Sedaris is clearly a comic with a quick, biting humor. In a house full of children always biding for attention, it is no wonder. Sedaris makes it clear in the book that he felt like an outsider at a young age. In his very first essay, Go Carolina, Sedaris is branded as a kid with a speech impediment. He is so sensitive about this label that he goes to extremes to develop a vocabulary that allows him to cleverly dance around certain words and avoid being corrected.