Should you ever get the chance to sit and talk to David Sedaris for a while, on a nice afternoon, about nothing much at all, about whatever happens to pass through your head right then, his early writing days in Chicago, his relentless touring, the trouble with fact-checking him, take the opportunity. It’s like having your own talk show and he’s the only guest, the studio audience is you, and even when a question comes out meandering, he pauses, thinks and responds thoughtfully.
He’s been doing this for 30 years.
You ask whether he’s worried AI will replace writers and he tells about that time ChatGPT wrote him a breakup letter, just for fun: “I said OK, my girlfriend is getting fat, I’m not attracted to her anymore. ChatGPT said it would not body shame, it will write a respectful letter — but it sounded like it came from AI. So much of writing funny is surprising people with an unexpected word. AI isn’t there. Have you read Tony Tulathimutte’s ‘Rejection’? The guy’s girlfriend moves in with him and he makes her keep her stuff in the oven! I don’t know (Tulathimutte), but reading him, I do know he’s human.”
You ask about the language police, whether he worries about what he writes. He says the worst of them seem to have moved on, but someone called him a racist recently for mentioning that a person in an essay was Black. He says, “As the writer, it’s my world. James Baldwin notes that a white woman came to the door because it’s his world and everyone tends to be Black unless he says otherwise. But also, Flannery O’Connor said if someone is speaking, we need to know what they look like.”
This was in Ann Arbor the other day.
The last time we met was in Ann Arbor in 1997. He’s 69 now, and he wore spring green pants, a dark green plaid coat and his hair cropped and white, but otherwise he was exactly the same.
Still, talking to David Sedaris in 2026 is to be reminded that you’ve taken David Sedaris for granted, for decades. To be fair, the guy has written 12 collections of humor essays and two diaries since 1994, he’s rarely out of the New Yorker for long and he tours so frequently that even he worries about retracing his steps. Say you saw him somewhere in the Chicago area in the past year or so, now you’re headed to Auditorium Theatre to see him again — he doesn’t want you to hear him read anything old. Though his newest collection, “The Land and Its People,” is also his strongest in years, he likely won’t read from it. Instead, he wrote four new stories just for the tour.
Does he feel unappreciated?
“You mean, like ‘The Simpsons’?” he asks.
Kind of, yeah.
“I don’t — because I tour a lot.”
He realized he wanted to write for a living and read his stories to live audiences while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1980s. One of his first assignments was to collect sentences he overheard and shape them into dialogue for a story. He was in his late 20s by then, having dropped out of both Western Carolina University and Kent State. He picked apples in the Pacific Northwest and cleaned apartments (and did so long after he had bestsellers); he worked at IHOP in Lakeview and coordinated birthdays at McDonald’s; famously, he was an elf at Macy’s, the basis for his public-radio classic “The SantaLand Diaries.” But at SAIC, during a writing class with teacher Lynn Koons, he got a laugh while reading out loud. He realized right then he didn’t want to act; he didn’t want to ever read someone else’s writing out loud. After he graduated, another SAIC teacher, Jim McManus, pulled him aside and said he could write his own ticket. Struggling later in Chicago, creatively and financially, he recalled that.
But surely he doesn’t have to tour quite so much now? “The Land and Its People,” like previous Sedaris books, swerves between familiar subjects (husband Hugh, eccentric family members, insane strangers) and a rather expensive lifestyle, an apartment with a view in Manhattan, trips to Vatican City, safaris in Kenya, summer houses on the coast.
“I love money,” he says.
He laughs at his own admission.
“I know this other writer who wanted to buy a house and she found the house she liked but it was beyond her budget and we have the same lecture agent and I said, ‘Why don’t you just go on tour? You could make that money in six weeks.’ She said, ‘I don’t enjoy it.’ I said, ‘Most people don’t enjoy what they do, but most people also can’t buy a house in six weeks.’ It surprises me sometimes that not everyone loves money. Also I like the attention. Which is pathetic. But I’m not going to apologize. It’s a reward for the writing, plus I get to be in front of an audience and see if a story works.”
The stories he writes for his touring show often end up in books. But that whole time he’s reading to you, he’s also rewriting, there on stage. He says this and stands up and pulls a manila envelope from his suitcase and out of the envelope, a set of loose pages.
“This is from last night,” he says, meaning a show in Cleveland.
His typed sentences are marked in pencil scribbles, here, there and everywhere, waves of dense lines and great big Xs and impossible-to-read notes scribbled in the margins.
“Every now and then, I think I’ll never get this (story) to read how I want, so it doesn’t go into a new book. That’s why I didn’t do Substack. You’re putting in things that don’t work; otherwise, why not just sell it to the New Yorker? Substack approached me when they first started. They offered me money to do this for a year. They offered $100,000. I thought, well, OK, but everything I put there wouldn’t be the best material. You’d exhaust people, and they wouldn’t even finish, and they’d see your name next time and think ehhhh …
“Having to be funny all the time? That would be hard. On tour, I often meet guys who have a humor column in a local paper, and it’s called ‘Funny Bones’ or something. They always give me a copy of their latest column, and since they do it five days a week, it’s like ‘What’s up with hamburgers! It’s on a bun! Yet some people call their bottom a bun!’ No, no, this way, I get like 43 opportunities on a tour to use the audience as my editor.”
By now, he can hear the difference between a weak-stomach “Ohhhh…”; a taunting “Ohhhh…,” you’re in trouble; and an “Ohhhh….” that means he stuck the landing.
At SAIC, during class critiques, he learned the tidal rhythms of audiences, how you’re up one day, slammed the next. “Last night, in Cleveland, for instance, it was the first time in a long time I was ashamed of myself. It wasn’t what I read, it was during the Q&A. I heard (expletive) coming out of my mouth. Nothing I said was funny, a lot of it was obnoxious. I didn’t understand why people were staying. Someone asked ‘What’s your favorite ice cream?’ I’m thinking really? I just read new material for an hour — what a stupid question. I don’t say that. I said I was diabetes type 7, which isn’t funny. I said it goes right here and I get (breasts) and my sister Amy and I would have to get a brother-sister breast reduction. It just wasn’t working and I started to focus on someone in the audience, this older woman, and so I’m thinking to myself, ‘Step it up!’ I don’t think I did.”
He was doing a show that night in Ann Arbor, the next day in Peoria.
“What drives me crazy is when someone asks during the Q&A how much of what I write is true. I always want to say, ‘I wish you would go through a New Yorker fact-checking.’”
Infamously brutal.
“Brutal. I had a story last week and I said the stores in Amsterdam open late and close relatively early, so when I’m there with my sisters, we go shopping early. The fact checker called and said ‘I called Amsterdam and they open at 10, which seems pretty normal to me. So let’s change that to “They open relatively or somewhat late.” I said the stores I care about all open at 11. That seems late to me. I’m not interested in changing it to ‘the stores I care about’ because then the writing gets all clotted up and people get snagged because you are being too specific about something nobody gives two (expletive) about. And I don’t want to use two qualifiers in one sentence. I asked him, ‘Can we stet this?’ (Could they just let it stand?) And he said, ‘You don’t have to beg.’
“Every week you get somebody new, and often they flag the things you don’t expect. I don’t want to be wrong about something, but it bothers me sometimes. Say you don’t want to repeat the word ‘six.’ Instead of ‘At six o’clock, six people walked in the door,’ I’d say ‘At 5:45, six people walked in the door.’ Then the fact checker goes ‘No, we have the video footage and it was six o’clock.’ That makes me nuts. For this new book, I wrote about Miss Baker, who was one of the first monkeys to go into space. She went into space with another monkey named Miss Able. I thought it was funny that they were both unmarried. The copy editor said ‘No, David, Miss Baker later married, she married another monkey, so we need to change this to ‘unmarried at the time.’ And I said, ‘Monkeys can’t get married. Somebody just said they were married. Monkeys can’t actually get married, so I am not changing that.’ That’s exactly the kind of thing the New Yorker would flag. I wrote a story about going to Africa. The fact checker called Africa; he called the place we stayed, everything checked out fine. But then he said, ‘Ahhh, one problem … You use the term ‘witch doctor,’ and I think you should change it to ‘traditional healer.’ I said to him, ‘How many witch doctors do you think are reading the New Yorker? How big a problem are we anticipating here?’ No, I said I am absolutely not changing that. But then, you do choose your battles. You can’t use the word ‘prostitute’ in the New Yorker. You have to say ‘sex worker.’ Which is why I will never write about prostitutes.”
You dread it.
“Of course, it also feels good that nobody will take you to court after. But it just goes on and on and on. There was an article in the New Yorker about fact-checking and they quoted me saying that being fact-checked by them was like being (expletive) with a hot thermos. And the fact checker replied that, ‘Well, if the thermos was doing its job, it would not be hot.’ So, yes … I dread it.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
If you go
2 p.m. May 17 at the Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Ida B. Wells Drive; www.auditoriumtheatre.org
