Diary of a somebody
A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020
By David Sedaris Little, Brown £20
Throughout his twenties and well into his thirties, David Sedaris was an embarrassment to his family.
He was always on the move, dropping in and out of college and flirting with hard drugs, as he drifted from one odd job to the next. The only constant was the diary in which he recorded every bad or funny thing that happened to him or his family.
His big break came in Chicago in 1992, when the radio host Ira Glass invited him to read from it on his show. A blink of an eye later, Sedaris was on National Public Radio to talk about the Christmas he spent working as an elf at Macy’s in New York. His reminiscences, drawn from the notes he’d kept at the time, had the ring of truth, though Sedaris was happy to admit that he’d changed the story wherever he found a chance to make it funnier.
No one seemed to mind. Everyone wanted more. Almost overnight, his charmingly barbed and almost-true stories had become New Yorker and This American Life staples. Soon they were out in book form. With each new collection came a coast-to-coast tour. By the noughties, he had become a household name, and so, too, had the relatives whose dirty linen he routinely improved on for maximum comic effect.
They accepted their hair shirts graciously. For almost 30 years now they have worn them without much complaint. They could have broken ranks in 2007, when an Alexander S Heard took it upon himself to investigate just how much truth there was in Sedaris’s stories, and how much invention.
But the only ones to speak to him were Tiffany, his unflappable and endlessly forgiving sister, and Lou, his father, who admitted that he’d resented being cast as a loud-mouth, homophobic reactionary, but only sometimes, and not so much. You had to forgive the boy because he was just so funny. After the Heard article came out in the
New Republic, though, Sedaris’s publishers got a little nervous. Too much time might have passed for anyone to sue them about Sedaris’s almost entirely invented tale about a midget guitar teacher. But there were schools, mental hospitals and nudist colonies with reputations to think about. Some of his employers began leaning hard on their fact-checkers. Others began labelling his work as fiction.
How Sedaris feels about the shifting of goalposts is one of many topics skipped over in this, the second volume of his diaries. It covers 18 years, amounting to just under 600 pages, with a great deal of material he later improved on for greater comic or dramatic effect, and with good reason. Has he decided to release these lesser versions to get back at the fact-checkers, I wonder? Or does he genuinely wish for Brand Sedaris to be properly referenced and understood?
He goes out of his way not to mis-sell the product. He is not in the business of introspection, we are told. His interest, as always, is in recording the quirky offcuts of everyday life. But by 2003 there is little in his everyday life that will bring the shock of recognition to any reader who isn’t a rock star. He changes cities and countries with every new entry.
His deepest conversations are with the drivers who pick him up at 1,001 airports and the fellow passengers with whom he strikes up conversations in first class, even though their aftershave smells like sanitary urine cake.
The fans who flock to his shows and spend up to four hours in the signing
line afterwards become his main sources of new material. We hear about the funniest English-language menu you’ve ever seen in China. T-shirt slogans you can’t believe are still legal. Why and how often women take off their bras the moment they get home from work.
In the lulls between tours, he goes shopping and pees 14 times a day. Hugh, his partner, makes him côte de boeuf and apple pie with fruit from their own trees.
Every few years, he buys a new house. Paris gives way to La Bagotière, London to Rackham. Then it’s back to New York City and a beach house in North Carolina, which would be perfect if the neighbours would only stop voting for Trump.
As the tours go global, his nerves start fraying. There are times when he doesn’t even want to talk to his drivers. As he waits for his luggage in Albuquerque, he imagines a child’s coffin sliding onto the carousel. In Santiago de Chile, his credit card fails him totally, and the airline people treat him like the indigent he once was. The mishap leaves him badly shaken: ‘At what point did my airline status come to determine my identity?’
The pandemic gives him time to think it through. By Christmas 2020, he’s come to understand that, as much as he likes the money he’s been raking in and the prestige it’s brought him, what he’s craved most, and now misses most dreadfully, is the attention of adoring strangers. It’s hard to see, though, how he’s going to win them back, though, with this dreary mishmash of anecdote, casual narcissism and complaint.