Title Analysis

The title Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim’s literal meaning is that the barbie doll (his family) is being changed or outfitted to his liking.  Also since this book is a memoir, it is David past being told the way David wants to tell it;  so this a direct correlation to how he is dressing his family.  In addition the word dress is to put on a persona almost, or to change the way you appear to others.  So David is telling his past to make his family to appear to others worse than himself.  So he makes them look like “rednecks”: “Back in New York State, we had lived in the country, with no sidewalks or street lights; you could leave the house and still be alone.”(Sedaris 3-4).

Its figurative meaning is how he is changing the way the world looks at him.  Just like how some people hang out with people with worse reputation to make themselves look better, David is making his family look worse in his memoir of his past.  He also states in his book a few times how his family members are crazy and don’t understand him because they’re not as good as him, this is an example of how he tries to make his family look bad to make himself look better.  So sometimes during the novel he especially make fun of his father: “I looked at my father, a man in dirty  shorts who drank his beer from the can rather than pouring it into his tumbler, and I thought, You don’t belong here.”(Sedaris 49).  He may also use the title Dress your family in corduroy and denim because he goes into his past makes his family look bad but in a way to make people laugh when they read.  This way of making his family look bad in order to make the reader laugh is very sly and funny thing.   The title Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim means he’s morphing or setting up his family to make himself look better.  He says hes dressing them in corduroy and denim because generally unfashionable people where only corduroy and denim, so by calling them unfashionable is a way to make the reader laugh and to make himself look better.  A lot of this title is very ironic because his family has money, so saying they’re poor and unfashionable is very ironic and funny.  

Word count: 405