A shriek pierces the air inside the Hotel Inter-Continental Chicago, where humorist David Sedaris is settling down for coffee and a smoke in the hotel bar.
“Is it a laugh or is it a scream? If it’s a laugh, I’m not interested,” says the best-selling author of “Naked” and “Me Talk Pretty One Day.”
“I don’t want to see what someone in a hotel finds funny; it could be an aluminum balloon. But if they are screaming in pain or in terror, I’m interested,” says the 44-year-old Sedaris with a self-conscious smile. “I want to see what’s so horrible. I want to see if I think it’s horrible too.”
An unapologetic voyeur of human behavior, Sedaris’ talent is finding laughter in the macabre, beauty in oddity.
He has built a cult audience for himself with radio pieces on “This American Life” on National Public Radio (distributed by Public Radio International and produced by Chicago’s WBEZ-FM 9l.5), plays such as “The Book of Liz” (written with his sister Amy), and four collections of autobiographical short stories. (This paragraph as published has been corrected in this text.)
After appearing on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” his latest collection — “Me Talk Pretty One Day” — hit No. 1 for two weeks in a row on the New York Times paperback best-sellers list, a first for the author.
As his fame has grown, Sedaris has blurred the line between performer and author, drawing concert-size crowds at his public appearances. “I’ve never had so many people on staff — our generally professional crew — line up outside his door waiting to get their books autographed. It was like he’d just won the World Series,” says “The Late Show” talent coordinator Celia Converse.
Says Ira Glass, host of “This American Life”: “He’s like a little rock star.”
Few athletes or rock stars, however, show up at events an hour early to sign autographs for people at the back of the line. At Borders on Michigan Avenue later that same June evening, Sedaris startles a young man reading at the back of the crowd, asking, “Would you like me to sign that for you?”
Sedaris, a man of small stature who wore a blue dress shirt and bow tie for his Borders appearance, is anything but menacing — still, people approach him cautiously. Perhaps they expect someone as sharp-tongued as his acerbic narrators, but in person, he’s charming, funny and genuinely enjoys chatting with fans.
Someone asks him, “How’s your sister Amy?”
“Oh, she died in a car accident,” he deadpans.
“Everyone in my family is like that. I don’t know where it comes from,” Amy says. “When our mother died, we were up half the night doubled over with laughter writing sympathy cards. It was awful, nobody would have possibly understood it at the time, but it was our way of dealing with it.”
Not a writer
For Sedaris, laughter is much more complex than comedian Lenny Bruce’s formula of “tragedy + time = comedy.” “I think the pain is what makes the comedy memorable,” Sedaris says. “You go to a show at Second City and laugh for an hour and a half, and you won’t remember anything. For some reason, if there is pain involved, I tend to remember it more.”
In “Naked,” he wrote about his mother’s battle with cancer and growing up with obsessive-compulsive tendencies with such insight, infectious dark humor and attention to detail that some critics have compared him with Mark Twain and J.D. Salinger.
Even so, Sedaris hesitates to use the term “writer” when talking about himself. In 1992, his “SantaLand Diaries” (a biting account of his time spent as a Christmas elf at Macy’s) on NPR’s “Morning Edition” made him an overnight radio celebrity. But in early profiles, before the publication of his first book, “Barrel Fever” in 1994, Sedaris referred to himself by one of his “day jobs” — house cleaner — even though by that time, he had also done a two-year stint teaching creative writing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
These days, more than 10 years after “This American Life” creator Glass discovered Sedaris reading at a Chicago nightclub — after six plays, dozens of stories and two appearances on “The Late Show” — Sedaris puts himself down as a “typist” on any official forms he has to fill out.
“`Writer’ to me signifies that you have some kind of intrinsic value, whether you’re published or not. You’re an artist, somehow,” Sedaris says. “Maybe it’s because when you call yourself a writer, you’re more responsible. If you say you’re a typist, then that’s OK.”
Scratching `mental itches’
A self-described introverted child, who was excessively clean and private, Sedaris was second oldest of six children raised in Raleigh, N.C. From grade school until college, Sedaris was prone to a variety of “mental itches” that could only be satisfied by licking light switches, tapping himself on the forehead with a shoe, and following a complex routine of counting steps on his way home from school. In the short story “A Plague of Tics” (published in 1997’s “Naked”), Sedaris wrote about the string of concerned teachers who came to his house to talk about his odd behavior, which his mother protectively dismissed.
Sedaris, who often turns down speaking invitations from obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette’s Syndrome organizations, never saw a doctor for these afflictions and therefore was never formally diagnosed with either disorder. But in any case, the mental itches have been largely scratched, he says.
“I just know things aren’t as bad as they used to be — aren’t as bad since I started smoking,” Sedaris says. “The tendencies are still there, but I’m filling them constructively.”
Gaining material
Preferring amphetamines and marijuana to college, Sedaris dropped out of Ohio’s Kent State University in 1977. He eventually completed his degree at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987, but he spent the time in between hitchhiking, working as an itinerant apple picker and taking odd jobs, all of which provided much of the material for “Naked.”
Sedaris says he hasn’t touched drugs or alcohol in years, although he’s never far from a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes or an IBM Selectrix typewriter.
“I have to write everything down,” Sedaris says. “It’s not real to me unless it’s written down. It doesn’t exist. And if something interrupts me, or doesn’t go well that day, I spend the rest of the day obsessing about it and hating myself for it.”
Sedaris writes every day, never taking a day off, and he has filled scores of journals. Described by Glass as “an extremely disciplined writer,” Sedaris writes each story six times before an editor will see it.
“It’s true, everything revolves around writing. Even at my little brother’s wedding last month during the service he was taking notes,” Amy says. “He’s just obsessed with getting it down. He would never write anything that he thinks will hurt. Everyone is really proud of him and happy. We trust ‘im.”
Sedaris’ pointed humor is sharpest when turned inward, however, and in conversation Sedaris is particularly harsh on himself.
“If you’re going to make fun of other people, you have to be hardest on yourself in order to get away with it,” he says. “I’m not a very good person. I’m a very selfish person, and two-faced. No one believes it. . . . I just always feel like I’m supposed to be punished for certain things — being envious, cruel, stingy — and if no one else is going to punish you, at least you can punish yourself.”
This from a man who writes thank-you notes to every bookstore he visits and to every tour escort and journalist who spends time with him.
“That’s just the way he is,” Glass says. “He was just brought up to believe that you’re not better than anyone else.”
He’s respectful to his family’s wishes, including two of his five siblings who don’t want to be written about, and he consults them before stories are published. His last book, “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” focused less on his aging father and family life than his move to France with his longtime mate, painter Hugh Hamrick. Still, the fame of the Sedaris clan might increase even more now that director Wayne Wang (“The Joy Luck Club”) is set to direct a film based on the book, possibly starring Matthew Broderick.
“I should have put a little more thought into it before I signed the contract, because now my brothers and sisters will be played by actors in a movie,” Sedaris says. “And that’s different than being in a book. That’s kind of a lot to ask of them.”
At home in Paris
For now, though, movie development being the protracted process that it is, a “Me Talk Pretty” film might not be finished any time soon. For now, Sedaris says he enjoys returning to his home in Paris, a city that allows him to be “less than obscure,” and have a life outside of his new-found celebrity. There, he can visit taxidermy shops, watch movies and improve his French by watching Parisian soap operas.
“If everywhere you went people were being nice to you just for [being famous], there’d be nothing left,” Sedaris says. “As a writer, I’d be bankrupt.”
And just for a moment, he catches himself.
“I mean, as a typist, I’d be bankrupt.”
He write pretty one day
When David Sedaris visited Borders on Michigan Avenue in June, he signed a few books, personalizing them with lines such as:
Can you shorten that a little? (to a woman with a long name)
On [your] 28th birthday . . . (for someone on their 24th birthday).
With a pleasant feeling . . .
I still care.
Everybody thinks you’re gay.
Don’t Mess With Texas.
It was so nice meeting your much prettier sister.
You’ll have no problem in France.
An obnoxious American or two in Paris
In an excerpt from a story in “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” David Sedaris describes his encounter with two American tourists in the Paris subway; the tourists have mistaken him for a Frenchman — one who doesn’t bathe, at that:
It’s a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. These two [tourists] didn’t seem like exceptionally mean people. Back home they probably would have had the decency to whisper, but here they felt free to say whatever they wanted, face-to-face and in a normal tone of voice. It was the same way someone might talk in front of a building or painting they found particularly unpleasant. An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn’t French. And even if I were French, it’s not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals. . . . Anyone can learn it. Even people who reportedly smell bad despite the fact that they’ve just taken a bath and are wearing clean clothes.
Because they had used the tiresome word froggy and complained about my odor, I was now licensed to hate this couple as much as I wanted. This made me happy, as I’d wanted to hate them from the moment I’d entered the subway car. . . . Unleashed by their insults, I was now free to criticize Martin’s clothing: the pleated denim shorts, the baseball cap, the T-shirt advertising a San Diego pizza restaurant. Sunglasses hung from his neck on a fluorescent cable, and the couple’s bright new his-and-hers sneakers suggested that they might be headed somewhere dressy for dinner. Comfort has its place, but it seems rude to visit another country dressed as if you’ve come to mow its lawns. . . .
People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American. France isn’t even my country, but there I was, deciding that these people needed to be sent back home, preferably in chains. In disliking them, I was forced to recognize my own pretension, and that made me hate them even more. The train took a curve, and when I moved my hand farther up the pole, the man turned to the woman, saying, “Carol — hey, Carol, watch out. That guy’s going after your wallet.” . . .
“It just gets my goat,” he said. “I mean, where’s a policioni when you need one?”
Policioni? Where did he think he was? I tried to imagine Martin’s conversation with a French policeman and pictured him waving his arms, shouting, “That man tried to picka my frienda’s pocketoni!”
— Copyright 2000 by David Sedaris
