'He's lying through his teeth!' she said-loudly-before schooling me on the more obvious factual errors. So I made some calls, working through a few baffled state employees until I found Margaret Raynor, a 62-year-old registered nurse who has worked at Dix since 1969. Call me a skeptic, but that didn't sound likely. I had never before seen a naked woman and hesitated just long enough for her to lurch forward and sink her remaining three teeth into my forearm. 'Come on, granny, you're going for a ride.' When the sheet was lifted, Iwas shocked to discover that this woman was naked. 'I'll take her up top and you get the feet,' said. 'Dorothea Dix Sanitarium,' Sedaris informs us, was a bizarre madhouse marked by 'a bleak colony of Gothic buildings'and trees whose limbs 'resembled the palsied fingers of mad scientists tapping against the windows in search of fresh brains.' Since David is an eerie little guy, he casts his gaze toward the state mental hospital on the south side of his hometown, Raleigh, North Carolina. His acerbic (and now deceased) mom, Sharon Sedaris, decrees that he has to volunteer for a job somewhere. Except that some things in Naked aren't true, even if you allow for an extra-wiggly definition of 'exaggerate.' Start with the story called 'Dix Hill,' in which David is a 13-year-old on summer vacation in 1970. 'Everything in Naked was true,' he told the webzine Getting It in 1999. The Library of Congress called it biography, and Sedaris assured several interviewers over the years that the book was essentially factual. The New York Times was convinced: When Naked hit the best-seller list, it categorized the book as nonfiction. 'The events described in these stories are real,' humorist David Sedaris wrote in the introductory note to Naked, his 1997 collection of nonfiction essays. A midget guitar teacher, a Macy's elf, and the truth about David Sedaris.

Naked by David Sedaris