David Sedaris
David Sedaris
David Raymond Sedarisis an American humorist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. He was publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "SantaLand Diaries". He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994. His next five essay collections, Naked, Holidays on Ice, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and When You Are Engulfed in Flames, became New York Times Best Sellers. In 2010, he released a collection...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth26 December 1956
CountryUnited States of America
I felt uncomfortable calling myself a writer until I started with 'The New Yorker,' and then I was like, 'Okay, now you can call yourself that.
I like to reserve the right to write about whatever I like.
Each one of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, sooner or later something's gonna get you.
I've always been very upfront about the way I write, and I've always used the tools humorists use, such as exaggeration.
I tend to show everything I do to my family, to check they won't be offended.
It can take years. With the first draft, I just write everything. With the second draft, it becomes so depressing for me, because I realize that I was fooled into thinking I'd written the story. I hadn't-I had just typed for a long time. So then I have to carve out a story from the 25 or so pages. It's in there somewhere-but I have to find it. I'll then write a third, fourth, and fifth draft, and so on.
The things I've bought from strangers in the dark would curl your hair.
When I taught, a lot of my students weren't big readers, so they would write something and I realized that they thought it belonged in a book. Like, they didn't know what the inside of a book looked like, you know what I mean?
I tend to write things seven times before I show them to my editor. I write them seven times, then I take them on tour, read them like a dozen times on tour, then go back to the room and rewrite, read and rewrite... I would never show him a first draft, because then he's really going to be sick of it by the twelfth draft.
In the beginning, I was put off by the harshness of German. Someone would order a piece of cake, and it sounded as if it were an actual order, like, 'Cut the cake and lie facedown in that ditch between the cobbler and the little girl'.
In the Netherlands now, I imagine it's legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church.
Of course, the diary helps me as well. 'That wasn't your position on July 7, 1991,' I'll remind Hugh an hour after we've had a fight. I'd have loved to rebut him sooner, but it takes awhile to look these things up.
I'd always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call "understanding" is basically just fantasizing.
As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character.