A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

Sedaris describes the ideal short story as an experience that temporarily dislodges the reader from habitual selfhood—absorbing attention so fully that one forgets one’s own concerns—then returns the reader to themselves altered. The image of being “stuffed…back in, outsized” suggests enlargement: new perceptions, emotional residue, or moral discomfort that makes the old self feel too small. “Uneasy with the fit” captures literature’s power to create productive disquiet, leaving the reader unable to settle back into prior assumptions. The metaphor also hints at compression and intensity unique to short fiction: in a brief space, it can expand the inner life and make ordinary identity feel constraining.