RaveThe Charleston City PaperIn his sixth collection of personal essays, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Sedaris continues to play the bemused outsider, the man poking his head through the doorway, looking askance at his own and other lives ... While past collections featured more childhood stories about Sedaris’ family, this one more than holds its own with tales of his current life: domestic disasters, his boyfriend Hugh, his travels ... As always, the merely odd and the icky-grotesque mingle here. But Sedaris is looking at his life from a newly crossed threshold: middle-age. And there is a bittersweet quality to his professed anxiety. It’s no less funny, but in these pages, his take on it all may have emerged from somewhere a little deeper.
