Sedaris takes a trip to Japan, at which point it morphs into a travel narrative.
The best piece in the collection is “That’s Amore,” about David’s relationship with an angry old woman who lives across the hall in the same apartment complex. The piece does a good job of highlighting what Sedaris does best: eccentric characters and hilarious situations. Sedaris seems to collect the bizarre, referring in other pieces to how much he likes stories of freak accidents and his sister Amy’s collection of horse porn. As a fan of Strangers with Candy, I found myself keeping an eye out for information about Amy, who played the show’s main character, Jerri Blank, to the point where you wondered about the kind of person who could create such a character.
Since Sedaris has admitted to making up parts of his stories, it’s easy to find yourself questioning everything he writes. Anything that seems far too strange, even for fiction, gets discarded in the act of reading. It’s almost detective work, almost a game, discerning what is real and what is not. It’s possibly the sort of thing to drive a reader mad, or, at the least, take focus away from the stories themselves and think about Sedaris as a untrustworthy narrator of his own adventures. Creative nonfiction, a relatively new genre, has been privileged over other kinds of writing, especially by the publishing industry and the reading public as better because it is “true.” If creative nonfiction isn’t true, than it does not have the assumed inherent advantage over other forms of writing. Mostly, it seems that the resentment over this controversy about creative nonfiction is the result of other genres being ignored, despite their dedication to being as emotionally true as creative nonfiction. Sedaris, in taking away the one advantage that creative nonfiction has over other forms, has forced the genre onto the same plain as the rest of creative writing, for better or worse.