ReadOut
by Lawrence Ferber

HE WRITE PRETTY

Humorist David Sedaris talks about his latest book and funny sister Amy

David Sedaris, the acerbic, sardonic, and self-deprecating openly gay humorist/writer, is at his best when life seems worst. His foibles with an eccentric family, employ as a Christmas elf, a homophobic midget guitar tutor, insane neighbors, and tricky French culture/language after moving to Paris with boyfriend Hugh Hamrick have made for riotous reading in best-selling books (Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day), and the highly anticipated Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Little, Brown & Company). In this new collection, published this month, Sedaris recounts equally outrageous, painfully funny, and sometimes deeply affecting experiences with a Bad Seed little girl neighbor and her equally monstrous mother (“The Girl Next Door”), losing his Halloween candy as a child (“Us and Them”), and paranoia in the wake of the Catholic church pedophilia scandal (“Chicken in the Henhouse”).

Sedaris is also a widely published essayist and an acclaimed (albeit self-conscious over his tinny, youthful voice) radio presence on public radio’s This American Life. He regularly packs reading appearances at venues as diverse as independent bookstores and Carnegie Hall. He’s also one half of The Talent Family with sister Amy, best known for her starring role on the Comedy Central series Strangers With Candy. They have collaborated on seven plays including the Obie-winning 1995 production One Woman Shoe and The Book of Liz.

These days Sedaris divides his time between home bases in France and England, although he’s hitting the states for an extensive summer/fall reading/signing tour. To discuss his book, getting into trouble by himself, with Amy, and with small-town child molesters, I spoke by phone with Sedaris, at the moment at his London home.

Lawrence Ferber: Do you ever actively try to get into trouble or horrible situations for a good story?

David Sedaris: Not to get in trouble. I’m not that adventurous. Usually I wait for things to come to me, but if you’re at home writing all day not that much is going to come. So I have been trying for six weeks to get a volunteer job in London because it would give me something to do. But God, they’re making it hard for me [by requiring training courses and red tape hurdles]. I don’t need a training course! I love hearing people complain. I love it. Especially when it’s nothing I can do anything about. Back pain or the health system—great, I’m all for it. I want to hear people complain and do little tasks for them, like I’ll go to someone’s house who’s old and clean their oven. Happy to do it.

L.F.: What if they gave you a happy person to care for?

D.S.: I’d be disappointed if I went to someone’s house and they were very sweet and gave me cookies, and I cleaned their oven and it wasn’t really dirty. I’d come away disappointed. I’m hunting for crackpots, basically [laughs].

L.F.: How many stories never make it to a completed published state?

D.S.: About 80 percent. I have a whole, big file of stories that are three pages long.

L.F.: Can you give me an example of one?

D.S.: My boyfriend owns a house in a very small village of only 12 houses in Normandy, and one of our neighbors was taken to prison for sexually molesting his granddaughter. He got out of prison last summer, and everyone assumed he would move, but he couldn’t afford to. The man was always nice to me, and I walked by his house a lot, and he was very lonely, so he started talking to me and inviting me into his house. In this small village when you’re an outsider to begin with, and everybody sees you leaving a child molester’s house, it doesn’t look good. That’s a story I never finished [writing], and I don’t know if I just wasn’t approaching it the right way or being honest when I needed to or it just didn’t have an ending.

L.F.: So you’re an American living in Europe, which must have been interesting during the whole start of the war. French hatred of Americans was at a high, I understand, with frequent anti-war/American protests.

D.S.: I saw a lot of protest, but then I saw a lot of protests in London as well. If anything I would say the protesting was fiercer in England than France. I was in London the day the war broke out, and then I was in Paris and then the U.SA. for a month traveling around the country. In the United States, everywhere I went, I saw signs that said “Support our troops” or American flags. This whole war industry. And when Jessica Lynch returned, when she was freed, I was watching TV, and the reporters surrounded her parents‚ house. “What did you do when you found out she was still alive? Did you cry? Did you pray? Which did you do first—cry or pray?” Nothing short of a reenactment would satisfy them. It was interesting coming back to London because they’re in Iraq too, but I have yet to see a flag, or “Support our troops” bumper sticker or T-shirt. It’s on the news every night but it hasn’t inspired greeting cards. It’s not sentimental like it was in the U.S.A.

L.F.: So what is the British take on what’s happening in the U.S.A. right now politically?

D.S.: What’s interesting here is you read such different things. If you read the Guardian or Independent you get the idea Bush is going down. These hearings, he’s going down, his days are numbered. And then you get the Herald Tribune, and it’s on page six. So I don’t know if it’s just wishful thinking. One thing I do like about London is there are ten daily papers. So many that there will be a column in a paper saying what the other papers are saying that same day. And on TV every night they tell you what‚s going to be in tomorrow’s papers. The columnists and reporters from the papers are on TV.

L.F.: Do you see your sister Amy a lot?

D.S.: Not so much because I don’t live in New York anymore. I see her when I visit, and she comes here sometimes. It’s hard when you don’t live in the same country. That’s the only thing I miss about the U.S.A.—my family and friends.

L.F.: Do you and Amy ever try to take the other aback?

D.S.: Amy does that to me more than I do to her. We were in Paris, and I was pointing out that you always see American couples fighting in the street. They’re on vacation together and just snap. They can’t take it anymore. Generally they don’t spend much time together, and often they feel threatened, don’t speak the language, and only have one another to depend on, and they snap. I hear fights all the time on the street outside my apartment. I pointed this out to Amy. Then Amy and I were in a crowded place, and she turned to me and yelled “This is my vacation too! Can we please just try to have a good time?” I thought Damn, that’s what I get for pointing things out to her.

L.F.: How much embellishment did you add to the stories in Dress Your Family?

D.S.: Not much.

L.F.: Is your mother that out of control and overdramatic?

D.S.: I don’t think so much in this book as in earlier books. There’s a story about wanting a beach house, and I think if I had written about that earlier I would have given my mother certain heightened vocabulary. We’re trying to think of a name of this beach house, and she says, “Everybody likes Sandpipers, right?” which is not a funny thing to say. There’s something so normal and naked about it, it makes it real in a way that sort of an invented smartass comment wouldn’t.

L.F.: Have any of your stories gotten you into trouble with your family or others?

D.S.: I always let members of my family read a story before its published.

L.F.: Are you afraid at of that psychotic neighbor child from “The Girl Next Door” discovering your story about her?

D.S.: I don’t worry about her because I don’t think she grew up to be much of a reader [laughs]. I was somewhere in New York State a few years ago signing books, and a woman came up and said, “Remember me?” Which is my nightmare.

L.F.: Who was she?

D.S.: I had gone to a nudist colony and written about a woman there who had just one nipple. It took me a long time to notice that because I’d been there for a week, and you stop noticing other peoples’ nudity after a week. So she says “I’m the one with one nipple.” And I said, “Oh boy, it’s so good to see you again,” and she was perfectly nice. She didn’t mind. I didn’t write that it was grotesque to have one nipple. Anyway, it was a close call because she could’ve been angry.

And one of the reasons I didn’t finish that story about the man who was arrested for child molestation is I didn’t think he was a huge reader either, but the people across the street from me, when the books are translated into French, would’ve asked for a copy, and it would feel wrong somehow. If you moved the story to London, there are lots of child molesters in London. There’s only one in this village of 12 houses, so I think that had something to do with why I was unable to finish it.

L.F.: So he should move to London because then you’d be good to go.

D.S.: [Laughs] He doesn’t want to. He has a steel plate in his head, and when he was in prison he got a hip replacement so he gets a 75 percent discount on all train travel, but only in France. The person he travels with gets a 75 percent discount, too, and he proposed we go on a trip together. He just wanted to hop on a train and go to the south of France.

L.F.: How sweet!

D.S.: Yeah, but at the same time, like what you said about getting into trouble, I think “Oh, a train trip with a child molester!” I would feel so nervous. If he wasn’t in my sight I’d wonder what he was up to. I would feel responsible if anything horrible happened—“I knew what he was and brought him to your town.”

L.F.: How is Hugh? There’s a lot of him in this book—far more than in Talk Pretty.

D.S.: He’s fine. Yeah, I guess you’re right. He is in this book more than the last one. I just exploited my family to death so now I’m moving onto his family.

L.F.: What else are you up to lately?

D.S.: I finished my book so now I’m just answering my mail, which is a huge task. Most of it is from people I never met.

L.F.: Anything scary?

D.S.: I don’t answer the letters that are hostile or scary. I just sometimes read something like a letter in which they’re proposing they come to France and stay with me for a while. You’ve never met this person, and they’re very serious about it and wondering when they should get their ticket. Even if you write them back a letter that says “That’s very nice of you to want to come to visit me. I’m so flattered you’d want to stay with me in my home, but this is not a good time,” then they’re just going to write back When is a good time?” Those letters I tend not to respond to.

L.F.: Any recent favorite letters?

D.S.: There was a teacher somewhere in a small town in Illinois, and he had his students read one of my books and then they had to write letters [about it to me]. He sent me all of the letters the students wrote. Most are very nice, the sort of letters where you can tell they’re high school students and it’s just a job and they mention they like this and that. But here’s my favorite [finds the letter].

“Dear Mr. Sedaris. We read your book. Although not very interesting they brought lots of joy into my life due to all the pointless stories. I wondered to myself after reading Me Talk Pretty, what were you thinking about when you began writing because some of the stories seemed quite retarded to me and to my close friends. Somebody who writes stories like that and puts them into a book seems to have way too much time and money in his hands. Maybe you should stop writing stupid stories about your family and go out and get a real job like everybody else. Signed, Jason Schmidt”

I love that the teacher included that! That he didn’t say
“I’m not going to send that because that’s unpleasant.”

L.F.: Don’t cut off the crusts! Flattering that you’re part of some teachers’ curriculums, isn’t it?

D.S.: It sort of troubles me. Stories are anthologized more and more in high school, writing, and college textbooks—usually with notes at the bottom that say “Notice how he does this and this, what does this make you think of or can you think of three examples of…” I hate the thought of anybody having to read what I wrote or write a paper on it, because that takes all the fun out of it. And [students] send me their papers sometimes and it just breaks my heart because they’ll talk about “this is a symbol of such and such,” and I wasn’t thinking anything when I wrote the story. I wasn’t thinking, “This is a metaphor for man’s inhumanity against man.” I don’t know that anybody consciously sits down and thinks that when they write. And I just don’t like the thought of [my writing] pushed on anybody—somebody having to stay up late because they have to write a paper about something I wrote. I’d be so angry.

Lawrence Ferber interviewed Courtney Love for our April issue.

If you have any comments about this article, please email them to letters@outsmartmagazine.com.