Here is a true story: I was so engrossed in reading this book yesterday that I forgot to pick up my son from school. (I was half an hour late.)

‘Wow, Mum,’ he said. ‘That MUST be a good book.’ It is. And, for the uninitiated, that’s the sort of small, ridiculous, human incident that Sedaris’s books are packed with – beautifully set up, then seamlessly woven in to tell a wider story and, sometimes, make a larger point about contemporary life. So, a flamboyantly gay 15-year-old living in the street where Sedaris grew up (who calls Sedaris’s dad ‘she’) leads to a memory of spontaneously coming out as a 20-year-old hitchhiker to a woman in a negligee and her husband, who drive the streets propositioning hitchhikers, then a reflection on the fact that it’s now okay to be gay in Mid-Western America.

There’s also the worm that once lived in his mother-in-law’s leg; the time he decided to say ‘d’accord’ (‘okay’) to everything rather than learn French, and ended up sitting in a waiting room in his underpants, surrounded by well-dressed French patients and – hooray! – more stories about his fabulously dysfunctional, enviously tight-knit family. This is the kind of book that will make you forget the outside world. I promise.