There’s a Tiffany in Every Dysfunctional Family
I’ve read several of David Sedaris’ books through the years, most recently his latest Happy-Go-Lucky, and have belly laughed my way through them all. He’s a phenomenal storyteller from a similarly large family as my own. I am also a fan of his brilliant sister, Amy, who starred in the late nineties Comedy Central classic Strangers with Candy. But did you know they had another sister named Tiffany Sedaris? She was a locally-loved artist who lived in Somerville, Massachusetts, coined “The Paris of New England” due to Somerville’s sheer volume of artists, poets and writers, who’d end up committing suicide just a few weeks shy of her fiftieth birthday.
A few years ago, I read Sedaris’ 2013 narrative “Now We Are Five” in The New Yorker. It moved me so much that I’d embark on a brief quest to learn more about the unknown Sedaris sister, the other sister — Tiffany.
David describes their closeted alcoholic mother as the beloved, gravitational family force in which all six children would try to orbit. She was quick-witted and comical, most likely where David and Amy got their genius.
The whole Sedaris family reminds me of J.D. Salinger’s literary Glass Family, briefly imagining Franny as Amy and Zooey, David. And like the Sedaris’, the fictional Glass Family would experience the suicide of their sibling, an older and profoundly wise brother named Seymour in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” a short story included in Salinger’s much beloved book Nine Stories. I always thought it apropos that Salinger named his pivotal character Seymour as in See-More and Glass being a self-reflective medium, an artistic medium favored by Tiffany, especially in her exquisite mosaics.
I remember reading Franny & Zooey in 1996, right after my first real heartbreak. I’d lost twenty-five pounds within a short span of time due to having no appetite at all, hovering around 100. My days consisted of college classes before heading to my part-time afternoon job as a receptionist at a busy, bulk mailing facility, then off to the library to study, then back to my dorm room where I would raise my plastic shot glass, or two, of NyQuil like it was top-shelf Tequila before I’d pass out cold, feeling no more pain from the betrayal — separate from the boy. And like Franny, this book would bring me back from the existential brink, particularly at the end when Zooey shares a story about Seymour and his profound comment regarding the Fat Lady:
“I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady.
There isn’t anyone anywhere who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know — listen to me, now — don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is?…Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”
I’d always see Seymour’s Fat Lady as Salinger’s reference to Matthew 25, particularly Matthew 25:40, the verse where Christ reminds us:
‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ One could even argue that the black sheep and/or family scapegoat is included in Seymour’s metaphorical Fat Lady comment, the literal least of their real-life brothers and sisters.
The Sedaris kids liked to linger around the dining room table after a meal, telling stories and laughing out loud with their mother. I could envision a young Amy Sedaris sitting at a long table, impersonating a plethora of funny characters who would later become her bread and butter. But out of all the children, Tiffany, according to David, was the most void of their mother’s love and affection. When asked if Tiffany was the difficult one, even when she was small, by VICE journalist, Blake Bailey, in a 2015 fiction interview for their magazine, Sedaris responds:
“Yes. She was a lot like my mother. The physical resemblance was almost spooky, and they had a similar personality. Perhaps because of this, our mom never really liked Tiffany. Even as a child I looked at my sister and wondered what that would be like, not to feel the warmth of my mother’s love. Tiffany didn’t. There was always a nervous quality about her, a tentativeness, a desperate urge to be in your good graces. While the rest of us had eyes in the front of our heads, she had eyes on the sides, like a rabbit or a deer, like prey, always on the lookout for danger. Even when there wasn’t any danger. You’d see her trembling and think, You want danger? I’ll give you some danger…”
This hit hard when Sedaris writes in “Let It Snow,” his 2003 short narrative featured in The New Yorker:
“Poor Tiffany. She’d do just about anything in return for a little affection. All you had to do was call her Tiff, and whatever you wanted was yours: her allowance, her dinner, the contents of her Easter basket. Her eagerness to please was absolute and naked. When we asked her to lie in the middle of the street, her only question was “Where?”
On August 15, 2004, Globe Correspondent, Jina Moore, published an enlightening article on Tiffany Sedaris entitled “Sister in a Glass House” three months after the release of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, writing:
“Once, he hired a neighbor to pretend to break into their house. All the kids knew it was a joke, except for her, she says. She looked in each room for the intruder. ‘’In the kitchen, I just lost it. I’m so afraid that I can’t move.” Her siblings laughed, and she realized it wasn’t real. ‘’That’s how it was in my house — everything was a joke. It didn’t matter how much it hurt, you’d laugh before you did anything about it.”
Moore’s article continues:
“Thousands pick up David’s books and laugh, ruefully at times, at his family’s folklore. His sister, unsurprisingly, is not one of them. She reads his books indifferently. They are stories about the ‘’unspeakable things we did to each other,” she says. And there are, after all, consequences to things.”
In large families, especially ones where a narcissistic parent and/or Cluster B personality is at the helm, it’s not uncommon for siblings to take on semiconscious roles like “Golden Child,” “Invisible or Lost Child,” “Mascot Child,” “Rescue Child,” “Comic Relief Child,” and the dreaded “Scapegoat Child.”
The scapegoat child is the strongest and most sensitive one out of all the children, often the pain-in-the-ass truth-teller — a potential threat to the family’s facade, who becomes a repository for the narcissist parent’s toxic shame and rage called psychological projection. Over time, siblings, extended family members, family friends and even neighbors will become unconsciously biased toward the scapegoat child due to the narcissistic parent’s projection and quite possibly from a subtle, long game behind-the-back smear campaign to neutralize their threat for when the scapegoat child starts talking, even passing their bias onto the next generation of family, treating them with a general lack of regard, or distain, as well. The scapegoats are more often tolerated than they’re loved so much so that it’s palpable. And when they start to figure out the dysfunctional familial pattern, and start talking as a result, they are not believed, and left even more shunned and isolated then before.
The scapegoat child may grow up to internalize their family’s disrespect as deserving, or much worse — normalizing it, which may later result in the manifestation of their family’s toxic dysfunction and shame in their own life as well; thus becoming the “family problem” for real. This way, none of the family members, especially the narcissist parent, have to examine themselves in return.
Think of narcissistic abuse as generational trauma that gets passed down from one generation to the next like the childhood game of Hot Potato. I suspect this covert narcissistic abuse pattern was prevalent in the Sedaris family, and if I were to be honest, in my own family as well. So much of this abuse pattern is unseen and unconscious by those deep inside the family system, but the effects are disastrous and undeniable just the same: parental and sibling estrangement, complex PTSD, autoimmune disorders from chronic inflammation and high stress chemicals like Cortisol, family betrayals, family secrets, lack of self-care, imposed isolation (purposely separated and excluded), eating disorders, including binge / emotional eating to numb oneself as a way to self-soothe, lifelong trust issues, paranoia from abuse by proxy e.g., behind-the-back smear campaigns, hypervigilance, rumination, difficulty with emotional regulation due to chronic triggering; difficulty maintaining healthy interpersonal relationships.
In my cathartic poem “High Anxiety,” included in my debut Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound, I try to capture the aftereffects of narcissistic abuse on the body, mind and spirit. Here’s an excerpt:
Squint into the white
horizon just over the sand
dunes, down the street
from the dive bar,
an F-bomb away
from spontaneous
combustion — exploding
particles — gun smoke,
a sneeze, the way a shaft
of light illuminates
the dust mite; static energy,
neediness, sleep paralysis;
the jump scares
from dollar store bake pans
springing inside preheated
ovens; a heart grown tired
of its chronic techno
house beat; the pet bird
made bald from missing
its master….
The family scapegoats are often primed for future narcissistic abuse and disrespect from their friends and significant others. They are often drawn to what is familiar, what they know — the foundation set by family, good or bad.
When you’re not fed love on a silver spoon
you learn to lick it off knives.
— Laura Eden
David’s response to the VICE journalist’s question, when asked if Tiffany was the “difficult one,” is telling when he says “my mother” instead of the appropriate “our mother.” A golden child will always see it that way — my mother. And it’s sad that David doesn’t stop to spotlight their mother’s cruel behavior of Tiffany but glosses over it instead. I believe this is due to the family’s unconscious bias towards Tiffany, you know the “family problem,” or rather — the “difficult one.”
However, two years after the VICE interview — May 31, 2017, Sedaris would do a reading on “The Life Altering And Mundane Pages Of His Old Diaries” including a discussion around his book Theft by Finding on NPR’s Fresh Air. Although David talks about Tiffany, what I find revealing is what he has to say about their mother, surprisingly so, whom may have been struggling with narcissism or Cluster B — a personality disorder umbrella term that covers antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic personality disorder. In short, maladaptive behaviors that can include a high degree of manipulation — lacking core empathy, which some speculate derives from unresolved childhood trauma. He recognizes, at least, their enabling family dynamic, especially in regards to the mistreatment of Tiffany. Sedaris shows real self-introspection here, and a sense of profound regret:
“The rest of us should’ve said, “Mom, you need to do something about this, because that’s not OK for you to treat somebody that way.” But we never said that. We never called our mother on her behavior towards Tiffany. You think, You’re 7, what are you going to do? But I wasn’t always 7. I was 20 and I was 30. … Tiffany had a lot of anger at us and a lot of it was really well-founded. We were adults, we could’ve said to our mother, “This isn’t OK.” …”
Narcissists can be highly charismatic, loveable, and endearing people. They have this uncanny ability to garner support to the point of creating an almost unspoken cult-like environment of enablers and flying monkeys. The environment that surrounds a narcissist can become rife with cognitive dissonance, and harbor a strange collective apathy in regards to the suffering of another, in this case — Tiffany.
I’ve wondered if Maya Angelou was thinking about a narcissist and cognitive dissonance when she famously said: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
David’s narrative essay “Put A Lid On It” is about Tiffany from his book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. From what I can remember, the narrative isn’t too complimentary of Tiffany, especially her propensity to talk too much, lacking self-awareness, but there are some hilarious moments.
Here, she tells David flat-out, not mincing her words: “I don’t like you people,” meaning her own family. However, after I read Happy-Go-Lucky last summer, I’d come to see Tiffany as less of a victim. I’d come to understand why David put distance between himself and his youngest sister those last eight years of her life. In her brokenness, Tiffany would begin to loosely suggest things that were not only hurtful, but potentially damaging.
In the London Evening Standard article, dated February 11, 2023, Sedaris says the real tragedy of his sister’s suicide was the mental illness she suffered from.
Here are a few random excerpts from the same article:
“She left behind some notebooks and reading the notebooks you think ‘wow, if that was the inside of my mind’.”
“She could really just say something to you that would just destroy you, reach inside your soul, and find your weak spot… She couldn’t listen to people and then she became combative and became super contradictory,” he said.
“The last time I saw my sister, I was on tour, and she came to the theatre and came to the stage door. I was like, ‘whatever you’re going to throw at me right now. I can’t right now. I can’t carry that right now’.”
Was Tiffany Sedaris organically mentally ill, meaning was she born with mental illness, or was her mental illness later acquired from a perfect storm of nature colliding with nurture such as the lack of love and warmth from their mother as a small child, per David, in conjunction with being sent away to an abusive boarding school at a pivotal time during her adolescence? Perhaps after a series of setbacks and losses, her mind finally cried “UNCLE!” and snapped.
Being a scapegoat in addition to having to go no contact from some family members, who I love, for my own mental and emotional wellbeing, I can sympathize with Tiffany and David, understanding both perspectives well— that of the scapegoat and that of being estranged. Because I lived this painful reality, including a recent devastating suicide as well, I sense that our families, his — Greek; mine — Italian; his — from six to five siblings; mine — from seven to six, are dealing with generational trauma at its root, manifesting as narcissistic familial abuse, somewhere on the spectrum of totally oblivious, which I think is the frustrating case for Tiffany, to absolute conscious-contempt, set to destroy the scapegoat for life.
Oftentimes, narcissistic families are run similar to a Pyramid Scheme, with the Top Dogs, a.k.a. The Golden Children and their offspring sitting pretty at the tip-top point of the pyramid with the lowliest members on the far bottom, flared to each side, who are often treated as an afterthought in every regard, if they’re regarded at all.
For the ones at the top and the middle, sweet spot, family is AWESOME! Sedaris has also expressed his family’s awesomeness on several occasions in print and on radio, and how they enjoy each other’s company, even going on vacations together. He’d voice his confusion over people referring to his family as “dysfunctional” as he didn’t see his family in this quasi-light at all. He’d see his family as a fabulous club, and couldn’t understand why Tiffany wouldn’t want to join like her refusal to engage was a preposterous thought to begin with.
“Why do you think she did it?” I asked as we stepped back into the sunlight. For that’s all any of us were thinking, had been thinking, since we got the news. Mustn’t Tiffany have hoped that whatever pills she’d taken wouldn’t be strong enough and that her failed attempt would lead her back into our fold? How could anyone purposely leave us — us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost faith in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting. Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you’d take your own life?” ― David Sedaris, Calypso
In Happy-Go-Lucky, the Sedaris siblings never really know what’s the truth from the lie when it comes to Tiffany, adding to her mystery.
From the June 2015 VICE Magazine Q&A, Sedaris comments on Tiffany’s secrecy:
“We never knew what was going on with Tiffany and thought, at one point, of hiring a private detective to find out what her life was like. Because of her secrecy we suspected the worst. I know that she had sex with people for money at certain points in her life.”
Later in the same article, Sedaris concludes:
“I would love to find out who she was. But I don’t have your skill, the skill to go out and talk to her friends, to hunt down people she went to Élan with and construct a concise portrait of her. We all wonder, my family and I. We talk about it all the time. We’d like to know how she survived.”
When Tiffany’s friends had written messages in her ninth-grade yearbook with one drawing an unfurled marijuana leaf, suggesting they meet up to get high that summer in addition to the two times she ran away from home, their parents would react by sending her off to Élan — a private, coeducational, residential behavior modification boarding school for wayward teens located, as one former student resident coined it, “in the middle of NoWhere, Maine,” about a fifteen hour drive from the family home in North Carolina. Sedaris commented on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2017 that their mother had learned about Élan from watching The Phil Donahue Show, which, right there, should’ve served as a warning.
On October 21, 2013, five months after she took her life, a person claiming to be David Sedaris’ ex, circa. mid-eighties, would post in The Data Lounge the following comment concerning Tiffany, which might explain the subsequent years of raw anger and rumination. If this statement was true, and she was tricked into going to Élan, perhaps to make her more compliant during that god-awful, long car ride, then it would appear to be an intentional act of betrayal by their parents:
“Tiffany was troubled, very funny, and very angry that her parents tricked her by leaving her at a very brutal reform school when they said they were only taking her there to look at it. She deserved a better life.”
Another person with the initials M.K. had commented on the same Data Lounge thread, posting:
“I was the last person on this earth to speak with Tiffany Sedaris. We were close friends for nearly a dozen years. The night before she killed herself, she begged me to go along with her to her family reunion in order to help her through her anxiety over the event. I agreed to go, promising to rent a vehicle so she could flee at a moment’s notice should she feel uncomfortable.”
Élan School was similarly abusive as Paris Hilton’s Provo Canyon School, and had since shut down after a myriad of abuse claims were publicly unleashed by their previous students, including Tiffany. She would never be the same after she was sent to Élan, and harbored a deep, personal resentment towards David, Amy, and the rest of her family. It was eerie to see happy family photos online of the Sedaris’ clan, minus Tiffany, during those years she spent at Élan, an almost ominous foreshadowing of what life would look like some decades later, when they really are five.
Here’s a photo of The Sedaris Family, minus Tiffany.
And when asked if “the Élan thing was the most valid aspect of whatever overblown grievance Tiffany had against the family” by Blake Bailey for VICE, Sedaris responds:
“I can’t remember a single conversation where she didn’t talk about that place, I mean, ten, 20, 30 years after she left it.”
One could almost hear the exasperation in his voice.
It sounded like Tiffany was experiencing a repetitive thought process called rumination. Rumination is quite common after experiencing a traumatic event that could be interpreted, in Tiffany’s case, as a parental/family betrayal. I’d like to think that being shipped-off, alone, to an abusive boarding school as a vulnerable minor, fifteen hours from home, separated from everyone you knew and loved would cause anyone to ruminate— even ten, 20, 30 years later. Perhaps, I should’ve named this essay —
“Tiffany Sedaris: Girl, Interrupted.”
Like any resident scapegoat, I think Tiffany Sedaris deeply longed for love, affection, and validation; longed to hear her parents say “We f — up, Tiff” with no tag on excuses. And I think she wanted more empathy, more solidarity, from her talented and amazing siblings. Would David or Amy have been so successful if they were shipped-off, alone, to that hellhole prison-school that prided itself on the business of breaking young spirits, some fifteen hours drive from their tight family nucleus?
Tiffany’s rumination, in my opinion, was a typical response to narcissistic familial abuse as unconscious as I thought it was in her case. David even concluded that his / their mother “didn’t like Tiffany,” and had even likened her childhood presence to prey, which is heartbreaking in its honesty. According to fiphysician.com, “After narcissistic abuse, rumination is expected. This feedback loop will consume you and cause cycles of anger or shame. It feels like you are stuck and cannot move on. Rumination is a self-perpetuating vicious cycle.”
I’d find the particular wording of Bailey’s question to David “Sus” as my Gen Z-age daughters would say, short for suspicious or suspect, as if he’s trying to put the onus back on Tiffany instead of on her family, particularly their parents, when he asks David: “If the Élan thing was the most valid aspect of whatever overblown grievance Tiffany had against the family.” That flippant, glib, minimizing attitude is so prevalent within narcissistic families, especially when it comes to the scapegoat’s own pain and trauma. They’re not allowed to be validated because what would that say about the parents, or the family as a system? Enter projection.
At the end of the day, the scapegoat has two choices: suck it up and continue to deteriorate in a myriad of ways, or as painful as it is — my God, is it painful, go no contact because things will never improve. For one, the narcissist and/or their cult of enablers will never apologize or validate the scapegoat’s own trauma-filled memories and experiences, a foundation required for any healthy, trusting, authentic relationship. Anything short is gaslighting.
She would struggle with financial and relationship stability throughout her short life. Up to her suicide, Tiffany existed on the fringes of her family: the black sheep, the scapegoat, the flighty one, the hot mess truth-teller; the family’s collective eye roll. There’s a Tiffany in every dysfunctional family.
In her own right, she was an accomplished, self-taught artist who’d use trash and other fragile items, like glass and porcelain, she’d found discarded around Somerville to create her mosaic masterpieces. Maybe that was how she’d see herself — broken pieces turned into well-crafted, original pieces of art, deserving of attention and admiration, too. In addition, Tiffany was an excellent cook, a once premiere baker, and a graduate of Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, who was known, in the past, to feed friends gourmet-quality meals.
Globe Correspondent, Jina Moore writes in her 2004 article — “Sister in a Glass House,” regarding Tiffany and her hard-to-let-go of glass mosaics:
“She prices her pieces on a sliding scale. It depends on how much I had to hurt myself while I made it, how far I had to drag it, whether it was night or day. Mostly, I make it up,” she says. ‘’It’s a made-up price for made-up stuff in a made-up world.”
And she adored her rabbit and cat, but had to give them away before her death as she faced financial hardships. A close friend of Tiffany’s with the initials M.K. would post a comment in The Data Lounge in 2013:
“She gave the rabbit away when she could no longer afford or manage to feed it/care for it — she had already long since given away her cat, Mister Wonderful.”
Tiffany would die alone atop a mattress on the dirty floor surrounded by fake, plastic flowers similar to Sir John Everett Millais’ famous Ophelia painting. Her body remained undiscovered behind a locked door for five days in a ramshackled house she shared with two other roommates on a dead-end street in Somerville that was in such a deplorable state that it had to be torn down — uninhabitable.
I think Tiffany, in the end, just wanted to be seen and validated. She’d layout strict instructions before her death, making it absolutely clear that she did not want her family to memorialize her, or have any of her belongings. I think it was important to Tiffany to have the last word. And nothing screams last word than a punctuated suicide, especially in the context.
The surviving Sedaris siblings would study the many photos that Amy took of Tiffany’s scatterbrained-looking apartment with the intent of a steely-eyed forensic, looking for clues, when she went there to collect two boxes that contained their sister’s eclectic life of almost fifty years.
From Now We Are Five:
“Toward the end of the week, I came upon my father in Amy’s room, sifting through the photographs that Tiffany had destroyed. In his hand was a fragment of my mother’s head with a patch of blue sky behind her. Under what circumstances had this been ripped up? I wondered. It seemed such a melodramatic gesture, like throwing a glass against a wall. Something someone in a movie would do.
“Just awful,” my father whispered. “A person’s life reduced to one lousy box.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Actually, there are two of them.”
He corrected himself. “Two lousy boxes.”
A poem from my second book Coupling, released in November 2021:
Elephants
To get along
in certain circles
sometimes meant
living with elephants.
The smart ones
carried peanuts
inside their pockets.
I was not one
of the smart ones.
The day I picked up
a brochure
on teaching English
as a second language
from a school
somewhere in Seoul,
was the day I planned
to run from the elephants
for good.
I’d imagined myself
teaching a class
in a room
above a bibimbap cafe,
where afterward I’d go
and drink bubble tea
with new friends.
Then I read about dog
markets and bosintang —
a popular dog meat soup,
and changed my mind.
Jimmy Russo told me
six months
before he jumped off
the George Washington Bridge
that my problem was
I didn’t know myself;
that…and I talked too much.
“Why are you so afraid
of silence?” Jimmy asked,
before passing me
his cigarette
as we watched the sun
go down
from the Brooklyn Bridge.
Thirty years later,
and I still talk too much,
according to my daughter;
still don’t know why
I’m so afraid of silence.
At night, when every sound
is another sound
in the dark,
I think about those elephants;
their big and small gifts.
