This is Fresh Air. I'm David Beane-Kooley.

David Sederis is a famous humorist who got his start by reading his personal essays

on the public radio show This American Life.

He's had best-selling collections of his personal essays, and he's received the Thurber

Prize for American Humor, the Jonathan Swift Prize for Satire in Humor, and the Terry

Southern Prize for Humor. Yet several of the essays in his latest book take a pretty

serious turn.

Those essays are about his father, with whom Sederis had a lifelong combat of relationship.

He says, quote, as long as my father had power, he used it to hurt me.

End.

In Sederis' new book, he writes about when his father was in his 90s, and his power

was continually diminishing in assisted living and in the ICU. The new book is called Happy

Go Lucky, and it's now out in paperback.

Terry Gross spoke with David Sederis last year.

David Sederis, welcome back to Fresh Air. So great to talk to you again.

Oh, thank you so much, Terry.

So I have to start with your author photo before we get into the heavy stuff.

So you're standing in front of a library of bookshelves, wearing an elegant suit, holding

a pipe in your hands, looking off to the side. There's something so like 1950s movie

about it. Like, what is this photo about?

He has an old friend who he went to college with, a photographer named Anne Fishbind.

And so I needed an author photo, so I asked Anne if she would do it, and so she arranged

...