For clarity sake, I mean the people who think he’s sincere and agree with him. The people who claimed to have turned out just fine anyway are also likely to criticize kids these days for being too coddled, so that whole perspective is being satirized in the free press piece.

And while he might have done genuinely awful things to his sister, It can be very difficult to negotiate relationships that are so emotionally trying if you are not in a place to deal with those emotions at that moment. this doesn’t make him a narcissist by default. It just makes him human.

And even that excerpt from the New Yorker article betrays a sense of awareness that his own beliefs about the exceptionalism of his family were made unquestioningly, and that had he been able to better connect with his sister he might’ve understood her viewpoint better.

It could be that Sedaris is being an asshole (non-clinical definitions of narcissism aside), or it could be in the free press piece that he is satirizing all the people who believe he is sincere.