Naked

As a teenager, David begged his siblings not to get married. However, as an adult, Lisa gets engaged to her boyfriend of 10 years, an “unapologetic” man. David likes Bob, but he is still uneasy with the wedding, writing, “‘My sister’s wedding’ was right up there with ‘my recent colostomy’ in terms of three-word phrases I hoped never to use” (187). He is particularly irritated that Bob and Lisa choose to hold their wedding ceremony on a mountaintop.

Three weeks before the wedding, Sharon informs her children that she has late-stage, inoperable lung cancer. David and his siblings are grief-stricken and attempt to convince themselves that their mother will be cured. Sharon accepts her imminent death and prefers to behave as if nothing has changed. She continues to drink and smoke whenever possible.

At Lisa’s wedding, David and his mother awkwardly struggle to communicate with one another. They have both always struggled with discomfort around sick people, so they are unable to find common ground for conversation after Sharon’s illness is revealed: “If she were to complain, she risked being seen as a sick complainer, the worst kind of all. If I were to do it, I might come off sounding even more selfish than I actually was. This sudden turn of events had robbed us of our common language” (192). Now that a serious health crisis has altered their relationship dynamic and the mother and son can’t revert to their habit of making petty complaints to each other, they don’t know how to communicate or what to talk about.

After the wedding, David’s parents bicker about where to get dinner. He regards his parents’ clash over their meal as a microcosm for their marriage. During the drive back to the hotel, Sharon states that she wants to be cremated. David and his siblings leave her alone in the hotel to walk in a nearby graveyard. At the time, they assume she wants to be alone, but Sedaris regrets this at the time of writing.

David takes to teasing his brother Paul after he has an embarrassing wardrobe malfunction. He plans to send Paul a brochure for a nudist park but starts to consider vacationing there himself in an effort to get more comfortable with his body.

David books a week-long stay at the nudist park, although he is uncomfortable with the whole enterprise. When he arrives, he finds the park’s culture to be aggressively candid. “We don’t lock our doors because, unlike certain other people, we have nothing to hide” (204). David initially walks the grounds fully dressed. After getting drunk in his assigned trailer, he is able to strip naked privately.

The next day, David leaves his trailer wearing a t-shirt and sneakers. He plays pétanque with a group of elderly nudists. Over the course of the game, he gets more comfortable with partial nudity. “At first, I’d hung around the outer edges of the court and retrieved my balls like a white-wigged countess, twisting my way toward the ground as if the queen were passing through the gardens” (211). Once he determines that no one cares what he looks like naked, he feels more empowered to go nude.

After this experience, he challenges himself to go out completely naked. He chats with an elderly woman in the sauna. She is fully nude, but the way she talks about the human body is surprisingly conservative: “With sweat pooling just south of her shaved vagina, this grandmother could sit naked with a strange man but not for the life of her use the words breast or penis” (214). Over the course of several days, David learns that swearing, drinking, and overt sexuality are against park policy. Many of the residents are Christians who leave the grounds to attend church clothed.

After returning home, he finds that he misses frequent nudity. He feels that he is able to see other people more clearly now. He compares this feeling to what he thought X-ray glasses would do when he was child.