Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim Literary Elements

Memoir/Autobiography/Essay collection

North Carolina, New York and Europe in the latter half of the 20th century.

First person narrative from the author’s point of view looking back at various points in his past.

Light-hearted but with melancholy mood permeating throughout the text. The presiding tone throughout is ironic self-deprecation.

Protagonist: the author. Antagonist: varying from essay to essay and ranging from a tiny nine-year-old girl from a broken redneck home to a tall, menacing African American tenant of his father’s rental home.

The center of most of the conflict in these essays is located between the author and members of his family, especially his parents, but also in various ways with his multiple siblings.

Individual essays sometimes lead to a climax: “The Girl Next Door” climaxes with the author moving to escape the psychological torture of a nine-year-old neighbor.

The fourth line of the book—in the opening chapter—foreshadows a tendency toward living arrangements and a social order which the author will repeat throughout the book: “Within a year we would move again and, as she explained, there wasn’t much point in getting too close to people we would have to say good-bye to…I adopted my mother’s attitude, as it allowed me to pretend that not making friends was a conscious choice. I could if I wanted to.”

“…she took pictures of germs, viruses, and people reacting to germs and viruses. On weekends, for extra money, she photographed weddings, which really wasn’t that much of a stretch” is a memorable example of the author’s propensity for understated ironic humor.

“`The two of us together, man oh man, what a sight that would have been!’ We laughed then, Vespasian and Titus in the cab of a Toyota pickup” is an ironic allusion comparing the suburban adventure of the author and his father to a very powerful father and son emperor team of ancient Rome.

“Both were blond, their hair almost white, with invisible eyebrows and lashes. The mother darkened hers with pencil, but the girl appeared to have none at all. Her face was like the weather in one of those places with no discernible seasons…You had to feel sorry for a girl like that. No father, no eyebrows, and that mother.”

Paradoxically, the title has nothing to do with the contents. In fact, the word corduroy appears just twice and the word denim not at all.

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“The Empire” is used as an ironic metonym to describe the entirety of his parents’ investment and holdings in rental properties.

“If finding an apartment is like falling in love, buying one is like proposing on your first date and agreeing not to see each other until the wedding” is an example of the unusual art of personifying an action.