Naked

This chapter describes David’s childhood struggle with “tics.” It opens with a scene of him in class, compulsively licking light switches and performing intricate tapping rituals. His teacher, Miss Chestnut, asks to meet with his mother to discuss these “special problems.” She is brusque and sardonic.

David’s tics make it difficult for him to walk home from school.

It was a short distance from the school to our rented house, no more than six hundred and thirty-seven steps, and on a good day I could make the trip in an hour, pausing every few feet to tongue a mailbox or touch whichever single leaf or blade of grass demanded my attention. If I were to lose count of my steps, I’d have to return to the school and begin again (12).

When others confront David about his compulsions, he downplays their frequency and even claims that he doesn’t do them at all. He takes no pleasure in doing these things. Rather, he feels so compelled to do them that resisting his tics causes him “agony.” He also develops a habit of rocking back and forth in his bedroom while listening to the radio. Sedaris describes rocking as a soothing, voluntary activity, unlike his other tics. 

When Miss Chestnut arrives to speak with Sharon, David eavesdrops on their conversation. They do impressions of his compulsions over drinks. After her visit, David’s father begins threatening him in an attempt to curb his compulsions: “You touch your nose to that windshield one more time and I’ll guarantee you’ll wish you hadn’t” (17). When David begins to do it again, “[his] father slam[s] on the brakes” (17), leaving him with a bloody nose. After this incident, David develops a strategy of punching himself in the nose and rolling his eyes back in his head to quell his compulsions.

In the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, the cycle continues: David’s teacher and his mother drink and do impressions of him, his father berates him, and he develops more and more disruptive tics. His grades are poor, as school holds little interest for him.

His tics continue through high school and college. As a college freshman, he curbs his rocking to avoid having to explain it to his roommate and only does it when he is alone in their dorm.

Ultimately, David’s tics recede. He attributes this to his self-medication with cigarettes. 

David’s paternal grandmother— whom he and his sisters called “Ya Ya”— owns a newsstand/candy store and lives in a cramped “shithole” New York apartment.

Ya Ya is from Greece and speaks broken English. She and Sharon don’t get along and openly snap at each other. Ya Ya has an abnormal understanding of familial relationships; because of this, Louis had a difficult childhood.

During Sharon’s sixth pregnancy, Ya Ya breaks her hip. After her recovery, she moves in with the Sedarises. She begins attending Sunday services at the Orthodox Holy Trinity Church with David and his sisters. On her first day there, Ya Ya behaves bizarrely. In response, the Sedaris children pretend not to know her, but they soon become accustomed to Ya Ya’s eccentric behavior.

While she barely tolerates the Sedaris women, Ya Ya treats every boy like “a king.” She is delighted that the new baby is a boy. Sharon becomes increasingly withdrawn and begins drinking more. However, Louis refuses to put his mother in a nursing home: “He couldn’t evict his mother, but neither could he care for her” (30). When Sharon’s wealthy aunt dies, she inherits a large sum of money. With this “newfound leverage,” she threatens to move out, and Louis agrees to send Ya Ya to a lavish assisted living community called Capitol Towers. David enjoys visiting her and pretending that her apartment is really his.

Ya Ya’s behavior at Capitol Towers is antisocial, and its managers eventually find an excuse to evict her. She is transferred to Mayview, a depressing nursing home filled with dying senior citizens. Louis brings her home for regular visits.

Ya Ya dies while David is away at college. David returns home for the funeral and fights with his father because he got his ear pierced. David ultimately agrees to take the earring out for the funeral. The chapter ends with David pondering Ya Ya’s inner life and worrying about how his father will age. 

At age 13, David finds a pornographic novel called Next of Kin in the woods. It’s filled with incest, zoophilia, and other taboo sex acts, as well as numerous typos. David and his sisters Gretchen and Lisa discuss the book among themselves.

Gretchen begins to suspect that their neighbors and even their parents are involved in similar debauchery: “The Greek Orthodox church, the gaily dressed couples at the country club, even our elderly collie, Duchess: they were all in on it, according to Gretchen” (39). The book finds its way to the younger Sedaris girls, ten-year-old Amy and eight-year-old Tiffany. Eventually, the family’s housekeeper finds it and turns it over to Sharon.

David and his sisters become terrified that their parents will begin making sexual advances on them. David retrieves the book from his parents’ room and disposes of it in a grocery store parking lot, where a man with a pickup truck finds it and takes it away.

After an incident in which six-year-old Tiffany stabs David in the face with a pencil, Louis tells a story from childhood: He accidentally shot a childhood friend, Frank, in one eye with a BB gun, permanently blinding him. Louis tells his children that the guilt is unbearable. He introduces them to Frank, and they see that one of his eyes has a “milky” pupil and a “mangled” socket. As an adult, David learns that the story was fabricated; Frank’s bad eye is a birth defect.

The BB gun incident is only one of many stories Louis tells to warn his children about potential danger, leading them “to wonder if [their] father had any friends who could still tie their own shoes or breathe without the aid of a respirator” (43). His warnings terrify David as he starts taking driver’s ed in high school. He decides never to drive again.

Although Louis “waged a full-fledged campaign of terror” (45) when David first moved to New York City, he now visits often and goes out of his way to annoy and berate strangers. When David chides him for it, his father responds: “Oh, you kids […] Not a one of you has got so much as a teaspoon of gumption. I don’t know where you got it from, but in the end, it’s going to kill you” (45).