David sedaris
AUTHOR AND HUMOURIST DAVID SEDARIS FINDS HIS BIGGEST INSPIRATION IN THE EVERYDAY.
It begins in typical Sedaris fashion – with a story. “Every day I stay in a hotel, and when I go down to breakfast the hostess always says, ‘So, how’s your morning going so far?’ And I’m not even going to answer that question, because it’s so stupid. My morning is eight minutes old. If you want to have a conversation with somebody, put some effort in! Ask me, ‘When was the last time you went to the beach?’ or ‘Do you know a lot of doctors?’”
Sedaris is chatting down the phone from Houston, Texas, halfway through a marathon three-month, cross-america book tour, where he’s entertaining legions of Sedaris acolytes with stories from Calypso, his tenth collection of personal essays. Well, his tenth collection of whatever it is Sedaris actually does. His style often gets compared to Alan Bennett and Garrison Keillor – a bubbling, satirical gumbo of memoir, essay, personal diary and creative non-fiction (Sedaris has admitted that most of his stories, even the gut-wrenching biographical ones, are only “real-ish”). If the unexamined life is not worth living, Sedaris must have the most valuable existence on record.
“I can’t imagine ever running out of things to write about,” he says. “I started this tour with three new essays, and when I tour in the spring I’ll have three more, but I have no idea what they’re going to be. Presumably I’ll be living between now and then, and something will happen. There’s always something to write, if you look close enough.”
This might be Sedaris’s superpower. The ability to simply pay attention. He says most of his stories – perhaps the best stories – don’t come from high drama or kooky family antics, but from life: feeding your tumour to a snapping turtle (true), or drowning a half-dead mouse in a bucket (also true). “I could write an essay about my day today,” he says, “just going to the post office and eating lunch and walking back to the Four Seasons through this really bad neighbourhood. So maybe the story becomes about how spoilt I am, or what does a ‘bad neighbourhood’ really mean? Like, when you say ‘bad neighbourhood’, you just mean a neighbourhood you don’t want to live in, right?”
Sedaris speaks in a gentle, high-pitched hum, audible primarily to dogs and book critics. His head feels like an infinite library, shelves stacked high with hilarious anecdotes, each story filed alphabetically for instant recall. Like ‘T’ for ‘tampon’. “This woman gave me four huge boxes of German tampons,” Sedaris says without explanation, as if German tampons are something that happen all the time. “So, the other night this 15-year-old girl and her mother came up after the show, and I said, ‘Oh, I have something for you,’ and slid some tampons across the table. And the mother goes, ‘Oh, look at that!’ and she turns to her daughter and says, ‘Are you going to put them in your special treasure box?’ I laughed and said, ‘Is that what you call it in your household?’”
It’s classic Sedaris: relatable, a little dirty, catching you off-guard. Calypso is full of this sort of thing. Existential musings on getting old (“There are few real joys to middle age. The only perk I can see is that, with luck, you’ll acquire a guest room”) segue savagely into his sister Tiffany’s suicide (“A person expects his parents to die. But a sibling? I felt I’d lost the identity I’d enjoyed since 1968”). Sedaris forces his readers to ride emotional switchbacks, veering from laughter to tears and back again. He says getting older hasn’t made him bitter, just more curious.
“I don’t think I’m a particularly cranky person,” he says, “because things that irritate me are material for me. So, if you irritate me, it’s like you’re handing me money.”