Dear Diary ... I have a secret
Theft by Finding: Diaries ( 1977- 2002) by David Sedaris Little, Brown and Company 528pp, $ 36.50
“If nothing else,” David Sedaris writes in his introduction to this first instalment of his edited journals, “a diary teaches you what you’re interested in.” Most diaries start out as performances for an imaginary admiring audience, he suggests, but the longer you keep them, the less likely you are to maintain any pretence. You might start out keeping the diary of the “civic- minded/ big- hearted/ philosophical” person you would like to be, but the longer you keep a diary going, the more the performance gives way to reality.
In Sedaris’s view, keep it up long enough, and a journal will eventually converge on the real you; not a man interested in macroeconomics or social injustice, but someone who spends his days “questioning fondue or describing those ferrets you couldn’t afford.”
By his own theory, Sedaris’s diaries should certainly be the real deal. Since 1977, he has accumulated “roughly eight million words” of journals — more than enough to home in on the real him, even after the editing necessary to condense it all into two volumes. Theft by Finding, the first to be published, covers the period from 1977 to 2002 that sees Sedaris grow from a despondent 21- year- old moving from one menial job to the next into a man recognized as possibly the best humorist of the 2000s. And, while I am not sure I quite buy into the idea that a diary ever represents the real you, especially if the you in question has as carefully honed a persona as David Sedaris does, Theft by Finding will be a feast for Sedaris fans and newcomers alike.
On the humour side, regular Sedaris readers will be reassured to know that even in the earliest entries the familiar comic voice of Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls or Me Talk Pretty One Day is well on its way to emerging. Just as in his essays and stories, the young Sedaris is both scandalizing and scandalized, surprisingly profound, and very, very funny. If he is less sure of himself than present- day Sedaris, and a little rawer, it is all the more engaging.
A typical entry from 1978 finds him homesick, and stuck between the sexual advances of a co- worker in one job and the evangelical advances of his boss in another: “I want to be with my friends,” he writes, “not going to church with John or staring down a dildo collection at Tom’s.”
Even the darkest events offer material for trademark Sedaris turnarounds. Shortly after 9/ 11, a saleswoman in a Parisian sofa showroom launches into a terrified 20-minute monologue about the dangers unleashed by the “War on Terror”: “They’ll poison the earth and the water and there’ll be chaos and rioting and we’ll all die,” she tells them. “I understood her fear,” Sedaris records, “but is that really the way to sell a sofabed?”
Sedaris fans will not be surprised to know that he can do darkness and profundity as well as humour. Theft by Finding is full of all three, but what makes it so good is Sedaris’s gift for sidling up them all from the least expected angle. Success, when it finally comes, is all the more satisfying for knowing what it took Sedaris to get there but, whatever else you might say about him, you cannot accuse Sedaris of earnestness.
Only he could experience his breakthrough moment as being recognized by a drug dealer delivering pot to his apartment: “I was so flattered,” the diary records. “I mean, here he was, a big-time pot dealer, and he wanted my autograph?” Or record his hard- won sobriety with this two-sentence entry: “Today I saw a one-armed dwarf carrying a skateboard. It’s been 90 days since I’ve had a drink.”
By the time these moments came, I was ready to cheer but, of course, I was too busy laughing.