Naked

By: David Sedaris

Narrated by: David Sedaris, Amy Sedaris

Length: 3 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

Welcome to the hilarious, strange, elegiac, outrageous world of David Sedaris. In Naked, Sedaris turns the current mania for the memoir on its proverbial ear, mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his unique worldview, a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and deeply charitable. A tart-tongued mother does dead-on imitations of her young son's nervous tics, to the great amusement of his teachers; a stint of Kerouackian wandering is undertaken (of course!) with a quadriplegic companion. Through it all is Sedaris's unmistakable voice, without a doubt one of the freshest in American writing.

©1997 David Sedaris (P)1998, 2001 Time Warner AudioBooks

Critic reviews

"Sidesplitting." (The New York Times Book Review)
"Genuinely funny, at times hilarious....Makes for a smashing use of audio as a unique entertainment medium....Highly likable and spirited throughout...makes a case for audio as its own special form." (Publishers Weekly)
"Sedaris is a gifted satirist with an uncanny knack for re-creating dialogue and revealing fantasies....Brutally honest and brilliantly eloquent, Sedaris is positively tonic." (Booklist)

David Sedaris never fails to entertain!

I read the book years ago and just as entertaining and fun to listen to on the road.

Good early Sedaris

Much like Sedaris's other works, Nake is funny and disturbing. It's not laugh-outloud funny like Me Talk Pretty or even Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim but it's still bound to make you laugh

abridged

Where does Naked rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Naked is a wonderful autobiography. the story is funny, enlightening and above all entertaining.

What did you like best about this story?

i loved that David and his sister where part of the performance, it makes it more real

Any additional comments?

only negative thing i have to say is that it is abridged, and it missed a lot if important chapters originally in the book.

Revealing..and funny

What did you love best about Naked?

Davis Sedaris writes with a mixture of exaggerated descripton and a hint of self-deprecation that manages to be always humorous. In Naked he tells one of my favorite Sedaris stories--the visit to the nudist trailer park.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Naked?

Sedaris' mother navigates an awkward school life for him by her dead-on imitations of his tics, in addition to other great stories regarding his struggles with OCD, and the realization that he is gay.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The most moving art for me was the stories of his sister's wedding where the family dealt with the realization that their mother had cancer and that she was going to die. The strain that death puts on relationships that have existed for t=our entire lives is a difficult notion to pinpoint but here Sedaris does it beautifully.

More fun stories

David tells more of his fun stories. These seem to be from early in his life. His sister joins in the narration. Really enjoyable!

amy’s voices are hilarious

short, but worth your while! so funny, the david/amy dynamic is unique to his repertoire and her voices add shape to this already-spicy piece of prose .

I just can't seem to get enough!

I absolutely love David Sedaris and I can't seem to survive long without having a book to turn to. His voice is now my internal dialogue voice lol and I feel like I am part of the Sedaris Clan.

Would be perfect 5stars all around, but...

Listening to the credits at the end, and it says that it was abridged. The credit specified "text abridged by: (name)". This is quite a disappointment, and a bit of an unpleasant surprise, as had I known (had I but known! - extra dramatic! -) it was abridged, I would not have used a credit on it.
I don't know if this is even connected to the 'abridgement issue', but something has been really bothering me for quite a while now, namely, I have very very vivid memories of reading a particular David Sedaris story, but have been unable to find it either on audio books or in print (although my current book copies are recent reprints, so any text abridgement would have occurred and more recent reprint would have the abridgement, I would think.). I remember a few specific details about the story that allows me to eliminate other stories from the list of possibilities. (if anyone is interested, it involves David and his sister Lisa going to a golf game/tournament with his father, his sister gets her very first period while they are there (I think she was wearing white pants /skirt, too! So embarrassing!), and her father asks a stranger, a female golfer, to help her out.
There's another story I remembered reading that I cannot find, and it was about David working in Chicago with dangerous wood stripping chemicals, working for some sort of foreign woman (I want to say, eastern European? Polish perhaps?), there's something about them listening to the radio together, and I think the woman says something derogatory about an ethnic minority (jews perhaps?). That one is more vague, memories-wise, but I am still positive that I read it more than once when I had my original copies! I don't remember what book it was from, nor the other story, but I am almost positive that it is either Naked or Me Talk Pretty One Day (but I'm like 85% sure it's Naked, not MTPOD)
Anyone who can help enlighten me on this, feel free to hit me up with an email/message. My email is grrlsinister at Gmail dot com.)

Entertaining and boldly real!

Quality of narration is key for me. Loved it and the jazz breaks. Fun listen!

If you have ver smoked

This is the book for you. I’m sure non smokers will also get a kick out of it. These days I put it in just to hear his voice, I find him very calming.