When You Are Engulfed in Flames Summary
David Sedaris

When You Are Engulfed in Flames Overview

When You Are Engulfed in Flames is a collection of first-person point of view essays detailing the lifestyle and emotional arcs of real-life author David Sedaris. Weaving in and out of his past in a house filled with five other siblings in North Carolina, to his present-day career as well-regarded writer of bracing but honest sketches of his life as a gay man who frequently travels, the book is a collection of reflections, some humorous, some dark, and some a mordant combination of the two. By relentlessly re-examining his past conduct and expectations and contrasting them against his mature attitudes and realizations, the author presents a life full of self-critique mixed with a bitingly funny sense that few things in his time spent on Earth ever work out quite the way he expects or hopes.