Naked barrels engulfed in pretty denim
Customer Rating: 
"When You Are Engulfed in Flames" is David Sedaris' fifth full-length collection of humorous essays. I've long been a fan of his writing, which for the uninitiated tends to focus on the more skewed aspects of his family and life. His collections usually include a variety of stories from various epochs of his life - as a child and teenager with his hilarious family, in his twenties (when he did drugs and had a variety of bizarre jobs), and with his boyfriend, Hugh, in Europe.
Most of my favorite stories involve his family, especially stories from his youth. He adds one such gem here - "The Understudy," which features one of the worst babysitters in history, the corpulent and itchy, Mrs. Peacock. This story has more laugh-out-loud moments than anything I've read since....well since Sedaris' last book. I tend to enjoy less his essays about his years when he was an active drug user, although "All the Beauty You Will Ever Need" is one of the better of this genre.
Alas, this collection is a bit thin on stories about his family; perhaps as he gets older he will focus more on recent events filtered through his observational humor style; "Crybaby" is a good example from this collection. The longest section of the book details his attempt to stop smoking in Tokyo, which is not the strongest ending to this otherwise solid collection. Overall, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames" is average work for Sedaris; not as good "Naked" but still likely to keep his fans entertained and better than most humor essayists.
