At 56, David Sedaris still keeps a regular diary. “It’s how I start the day,” he recently told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “By writing about the day before.” He’s kept one since 1977 and only misses one or two days a year. Most of his essays and stories come out of it. More than 130 volumes of his diary entries are tucked away and will remain private (at least in his lifetime, wink wink). Talking to NPR about his new book, Let’s Talk Diabetes With Owls, he recounts the story of a seven year-old who once asked him: What’s the point of writing things in your diary?
“That’s a question I’ve asked myself everyday since September 5th, 1977,” he said. “It’s not that I think my life is important, or that future generations might care to know that on June 6th, 2009 a woman with a deaf, drug-addicted mother-in-law taught me how to say I need you stop being an asshole in sign language.”
It’s a question that keeps him going. Sedaris has been a lot of things: an art-school dropout, a meth-head alcoholic, a Manhattan nanny, a closeted gay teenager in rural North Carolina, and, most recently, a volunteer trash collector in West Sussex. But he’s best known for his witty observations about the absurdities of everyday life. No other writer today can touch his sought-after mix of self-deprecation, intuition and resolve. His books, which include Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day, have sold nearly ten million copies since he was first discovered by Ira Glass in Chicago in the early 90s. His readings sell out in minutes. Let’s Talk Diabetes With Owls, his first new collection of non-fiction in five years, won’t make it any easier to get a ticket.
There’s certain topics Sedaris won’t touch, sex and politics among them. Even in his journals, he said, he refers to having sex as “getting romantic”. It’s interesting coming from a guy who has no trouble writing about smoking meth in an abandoned warehouse and making a chair out of pubic hair. “There’s the ‘you’ that you present to the world, and then of course there’s the real one,” he told Gross. For all of his assumed unveiling, Sedaris likes to keep most things to himself. “People say to me, ‘Oh, you’ve exposed everything about you’— no I haven’t. I just give that illusion.”
Lane Koivu
