No one tells a story quite like David Sedaris. From his tales of buying groceries in bulk in order to avoid learning the gender of French nouns in Me Talk Pretty One Day, to discussing the conspicuous appearance of mice in his diaries as he opens the introduction of A Carnival of Snackery, what for many would be the banality of life becomes a delicately woven tapestry filled with humour and humanity. Me Talk Pretty One Day was the first of Sedaris’ works to land in my then-young and impressionable 17-year-old hands, and long before deciding that putting pen to paper would become my career, the book sparked both an attentiveness toward the outside world and a compulsion to derive laughter from the mundane.
“I always wanted to see the world — in the town I grew up in I just thought ‘I’ve gotta get out of here, and I’ve gotta keep going.’ I wanted to feel like I could go anywhere.”David Sedaris
Though the topics and tales have changed through his 50-plus years of journaling and 31 years as a published author, his latest book, The Land and Its People, is delightfully sharp as ever. In this new series of essays, Sedaris turns his lens on the strangeness of our species, and the world at large. With 74 countries under his belt at the time of our phone conversation, it was clear there remain plenty more tales to tell; our hour-long chat held enough material for a chapter or three on its own. As the conversation wove from early travels with his friend Patsy to the difficulties of writing a story involving a micropenis, we tried our best to stay “on topic,” but in the end the conversation chose its own path.
Before diving into your new work, The Land and Its People, I wanted to first touch on your process a bit. How do you make decisions about what gets crafted into a story and an essay? Are you perpetually looking at the world and analyzing each moment as to whether or not it will become a story?
Well, I carry a notebook in my pocket, so if something interesting happens I pull it out and make a note of it. Then each morning I write in my diary and go through my notes, and every now and then something happens that leads me to think ‘hmmm, maybe that could be something.’ Sometimes it’s a story someone tells me in passing.
I was in New Orleans the other day, and this woman told me she went to take her 15-year-old son to get his driver’s permit, and when she got to the Department of Motor Vehicles the person behind the counter says ‘no ma’am, you are not coming in here with those protruding nipples.’ The woman is of course dumbfounded and had to go up the street to buy a $6 t-shirt from the strip mall. She couldn’t believe it and felt like she should call the evening news and tell everyone, but her son was so embarrassed already that she decided not to make things worse for him than they already were. I told this story to someone, and they went on to tell me about how if you cut nipples off, they actually regenerate; they don’t, a doctor has since informed me. That made me think this whole arc could be part of a series of things people have told me that aren’t true. I took extra care when writing it in my diary just in case.
With The Land and Its People, travel has played a bigger thematic role than in your past works. You always seem to be on the road, but when did the travel bug first strike you?
It started when I moved to Europe, with everything being so close, plus I have my friend Patsy who’s great to travel with, as we have the same ideas about where we want to stay and when we want to move, so every December I’d aim to get to two new countries a year. But really where it all started was, I met this couple at a breakfast buffet in Tanzania, and they’d been to 123 countries. I didn’t even know there were that many. I’ll never catch up to them, but I’m at 74 now. I mean, I always wanted to see the world — in the town I grew up in I just thought “I’ve gotta get out of here, and I’ve gotta keep going.” I wanted to feel like I could go anywhere, and not like a cat stuck in an apartment.
I have these friends in East Timor who told me about having chartered this medical plane to go to a small island. The pilot handed them this paper with the answers to the 10 most common questions asked by passengers, and the most frequently asked question was, “why does everything look smaller?” It’s an especially Western thing to assume that the entire world has all this information at its fingertips the way we do, and the more we travel the more we realize there’s so much that we don’t know about other cultures, traditions, and societal norms.
“You can say so many things about someone, and they’ll be more real and more lovable to the reader. It’s not about putting someone down, but if they do or say something funny and I’m there to capture that moment, and I get to put it in an essay, that’s just what I’m doing.”David Sedaris
The new book also brings with it some tales from your personal life and helping to care for your husband Hugh after his hip replacement surgery. It sounds like there were some lessons learned there?
So the night before he had the operation, Hugh was on the phone with his brother from Seattle. After the call he told me his brother had said “I wish I could be there to help take care of you.” I told Hugh he needed to call him back. Two hours later I had a car on its way to his brother’s house to fly him to New York for 10 days because I knew I would be really bad at it. At the end of the day, Hugh knows that if anything should ever happen, he knows he can count on me. And to be fair, that mostly means he can count on me to hire somebody who actually knows what they’re doing, but that’s still help.
Does your storytelling or filtering change at all when it comes to writing about loved ones? From what I’ve read of yours it doesn’t seem like you’re pulling any punches.
I think that comes with time and experience. When you’re a young writer, you think you just have to flatter these people, and then they’ll be okay. So, you write about how they’re really good looking or how loyal they are, but you don’t really realize how amateur it is. You can say so many things about someone, and they’ll be more real and more lovable to the reader. It’s not about putting someone down, but if they do or say something funny and I’m there to capture that moment, and I get to put it in an essay, that’s just what I’m doing. It’s more about capturing that moment in time in a real and honest way. I end up making people look good, most of the time, I think.
I also think I’m being really honest about what a pain in the ass I am, so I leave the reader thinking “how do they put up with this guy,” or “gosh, they’re doing a much better job of putting up with this guy than I would have.” The last person I worry about making look good is me, and I think that helps.
