My Conversation with David Sedarias
For David Sedaris, everything is fodder for his slightly twisty and sardonic view of life, whether it’s those annoying post-purchase surveys that flood our emails, the condescending nature of Apple geniuses or our relationship with Siri. It’s all material for his essays for The New Yorker, his commentary for CBS’s “Sunday Morning” or perhaps just another entry to add to his vast collection of diaries.
These observations as well as readings from his latest works — will be part of this show at New Haven’s Shubert Theatre Sept. 30, just down the road from the Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where his archives are now housed. His other Connecticut stop will be Oct. 8 at at Hartford’s Bushnell.
Prior to the start of his new twice-annual tour, he spoke from his fourth-floor Paris apartment which he shares with his longtime partner, painter and set designer Hugh Hamrick, describing his neighborhood as one filled with 17th century mansard roofed-buildings lining quaint narrow roads. (“I think I have belts wider than my street,” he said.)
“Everything is still up, even after the Paralympics,” he said when asked if the city was still on an Olympic high. “But I didn’t go to any of the events. It was a nightmare here. You had to have passes to go from one neighborhood to another and if you were going to a cafe you had to prove you had a reservation. In Paris, nobody makes a reservation when they go to a cafe.”
Sedaris has found an even wider audience since he began his gig as commentator at “Sunday Morning,” in a role that evokes the late Andy Rooney on “60 Minutes” end-segments for 33 years.
“I used to watch '60 Minutes’ and when I was young I thought, 'That’s my job. I knew I was destined for Andy Rooney’s job.’ I’m trying now to grow out my eyebrows,” Sedaris said, referring to Rooney’s distinct brows.
“I really love the job,” he added, "But it doesn’t matter what I talk about on the show, people get mad at me. If I said, ‘It’s a beautiful day,’ people would come down on me: ‘How dare you say it’s beautiful.’ ‘Yeah, what does beautiful even mean?’ ‘Oh, when you’re privileged, every day is beautiful.’ I couldn’t believe it. Because the show is so gentle I thought viewers were gentle, too, but they’re monsters.”
Still, Sedaris is well known for personally engaging with fans, staying at the end of his touring shows — sometimes for hours, signing books and engaging in conversations. But he regrets one recent extra personal touch with the hoi polloi.
“I made a mistake in my last book by saying that I answer all my mail,” he said with a sigh. “I probably got 1,000 letters this year. Sometimes it’s like an eight-page letter — front and back — and it’s all about: 'And my cousin Jessica said she wanted to go on the roller coaster and but I didn’t want to go on the roller coaster. I wanted to go on the Tilt-a-Whirl and she said ‘What?’ and I said ‘The Tilt-a-Whirl' — I mean, seriously?"
“But sometimes it’s a really good letter and that happens occasionally. I feel I have to write people back and now it’s become a full-time job. I break it up and do a certain number per day. I can’t get behind because I know that if I don’t it will just be overwhelming and I’ll just drown in it all,” he said.
After more than 30 years of being in the public eye after his first big success — the long essay and the subsequent play “Santaland Diaries” — the 67-year-old humorist had been wooed by institutions to archive his works and personal papers.
“But they just wanted them for free, you know?,” he said. “It’s not like I think they’re worth all that much money. But it was just taking up so much space in my house that I thought, ‘Somebody wants this? Great! Get them out of here.’ There were a bunch of ok places, but I dunno, Yale. I mean I couldn’t ever have gotten into school there. And the Beinecke is most perfect and beautiful building in the world.”
Included in the Beinecke collection is his scores of diaries, many of which were presented in the 2017 book, “Theft By Finding: Diaries (1977–2002).”
Referring to some of the early entries by his 20-year-old self: “There were things I found that were painful to read. I usually don’t write about feelings and stuff like that in my diaries, but every now and then I overcompensate so it’s hard to read what I wrote because it was so naked — and yet uninteresting.
“It’s sort of like when you buy a jacket and you think this jacket is always going to look great and it’s going to stand the test of time and 30 years later you look back at the jacket and you think, ‘Oh, my god, I can’t believe I ever wore that stupid jacket.’ Thoughts change and times change and your attitudes can be embarrassingly out of date. That’s why I don’t get a tattoo.”