Mining the past

and we had left San Francisco. We were going to pick apples and pears in the Pacific North-West and I was writing letters to my family and friends, but I didn’t have an address where they could write me back. I started just writing to myself.

How you do describe your work? Do you embrace humorist, diarist?

I rejected the word humorist for a long time because I thought that it meant you had, like, a cardigan sweater with patches on the elbows, but now I’m old and I do. I grew into that word. I think at heart, all this time, I’ve been a diarist. I’m not ashamed of it.

As a teenager, what were you thinking you’d do?

I wanted to be a visual artist, but I realised I was more affected by what I read than by what I saw.

I would go to a show at a museum and look at a painting and say, ‘Oh I wish I owned that’, and that would be the end of my relationship with a painting. With a short story I would read or with an author I would discover I could be haunted. It would affect my mood and affect the way that I saw the world. I thought, wow, it would be amazing to be able to do that.

Diary item dated Dec 15, 1992, enter Ira Glass, who called to say National Public Radio’s

Morning Edition Santa-Land

broadcast your

and pay you US$500. This was your start as a public radio star, but you continued your work doing odds jobs to make money.

It never meant anything to me to be able to say to people I’m a writer so I kept my day job. But I would do these readings and I worked my way up from an audience of eight. I really had paid my dues. I wasn’t just this guy who came out of nowhere and someone put me on the radio.

I had been writing every single day for 15 years. I went from a small audience to an audience of 10 million people. Everything came from that.

Diary item dated March 23, 1999, you gave up drinking. Why?

I told myself I could only write when I was drinking. I would say that I was an alcoholic. There are many worse drinkers than me, but it meant I couldn’t go anywhere at night because I was just too messed up to leave the house. It meant I was constantly living with this low-grade fever of shame.

It felt great to quit. Now I can write anywhere. Put me on a plane on the runway for 45 minutes and I’m good. – AP

Diaries

‘I think at heart, all this time, I’ve been a diarist,’ says Sedaris, whose latest work mines the diaries he started recording when he was just 20. — INGRID CHRISTIE/ davidsedarisbooks.com wanted to