David Sedaris is unflinchingly honest in his writings about his middle-class upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, his Greek heritage, his difficult relationship with his father, his youngest sister’s suicide, his jobs, travels, boyfriend Hugh Hamrick, and so on. The bestselling book author made his de- but in 1992 when he read his “SantaLand Diaries” on NPR’s Morning Edition. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and his original radio pieces can be heard on This American Life and on BBC Radio 4. A resident of rural West Sussex, England, Sedaris is in Manhattan when we talk; he’s about to begin a multi-city tour that includes a return to the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield on Saturday, May 13.
I imagine you find material everywhere you go, in whatever you’re doing. What is your process?
I carry a notebook and write things down in it. And then every morning, I put it in my diary and tuck it away. I was just writing an essay about every time I go to Hawaii, somebody is spectacularly rude to me. I really kind of hoped it would happen this last time, so I could write about it. Because then it could be, like, “Every time I go to Hawaii….” I was on the side of the road, and these people drove by in a truck, and the passenger stuck his head out and said, “Get the f—- off the road!” Which I’d qualify as rude. But I thought, Oh, thank you. It didn’t hurt my feelings.
You’ve said in interviews that every morning, you sit at your desk and write. Do you have a person or an audience in mind?
One of the things that I have to finish is a graduation speech for Columbia. So, in that case, I really do have the audience in mind. But other than that, no. I’m just trying to think and visualize material for this tour. I’m just trying to put things together that would work on stage, that have some dialogue in them and that are funny, and thinking about how they move. I just got back from India. When you go to India, it hits you right in the face. It’s a lot to take in. It is hard to write about India. Usually, everyone’s first impressions are kind of the same. So, I don’t know that my first impressions are going to be that terribly different than anyone else’s.
Why were you in India?
I left New York and went to London because I have a radio show there. Four episodes. We were going to go to Japan, but Japan wasn’t open at the time. So, we said, “Okay, we’ll go to India.” We went from New York to England to India to Australia, where I had a tour, and then Hawaii, where I had a tour, and then back to New York.
India was my first trip out of North America. It was pretty incredible. It’s an overload to your senses.
It really is. I was surprised because nobody f—-ed with me in any way. Our first few days, we did not see any other Westerner, and we were in Mumbai. Nobody ever asked us for money. Nobody ever grabbed us. I felt invisible. I’m trying to write about it in a way that people can relate to or some sort of hook. I’m just struggling with it. It helps a lot that I have pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of diary stuff from India. We’d go out and then come back and then spend hours and hours writing it up. It’s not like I’m sitting here scratching my head thinking, What happened in India?
Have you ever witnessed any crime in your travels?
That’s a really good question. No, I haven’t. It’s always a fear that you’re going to witness a crime and that you’re not going to do anything. One time in the 1980s, I was living in Chicago, it was a fall weekend and we were going to the Wisconsin Dells—get a hotel room to look at the fall colors and everything. We went with this other couple, and we were at a rest area with fast food places. Our two friends of ours were going to go to the bathroom. I noticed these two guys watch- ing them who looked like the people who would rob people in bathrooms. I didn’t say anything to them. I didn’t say, “I wouldn’t go in there right now.” Those guys did try to rob them in the bathroom and would have if my then-boy-
friend hadn’t gone in there and started fighting them, which was really something. I always thought, I knew what was going to happen. I saw that coming, and I didn’t do anything about it. It’s always bothered me.
How has reading in front of an audience changed from before and after the pandemic?
I’ve read on stage about New York during the pandemic. I read it in the fall of 2021. And then I tried to read it in the spring of 2022, and it was too late. Every- body was, like, yeah, we know. We’d like to forget about that, please. I just read it again when I was in Australia, and it works again, because now people are like, “Oh, right, we did that.” It’s funny how that works, how we tend to have forgotten so many of the details.
We’re far enough away from it now that they can hear about it again.
It’s kind of like clothing that came back into style. I was in Australia, and I couldn’t believe the hairstyle that came back. I couldn’t argue with any of the mullets that I saw. I couldn’t say, “Oh, my God, somebody needs to hold you down and cut your hair.” Which is funny. I think they look fine, because they were on young men who were good-looking to begin with.
Good looks first, and then their mullets second.
What is it about reading in front of an audience that you so enjoy?
When I was in high school, we were supposed to read a chapter, let’s say, of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The teacher would figure out that nobody read it. So we read it out loud in class. The teacher would call on people.
I just remember thinking, Call on me. Call on me. Let me do it. Let me do it. And when I was called on—and it could even be a cold reading—I just thought, This is what I was put on earth to do, to read things out loud. And
I couldn’t believe how lousy my classmates were. It’s like, put some effort into it. The first time I read something I’d written, I was in college, and it was a creative writing class.
People laughed, and I thought, How did I not know? This is what I want to do with my life. I didn’t know it until that moment. I didn’t know it was an option.
You knew you wanted to write, but reading your works in front of an audience came later?
Yes. When I read out loud, I saw how good it felt to read something you had written and people laughed at it. I had been writing every day for
seven years, but I never showed it to anybody. I just kept it to myself. And then I took this writing class, and I was the best one in the class. But, I mean, I’d been writing every day for seven years, and they hadn’t been writing at all. We were in art school, so it was completely understandable. If you read short stories voraciously every day for seven years, and you write every day, you probably can be better than somebody who hasn’t read a short story unless you put a gun to their head and who never writes any- thing. It was the idea of writing something funny and hearing people laugh. I would not be
interested in reading something that was serious.
Can you give me an example of a ques- tion from an audience member who caught you off guard?
Back in Australia, all the
questions were, “What do you think of Australia? What’s your favorite thing about Australian people?”
A lot of people want to ask about their town. Also, sometimes people ask a question and think they’re be- ing funny, and I want to say to them, “Has anyone ever told you that you’re not funny?” It would be like, if you went into modeling, and no one ever said to you, “You know, you really should not be a model.” I don’t say that because I don’t want to embar- rass them. I was in Australia, on stage,
and someone asked, “What do
you like about Australians?” I said, “I like that you guys talk about money.” Any Australian will tell you how much they paid for something. It’s noth- ing in Australia to talk about money. Americans do it, too. But in France, oh, my God, or in England? It is so tacky to ask any kind of financial question. You could never do that. Aus- tralians are completely frank and loose about that. And I said that I really admired that. So somebody raised their hand and said, “How much money did you make last year?” And
there was no way I couldn’t answer it.
Does it ever get old being on the road and reading to audiences?
The only thing that gets old is my material. I wrote something new for the last tour. I had eight shows in Australia, and then six or seven shows in Ha- waii. When I got home, it was like, God, I’m sick to death of that. Sometimes you can have a really great monitor. A monitor is like a speaker that’s right next to you so you can hear your own voice, and exactly
the same height. You can read something that you’ve read 40
times before, and you feel like you can go places with it you’ve never been. It can be thrilling for me. It’s always nice to know that the evening can be revived that way. I also make the list of what I read, and where I read, because I don’t want to repeat myself.
Do you look back at your writing from 30 years ago and think, I’m so much better now.
Everything in the book, Naked, was only read in front of an audience once. They are so trying too hard. Everything’s four times longer than it needs to be, and everything is like me elbowing you in the ribs. “Funny, huh? That’s funny, huh? Huh? Huh? Did you laugh about that?” And then the book after that is still a bit that way. I was going on tour by then. The audience isn’t going to lie to you. They’re not going to laugh at stuff that they don’t think is funny. You can feel them drifting away. You can’t force anyone to pay atten- tion. Just because something is important to you doesn’t mean it’s important to someone else. You have to make it important to them. So, the audience really tells me everything I need to know.
How does your family react to your work?
I give it to them first, and I ask if there’s anything they want changed. There’s a lot of mental illness in my family. There’s a lot of alcoholism and drug addiction. I don’t talk about that. I talk about my own, but I don’t talk about other people’s.
How much do you enjoy working with your sister, Amy? And is there anything that you’re working on with her right now?
We used to do plays together. That was back when I lived in New York and was just here all the time. It was a great. We did six or seven of them. Hugh would do the sets and then he directed some of the later ones. There was a real “let’s put on our show” kind of feeling. Then I moved to Europe. Another thing is that I quit smoking pot. All those plays were written with a bong. The last one, I wrote sober. It didn’t have the manic quality that the other ones did. It had an actual plot and an actual ending. I thought it was the best one that we ever did.
I just read again “April & Paris,” which was published in The New Yorker in 2008. It’s another example of how you find the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Well, that’s the thing. When people ask, “Are you afraid you’re gonna run out of things to write about?” I always say, “No,” because when someone knocks on my door, I answer it. It doesn’t have to be something big. Often, the things I write about are really small. It’s just a question of keeping your eyes open and finding the right small thing.
—Anastasia Stanmeyer
May/June 23
Go to berkshiretheatregroup.org for information on David Sedaris’s performance at the Colonial Theatre, 111 South Street in Pittsfield on Saturday, May 13 at 7:30 p.m.
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