if only David Sedaris made movies...

This will come as no surprise to anybody who knows me, but I've got a knack for choosing really depressing movies. A while back on this blog, I defied anybody to find a more depressing movie than Savages with Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney. I mean, good lord, that movie just made me want to slit my wrists right then and there. Well, last week I went to Blockbuster by myself--I was hoping to get Synechdoche, NY, but it wasn't there, so I searched and searched and finally, when I got all the way around to the A section, I found and rented An American Crime. When S. and I would pause it to go pee or to get a drink or a snack, we'd just look at each other and shake our heads. Amy does it again. "You're no longer allowed to choose movies," he tells me. "This makes me want to go hang myself."

And it does. Make you want to hang yourself, that is. But it also made me want to do more research on this "true" account of the case of child abuse that brought child abuse to the nation's attention.

I have a similar tendency when teaching the personal essay course. It's not as severe, of course, but many of the essays I teach in that course are a bit, well, grim. Revise. On the surface, they're grim. But when we read and discuss them, they always make me (and pretty much all of the students, I think I can safely say) see the world differently. But I made a conscious decision to include a few essays on the lighter side. We began the course with David Sedaris' "I Almost Saw This Girl Get Killed," and today, we'll discuss the final two essays before moving into three weeks of workshopping student work. First, Sedaris' "Tricked," in which a young David shovels Halloween candy into his face rather than share it with the strange people next door, and then "Old Faithful," an essay about monogamy that begins with a lump. I don't think I meant to bookmark the course with Sedaris, but I did know that I wanted to make sure students had good models of how to articulate important insights in a funny way.