37 THE ART OF DIARY KEEPING
according to David Sedaris
Why do you keep a diary? I feel utterly compelled to do it and couldn’t imagine a day in which I don’t spend time writing my diary. It helps me make sense of the world, and it’s the first thing I do every morning. The world is so beautiful, complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it. Where and when do you write your diary? When I wake, I go into the office at home and write for 45 minutes. Using the small notebook I carry everywhere with me and in which I jot things down, I reflect on the events of the previous day, then start writing my diary entry for yesterday. I might write about a joke, something I overheard or a memory from my childhood.
Who are you writing for? For myself. When you start writing a diary, you write it for somebody else – you write the diary you feel you should be writing, the one you want your mum to find, but you grow out of that.
Do you edit your entries? I make an entry, then it’s fluid for a week. I give myself a few days to change something, then it’s set. Maybe I’m not convinced of an opinion, and I want to see how that reads in a week. I might decide it’s okay, or think, ‘Ugh! Get that sentence out of my life.’
You write about issues in your life, like drugs and drinking, with detachment. Why don’t you write more about your feelings? It’s not what I do. To type the word ‘alcoholic’ would have made it real. There was a brief period when I wrote about my feelings, but it’s the worst writing I’ve ever done. I was 32 and had just broken up with my first boyfriend after five years. My diary was like a teenage girl’s diary, going round in circles of misery; obsessively thinking about why we broke up and how I could get him back. I prefer to reflect on a newspaper or radio
[continued from previous page] article, something somebody told me, a time I was with my family at a beach house, or watching a stranger eat a sandwich with his eyes closed.
How do you write your diaries?
I type very fast, but only using one finger. Then I print it off and tape it into a ring-bound folder together with postcards, pictures, illustrations and little things people have sent me. Each diary covers one season, then I have it professionally bound, and every book has a different cover. They’re quite beautiful objects, I must say. There are 156 volumes of my diaries, so I created a master list and a guide in which the diaries are numbered.
Where do you keep them?
In a locked Regency cabinet in my office. I don’t know who they’re locked from: we often have house guests, but it never occurs to me that they’d want to read my diaries.
Has anybody read them?
No. I might read something to Hugh [David’s partner of 25 years], but I wouldn’t hand him the diary to read. My family has never shown an interest in reading them. When you read someone else’s diary, you get exactly what you deserve, which is to have your feelings hurt. I tell Hugh, ‘When I die, if you read my diaries and your feelings are hurt, keep reading, because on the next page I’ll have written something great about you.’
What do you do when you’re not writing?
My compulsions are walking, picking up rubbish from the Sussex countryside where I live, and vacuuming my room obsessively. When I was young, I’d come home from school and go on the rampage with the vacuum cleaner. I wanted order. My bedroom was always, is always, pristine. Now I just want to do that to the world – make it clean, tidy and litter-free. On an average day at home, I walk about 20 miles, but when Hugh’s away, I go into crazy mode, so I’m out at 1am with a head lamp on a dual carriageway, picking up rubbish.
How did your success come about?
You have to have luck in life. I was lucky. I was living in Chicago, reading a story I’d written in public, and there was someone in the audience who called a couple of years later and asked if I’d like to be on the radio. The biggest audience I’d read in front of at that stage was 500 people, then I had an audience the next day of 10 million.
How has your life changed?
I stay at the Four Seasons and fly first class. I slept on golf courses and under highway overpasses when I was younger, but now I’m older I do it differently. Maybe I’ll lose everything. But I’m not going back to sleeping rough.