DAVID SEDARIS ON FAMILY & LIFE
The writer talks to Ben Dowell about grief, how he explored accusations of abuse against his father in a new essay and whether Black Lives Matter killed comedy.
It’s hard to think of a better living practitioner of hilarious honesty than David Sedaris, the American writer who has mined his life and family to brilliant e ect in two sets of diaries and various essay collections. For decades he has probed every aspect of his existence, from his aimless, drug-fuelled early days when he worked as a decorator and an elf in Macy’s department store to his present status as a moneyed writer with multiple homes.
So generous is he with invitations into his world, he once shared details of another sort of probe (in his rectum) and his outrage at glimpsing a doctor’s note that said he had tolerated the procedure “poorly”. His fans could be forgiven for feeling as if they know him, as well as his partner, Hugh Hamrick, sisters Gretchen, Lisa, Ti any and Amy, brother aul, mother Sharon and father Lou.
Ah, Lou. Sedaris a cionados may have felt that there was always something troubling about Sedaris’ father, a great character if not always a nice man. David’s essays and diaries have painted their relationship as a battle, with the father constantly belittling and sometimes physically hurting the son.
Their sparring has o en reminded me of Tom and Jerry. You laugh, but uneasily.
Lou died last year aged 98 and in his new collection of essays his son lays bare some troubling details about his family’s early life in Raleigh, North Carolina, in a devastatingly candid essay called Lady Marmalade. Sedaris has written before about his father’s proprietorial air, including a habit of wandering round the homestead in his underpants. What is new is the description of Lou asking his sister Lisa to go to the nearby woods and pose topless for his camera (“It’s art photography, not smut,” Lou is reported as saying). There’s also the story of Lou looking at his daughter Amy in a bikini and saying: “If only I were 35 years younger.” Sedaris also writes that his bipolar sister Ti any, who killed herself in 3, made unspeci c abuse allegations against Lou.
First, Sedaris is clear (and correct) in saying that he didn’t write the essays assuming Lou was guilty of abuse. So why, I ask, did he write it “A er MeToo there’s this attitude that you always have to believe women,” he tells me over the phone from Oregon, where he is giving one of his regular readings. “And I think you have to listen to women. ut my sister Ti any was a case in
I think I do grieve him as a character. I don’t grieve him as a person. And I understand, too, that different people in a family have completely different relationships with a parent and that they might be hurting right now.
point where she wasn’t a reliable person. So believing her was maybe a step too far. But what it does to a family when those charges are levelled … I guess I wanted to write about it that way. And not write about it, like, ‘Oh, he definitely did this.’”
He also doesn’t think that Lou would have had a problem with Lady Marmalade, because “he never thought he did anything wrong or inappropriate, and had peerless self-belief”. Many readers will feel it is shot through with compassion.
“That’s got to be your worst nightmare … to have a daughter calling you up and haranguing you every day and saying, ‘I’m gonna go public with this,’ when taping the phone call and trying to blackmail you. So it is something that I thought about, but I didn’t write about it when he was alive. I didn’t write about it when Tiffany was alive. When he died, I thought, ‘Oh, great. I can write that essay now.’”
He gives one of many cackly laughs. In Sedaris’ world, humour and dark familial secrets rub together fearlessly.
I wonder how his family feels about the new book. I know he often sends them essays in advance. He tells me he ran Lady Marmalade by Amy, who asked for the bikini description to be slightly edited, but acknowledged that everything in it was true.
Sedaris’ writing has always featured rich characters and Lou is one of his greatest. Is his son’s honesty in some ways an affectionate tribute to his father’s complexity? Did he love his dad? “Uhm,” he says. “Ha.” He pauses, and I sense that he is getting upset.
“I don’t think I loved him. I think there was a period in my life when my father would have died and I would have cried about it. When my mother died [she died of cancer in ], it was one of those situations where you wake up every morning and you think, ‘How do I get through today?’ And you know, my father died, and we were at a restaurant. And then by the time the che ue came, we were talking about other things. So I haven’t really given it minutes’ worth of thought since then.
“I think I do grieve him as a character. I don’t grieve him as a person. And I understand, too, that different people in a family have completely different relationships with a parent and that they might be hurting right now. Amy said to me, ‘This is the first Christmas without Dad.’ And
I said, ‘That never occurred to me.’”
He’s also clearly angry. He was written out of his father’s will when he was still struggling financially and his father’s oft-promised payments to a retirement fund never materialised. Such was Lou’s envy, he once called David’s banker to ask how much he earned the banker kept shtoom . Lou would also attend his son’s performances and scrupulously count the number of empty seats. Towards the end of his life, Lou told David that he had “won”.
“To invest that much in somebody being a failure, to invest that much. I heard, ‘You know what, you are a big fat zero, everything you touch turns to crap,’ over and over. That was the one thing he could be sure of, that I would be a loser. And he was wrong. So that was hard for him to take, because he worked so hard to create this pathetic loser. And then it’s, like, you won.”
I ask why his father hated him so intensely. “Ah, because my mother liked me so much,” he says
uickly, outlining some of the preferential treatment Sharon gave him when he was younger. Then he admits that all such speculation is “just guesswork”.
“I don’t know that I would ever come to a definitive answer. I wish that he kept [a] diary [and said], ‘I hate David because blank, blank, blank.’”
In the new book Sedaris also deploys his wry, amused prose on the subject of the eorge
loyd protests in an essay called Fresh-Caught Haddock that draws attention to what he calls “so much phoniness … on the part of white people during that whole thing” and their chanting of slogans in the “singsongy way” of a fishmonger.
He feels “everybody has a story to tell about that summer” and he had every right to tell his. It’s funny – “I didn’t want those laughs to go to waste” – and a carefully written analysis of the toxicity of American race relations. “It’s a disorder. It’s like a race disorder,” he says and one of the joys of having a home in Sussex means he can feel free of the oppressive feeling he gets when he is in the US. “You have stuff in England that you guys are going through, but I can walk down the middle of it because I’m American.”
One of his favourite outlets, The New Yorker, employs sensitivity readers and was not going to go near Fresh-Caught Haddock, he says. He describes the magazine’s response to the BLM protests with an attitude of“No-one’ s ever g on na ever laugh ever again nothing can be funny, ever weneedtodrape black bunting on the outside of the building until further notice.” It’s not the attitude he sees shared in other parts of the US where the culture wars are rarely discussed. Or as he puts it “The mood in the elevator at Conde Nast is not the mood at the restaurant I went to yesterday in Bend, Oregon.” And it seems to make him despair.
“I hate everybody now. I feel like people on the far left are no better than people on the far right. I don’t want to be around those people on either extreme. And I think it’s their certainty that bothers me. It’s their lack of curiosity that bothers me. It’s their seriousness that bothers me.”
I wonder if we older people have always reacted like this to youth movements. Is the world overtaking us? Are we old farts or are we the sanest people around? “Can’t we be sane old farts? Because I think there are certain things that I just concede to. And I just think, ‘O , I’m old.’ But then other ones…
“There’s a college in the United States that put out a list of words and terms they don’t want people to use any more. And I look at that. And I think, ‘Yeah I’m old,’ but I’m also, like, they’re saying you can’t say, ‘Oh, you’re really killing it this semester.’ You can’t say that because it’s gonna offend people who were exposed to violence … How is that right?”
Sedaris once took Lou to a speech he gave at a rinceton graduation and, rather than praise his son, the older man told everyone there that they had asked the wrong Sedaris – “Amy would have been much better.” When Sedaris recently read a piece about this incident to a live audience, he was moved by the sympathetic “noise” they made.
“The noise the audience makes, I have to say, I want to stop everything to say thank you. Thank you for making that noise. Because that’s the appropriate noise here. You know, maybe that’s what I was after when I wrote that. I just wanted people to understand. I just wanted them to hear it. And again, you feel pathetic. You know, you’re 65 years old and you’re moaning about something like this. But again, other 65-year-olds are, like, ‘Yes! You’re still moaning when you’re 65. Yeah!’”
An audience member later told him that people don’t have daddy issues any more. It’s now called father hunger, apparently. Which actually sounds like a great title for another Sedaris essay. “Oh, yeah,” he says with a laugh. “It’s coming.”
Matariki, which will be formally recognised as a holiday for the rst time on Friday 24 June, is also the rst ublic holiday to recognise e Ao M ori And there are lenty of o ortunities around the country to celebrate this s ecial holiday, while learning more about Matariki in the rocess he Matariki celebration is based around three rinci les remembrance, celebrating the resent, and looking to the future his Matariki long weekend, take time to return home, gather with friends and wh nau or reconnect and recharge at some of these festivities
TE IKA-A-MAUI / NORTH ISLAND
Te Tai Tokerau / Northland
One of Aotearoa s most culturally signi cant regions will come alive from Friday 17 June to Sunday 31 July with over 20 free and ticketed events around the beautiful ay of slands The Bay of Islands Matariki Festival will host stargazing dawn cruises,
worksho s, waiata, community h ng and more, all in collaboration between local iwi, businesses and community
T aki Makaurau / ukland T aki Makaurau s Matariki Festival is back with a line-u of more than 0 events, activities and cultural e eriences from June 21 to July 16 his year s festival launches with a re-dawn ceremony at r kei Marae, with o ular events returning including Manu Aute Kite Day on June 26, Matariki Lights at Stardome, e aumata ka a haka, a light show on the arbour ridge, and e Korakora, a free concert
Waikato
he aitomo aves are magical any time of year, but it s worth aying them a visit over the Matariki long weekend as
art of a Twilight Matariki lowwor Cave Tour e greeted with a traditional
whiri on arrival and a warming kawakawa tea, before embarking on an unforgettable twilight cave tour
he aitomo aves will also hold the Rongo ducation Series at 10am on 2 June and 2 July his interactive worksho will delve into M ori rongo traditional medicine , and e lore the various internal a lications of the kawakawa
lant in the reinstatement of wellness
Te Moana o Toi / Bay of Plenty
he ay of lenty is well-known for their beautiful roduce and this year their Matariki celebrations will be focused on food with the Matariki Dish Challenge Local eateries have been challenged to create Matariki-ins ired dishes that shine a light on unique food and cultural stories at your way around the ay while enjoying the wide variety of additional events on o er including the auranga Art
allery Star unt, Matariki inematic Showcase, and Kite Day
Rotorua formerly amaki M ori illage will host T Te Ihi, a feast of culture and cuisine in the age-old ara Forest ome together to e erience ancient erformance and rituals linked to the Matariki star cluster, including the mystical Ahi aitai re ceremony , and enjoy seasonal kai horotai delicacies such as roasted tuna eel , creamy ua ember-warmed k mara and steaming boil u sou
Te Whanganui-a-Tara / Wellington
At the other end of the orth sland, elllington s waterfront will be bustling with rojections, erformances, food trucks, images and reworks as art of the Matariki ki P neke Festival from 24-26 June
Soulful M ori erformer KS joins forces with the ew ealand Sym hony Orchestra to erform live shows on each of the three nights, the ity allery
ellington e hare oi and he Dowse Art Museum will showcase M ori art and installations, and e Ao M ori will take centre-stage at M oriland Film Festival from 2 June until 3 July, the Southern emis here s biggest indigenous lm festival
TE WAIPOUNAMU / SOUTH ISLAND tautahi / Christ hur h From Friday 24 June to Sunday 3 July, a range of innovative lighting installations and artworks will be on dis lay throughout central hristchurch as art of Tira a Mai A 21m long illuminated tunnel will run between athedral Square and e ae, an immersive e erience that will teach a g i ahu creation story
Kaikora
Rikki Solomon of g ti Kahungunu and g ti Kahu ki hangaroa will lead a karakia and share his knowledge of Maramataka for the Matariki Dawn Breakfast in Kaiko ra ou ll also be able to view the Matariki constellation u close through a telesco e with astronomer rian orsfall on hand for all your night sky-related questions
Te Tai Poutini / West Coast elebrate the M ori ew ear with a winter festival on arters each on the est oast of the South sland from 6am on Friday 24 June
here ll be ka a haka, a masquerade, stargazing, a rangatahi zone, and a s ecial Matariki eremony to honour those lost since the last rising of Matariki
Otago
Over three nights, Mana Moana te oti will entertain and ins ire with a s ectacular water and light show on the Otago arbour waterfront he work of M ori and si k artists will be rojected onto a water screen, giving the illusion that the images, short lms, oems and dance are a earing out of thin air lsewhere in Otago it s all about the kai The Rees and sk alley s Matariki Cele ration Dinner in ueenstown is a nine-course dining e erience re ared by hef orey ume matched to the nine stars of Matariki, aired with sk alley wines
oraki / Mt Cook f you re staying in the Mackenzie region, Mt ook Lakeside Retreat is hosting a dawn stargazing and breakfast on Friday 24 June as art of the Matariki MakenieFestival he heart of the Aoraki Mackenzie Dark Sky Reserve is an ideal lace to view the Matariki constellation while you snack onadelicious,nourishingbreakfast Additional events include a nine-course Matariki Degustation Dinner and the Dark Skies Full of nlightenment
ublic alk with a range of s eakers celebrating the integrity of our dark night skies
This Matariki long weekend, take time to return home, gather with friends and whānau or reconnect and recharge at some of these festivities.