Author: David Oakley

Publisher: Carmel Saybrook

ISBN: 978-0-578-75726-1

Thanks to David Oakley, I spent far much longer than I wanted to looking at epic tattoo fails on YouTube. 

Thank you for mentioning it in your new book, David. Those are twenty-two minutes I’ll never get back.

But tattoos are real. And people who do weird things or have odd thoughts really do those weird things and have those odd thoughts! There are plenty of ironies, urges and eccentricities that may sound made up, but are really real because of the really real people who really have them. Parents and children are real, even when they seem like characters in not-real TV shows. Even practical jokes are real, if not always really practical. 

Which is to say that Oakley’s new book, Nobody Eats Parsley, and Other Things I Leaned from My Family, is total nonfiction. There’s not a made-up paragraph in the entire thing, even though the chapters have such headings “The UFO Upstairs,” “The Fountain of Spew,” “Freeze, Clowns” and “Aunt Hallie’s Heels.” The second of his two books (the first was “Why Is Your Name Upside Down?”), this new volume is a collection of short essays in which the author relates more than forty stories about random incidents and observations revolving around his family life. The book may not change the world for the better, but it will make the better part of a few hours of leisure reading a little more enjoyable—mostly because it will remind us of similarly odd or silly incidents and observations in our own really real lives. 

What, then, separates a David Oakley from, say, a Dave Barry, who has written books similar in genre and gist to this one, but is far more famous and, probably, a lot richer than David Oakley? That’s a difficult if not impossible question to answer. Oakley (a creative writer by trade, in the advertising business) has a fine command of the language, as does Barry. His real-life stories are as funny and intriguing as many of Barry’s real-life stories. So what’s the deal?

Maybe it’s just that there are too many Davids writing books like this (David Oakley, Dave Barry, David Sedaris, Dave Chappell). Maybe he should change his name to Tattoo. Maybe he doesn’t throw enough stuff against the wall (in terms of submitting projects) so that something eventually sticks at one of major publishing houses. Maybe he simply hasn’t found the right place and hasn’t gotten there at the right time.  

Or (and this is all speculation—I don’t know David Oakley at all, though I do know that he’s romantically in love with Las Vegas) maybe he’s absolutely fine with the publishing track he’s taken and the ways in which it has been going for him. That’s certainly possibly, because if the tone of the book is any indication, Oakley seems to be a guy who embraces life, has and gives plenty of love, enjoys himself and others, and is perfectly fine with his place in the universe. If so, more power to him. And hopefully more bylines. Maybe he should get a tattoo of Simon & Schuster on his chest and submit his next book of essays to that publisher with a giant picture of himself—topless—on his cover page. Maybe that will compel Simon & Schuster to give his not-too-serious stuff a very serious look. No one in his family will mind if he does something like that. In fact, they might not ever know. After all, as his son Lucas wrote in a short testimonial on the back cover of the new book, “Who is David Oakley?”