David Sedaris is taking it back to the beginning. After focusing on a diary collection and a best-of anthology, the beloved memoirist is releasing another new book of personal essays. Happy-Go-Lucky will be released on May 31, 2022.
“This wasn’t my first choice of a title,” Sedaris shred with Entertainment Weekly. “The initial one was The Testicles of an Old Sparrow in Winter. It didn’t really go with clowns, though, so I changed it.”
The jacket art adheres to the aesthetic of Sedaris’ previous covers. His past titles have used imagery of a chipmunk and squirrel having a romantic dinner, a hallucinogenic owl, a pair of fedora-clad men with their tongues out, and the iconic shot of a mall Santa using a urinal.
“I just love this guy’s makeup,” Sedaris says of the clown gracing the new cover. “I also like that him, the dog, and the child are all looking in different directions.”
Much like his best-selling previous essay collections, Happy-Go-Lucky will chronicle Sedaris’ own life and the ways we live now, pulling from his daily interactions and observations of seemingly ordinary moments that instantly turn absurd. The author has spent the past two years in more of a stasis than ever before — Sedaris typically spends much of his time on the tour circuit, reading his work to large crowds across the globe — which readers can expect to see factored into his new essays.
Happy-Go-Lucky is available for preorder HERE. You can read the title essay HERE.