THE COURIER MAIL
(9 August 2008)

DAVID SEDARIS
Edited version published: Courier Mail (28 June 2008)

If they didn’t actually exist, the Sedaris family would make for great American fiction. Chain-smoking mother Sharon had such a caustic wit, it was as though Oscar Wilde had been reincarnated as a mother-of-six from North Carolina. Sister Amy, an actress, once wore fat suits to family get-togethers for shock value. Youngest brother Paul swears like a stevedore, but has a high-pitched feminine voice.

Second-eldest sibling David—the most famous Sedaris—compulsively kept diaries since childhood. So perhaps it was inevitable he would end up writing about his family for a living. At last count, Sedaris had sold over 2.5 million copies of his books, most of which have been translated into 23 languages.

However, that international following and notoriety has come with its costs. Sedaris recounts how recently, his sister Gretchen was having an argument with a male neighbour. His dog was mauling Gretchen’s pet turtles, and tensions were high. “One day, he says to her: ‘I was up last night reading about you,’” Sedaris recounts. “It’s not like he was reading a description of what she looked like naked. But that’s what he sounded like.”

Another time, a fan came up to Sedaris at a reading, telling him he’d made a late-night prank call to Sedaris’s brother. The fan told Sedaris some “bitchy woman” had answered the phone. “Well, that would be his pregnant wife,” Sedaris said. “What would make you think that it’s okay to call my brother at 2.30 in the morning?” The man stood there silently, before answering: “I was drunk.” Sedaris sighs at the story. “See? That’s my fault.”

It seems strange that Sedaris would attract trouble with his stories. While illicit substances make an appearance, he is far from being a drug fiend. Sedaris is openly gay, but never writes about sex. His stories are hilarious, but never malicious; outrageous, but not controversial. He is not like James Frey, Augusten Burroughs, or the slew of other American memoirists whose stories are so horrific, their integrity demands scrutiny. So why has Sedaris attracted similar strife recently?

Back in 2006, it seemed to be the season for literary howlers. Frey had been publicly shamed for manufacturing incidents in his memoir A Million Pieces. It was also the year J.T. Leroy—alleged transgendered child-prostitute turned author—was outed as an elaborate and collaborative hoax.

So in 2007, the literary world seemed to be longing for a new scandal. Vanity Fair eventually found theirs with Augusten Burroughs’s family. Journalist Alex Heard thought he found one in Sedaris, and wrote an exposé for US journal The New Republic. However, while the furores surrounding Frey, Leroy and Burroughs raised serious questions about authorship, truth and literary responsibility, Sedaris’s biggest crime seemed to be about architecture.

“There was a mental institution where I worked, when I was 15,” Sedaris says. “I got the building style wrong.” Still, The New Republic headlined the story ‘This American Lie’—a reference to the US radio program This American Life, on which Sedaris regularly appears. “I don’t really think that’s evidence enough to title your article [that],” he says.

Readers came to his defence. If Sedaris’s major crime was simply exaggerating details about events that happened, they argued, that was transparent enough in his work. As for the architecture slip-up, Sedaris says, “I don’t see people thinking: ‘All those years, I thought that those building at Dorathia Dix were Gothic! And now I hear they’re Tuscan New Revival! I just don’t know who I am anymore!’”

He laughs about it now, which is a distinct Sedaris hallmark: finding humour in the humiliation and misery. His latest book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, keeps to the schtick, but stretches it towards darker territory. It covers—amongst other things—buying a life-sized skeleton for his partner Hugh, the death of a neighbour, the death of an area paedophile, and an epic piece about quitting smoking, which killed his mother in the early ‘90s. There’s a lot of death in this collection.

“Oh, I didn’t notice that,” Sedaris says. “It’s odd how that works out.” Like his previous collections, most of Sedaris’s stories had already been published in the US magazines Esquire and The New Yorker. “So it’s interesting when it’s all put together under the same cover. Lots of people die, which is something that didn’t occur to me. And lots of things catch on fire, which didn’t occur to me either.”

His story on quitting smoking is his longest one yet. Sedaris insists it wasn’t his mother dying that prompted him to give up. “When the Ritz Carltons went non-smoking, I thought: “Okay. Fine. You win. I’ll quit smoking three months.” His mother’s death from lung cancer had little effect, he says. “When my mother died, a lot of people—my father among them—said, ‘Well, everyone just smoked their last cigarette.’

“We all stared at him with cigarettes with our mouths thinking, ‘What are you talking about?’ That was her, that wasn’t us. But my mother’s coat of arms had a bottle of scotch and a tumour on it. If anyone is going to get cancer, it’s my brother and sisters and I.”

Although Sedaris continues writing about all of his family members, he actively avoids covering one: his sister Tiffany. Years ago, she had told Sedaris years ago to never write about her. “So I didn’t,” he says. “Then she calls and says, ‘Everybody thinks you don’t like me. Will you write a story about me?’” So Sedaris wrote a piece, and showed Tiffany, who said she loved it.

However, when the book was eventually released, Tiffany did an interview with The Boston Globe insisting Sedaris had invaded her privacy. “She was also the only sibling of mine that talked to the guy from The New Republic,” Sedaris says. “Then she put herself on the internet. I know you can’t auction yourself on eBay. But she made an open bid on a lunch, and [if you won] Tiffany Sedaris would tell you everything her brother doesn’t want you to know.”

Sedaris admits their relationship still isn’t exactly civil. Now in his early 50s, Sedaris is more reserved about who he writes about, and how he writes about them. Moreover, friends and family have become cannier. They will expressly tell him not to write about specific incidents, and he is respectful of that.

Still, Sedaris says there is one story he’d pull from every bookshelf if he had the chance. It’s a piece called ‘Me Talk Pretty One Day,’ which appeared in the book of the same name. It covers the period where Sedaris first moved to Paris, in his early 40s, and started taking French language classes.

There, the teacher would throw chalk at her under-performing students. She also stabbed a Korean girl in the eye with a pencil. “She told her to wake up or go back to Seoul,” Sedaris says. While everything in that story was true, he regrets not mentioning how she was also a good teacher, a funny person, and looked out for the welfare of her students.

“That sounds like a strange thing to say about somebody who stabbed somebody in the eye with a pencil,” he admits. But with clear remorse in his voice, he explains that she was a teacher who would actively phone employers of her students, if she knew they were illegally exploiting them as new migrants.

‘Me Talk Pretty One Day’ was initially published in US Esquire magazine. Because Sedaris never imagined the story would reach France, it mentioned the name of the school: the Paris branch of Alliance Francaise. However, the school’s Kansas City branch got a hold of the story, and faxed it to Paris.

Outraged, the Paris branch faxed Sedaris a photograph with a message. “It said: ‘Here are all the people you hurt with your story,’” Sedaris recounts. “And it was a picture of everyone who worked at the school.” That didn’t concern him, as such: he was convinced the story would have little effect on the school’s enrolments. However, the gesture did make him concerned for the teacher in Paris.

“So I wrote a letter—so she wouldn’t get fired—to the director of the school, saying that she was a good teacher, I’m a lazy writer, nobody reads me to learn which French school to go to. The letter probably helped, but if I could take it back, I would. I really did her a disservice.” Nearly a decade has passed, but Sedaris thinks about the episode every week.

“It’s probably good to sit at your typewriter and think: ‘Okay, do you really want this to happen again?’ But I would still keep the stabbing-the-Korean-in-the-eye-with-a-pencil,” he says. “Because that’s just funny.” There’s also one other key bit of wisdom he’s learned his field of work. “I try writing about people who aren’t big readers.”

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Last Updated :: 08 September 2008
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