david sedaris tour review

Stage and Cinema

Arts and Entertainment Reviews

Event Review: AN EVENING WITH DAVID SEDARIS (Tour)

by Lynne Weiss on April 14, 2024

in Concerts / Events , Theater-Boston

WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN SEDARIS

Storyteller and humorist David Sedaris began by “walking us through” his outfit: a pair of plaid culottes and a jacket that “looks like I lost a fight with a bear.” It did indeed consist of a lot of strips, like a wearable vertical blind. He then introduced the ASL interpreter Robert G. Lee , and tipped the audience off that he might be especially fun to watch since many of Sedaris’s stories would involve animals. Then he introduced his warm-up act Cindy House , former heroin addict and author of Mother Noise , a memoir of her struggle to tell her young son about her past. Warm us up she did, with a sweet story about texting her son, now a teenager, and barely responsive to her overtures of caring and support. “Texting your teenager is like dating someone who’s not that into you,” she remarked.

Then Sedaris himself returned to the stage and proceeded to offer an evening of laughter — some of it delighted, some of it rueful, some of it shocked — with his signature mix of wry misanthropy, cogent social commentary, and humane acceptance.

He described the online attacks he received after publishing an essay in which he recounted talking a friend into removing her mask in an airport at the point when few people were wearing masks anymore. People accused him of bullying, an accusation he dismissed — it’s not bullying to tease a friend, he said, and then commented, “If people are going to be furious, I might as well be my true self.” And then he announced that he did not like dogs. (I clapped.) But what he really meant (based on the accounts that followed) was that he did not like dog owners. He described people who allow their dogs to defecate in airports (multiple examples), or who bray about the fact that their dog is a rescue dog or claim they must protect their dog from “trauma” (a word that’s gotten out of hand, he said).

He offered stories of his photo safari to Kenya during which he refused to take photos, of a trip to a literary festival in Lahore, Pakistan, where he was startled by the lack of women in public places as well as the remarkably low price of a restaurant meal. That led him to suggest that Pakistan should be promoted as a vacation spot for “thrifty misogynists.” He told of his discovery of how to make small talk with people in his high-rise New York City apartment building by asking how long they had known their dentist.

He amused with his accounts of lessons on the Duolingo app, which he claimed taught would-be speakers of Japanese or German sentences such as “My uncle was a broken man” or “What will become of us if father dies” or “The man with small hands is my friend.”

Sedaris publishes regularly in the New Yorker magazine, and he read an essay that appeared in that magazine a couple of months ago. “How to Eat a Tire in a Year” is a tribute to his friend Dawn, his frequent walking and traveling companion, and suggests that the world’s population could be divided into two groups: those who would be able to eat a tire in a year by dividing it into 365 sections and then dividing each section into pill-sized pellets to be consumed in the course of each day and those who would leave the task until the last minute and be unable to complete it. David and Dawn smugly see themselves as among the first group.

This was followed by his reading of a selection of diary entries, including his advice to a teenager working on a college application essay (say you had a baby at the age of 14 and wrapped her up in a Princeton sweatshirt before you abandoned her) and his rewriting of an anodyne AI-generated essay “in the style of David Sedaris” to include gratuitous sex and violence.

All of this had the audience guffawing with shocked delight. I did notice, however, a handful of people who walked out before the show came to an end. Perhaps they had a train to catch or an early morning appointment. Perhaps they came without knowing what they were in for. Perhaps they didn’t understand that they had come to hear David Sedaris and simply weren’t prepared for the writer’s distinctive and brutally hilarious vision of himself — and all the rest of us.

An Evening with David Sedaris presented by Celebrity Series of Boston reviewed April 12, 2024, at Symphony Hall in Boston for tour dates and cities, visit David Sedaris

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Unpacking what was funny and not in David Sedaris’ show at Kennedy Center

Afterthoughts on an act in which some of the humorist's most memorable stories framed women or people of color as individuals we’re supposed to laugh at.

I saw David Sedaris at the Kennedy Center in mid-October, and the performance has been simmering in my head. The performance has been a unique challenge to write about, both in terms of its medium and in terms of its content. This show’s premise is an unusual one for a night at the Kennedy Center for the “Performing Arts”: a figure primarily known for his dry-witted essays and radio work reads aloud from his work on stage. It wasn’t a poetry slam, and it wasn’t stand-up comedy — it was something entirely different, but certainly still entertaining. Also, as someone who thinks a lot about the convolutions that come when someone who calls themselves a comedian attempts to use irony, contrast, parody, and/or satire to comment on deeply complex and sensitive issues (I focused on how political comedians with big platforms can ethically explore complex topics in my Georgetown English Honors thesis last year), and as someone who is new to David Sedaris’ work, I was surprised and confused by core narrative elements of his presentation. I am eager to better understand his core ethos as a humorist, and one of the most popular and successful humorists working in America today. I want to give him credit where credit might be due, while also pointing out major issues that appear to be inherent in prominent elements of his storytelling.

The show was a one-night-only stop on his tour promoting his new collection of personal essays about life during the pandemic, Happy-Go-Lucky , his first personal essay collection since 2018. This performance consisted of Sedaris reading several essays and a few short passages, and taking some questions from the audience. Many of the stories he presented had to deal with recent experiences he’s had while traveling and working recently, dealing with unpleasant, frightening, or otherwise thought-provoking people with different sensibilities.

For those who may not be familiar with his work — you are. You’ve seen that book of his in Barnes and Noble with a painting of a skeleton smoking a cigarette on its cover (that one is titled When You Are Engulfed in Flames ), or that other cover featuring a piece of wood with a face (that one is Sedaris’ collection of semi-autobiographical essays entitled Calypso ). You may have also heard of Sedaris’ other bestselling titles like Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls , Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary , or Me Talk Pretty One Day .

Sedaris’ particular “comedic” style feels like a bittersweet coffee sipped at a quiet university coffee shop, or stories told among friends in which frustrations and anxieties are expressed with honest, quiet dignity and staunch opinions. He is undoubtedly funny, but offers a different palette of definitions for what “funny” can be. His is a unique brand of humor you don’t typically find outside of the comedic essay genre. His work isn’t a laugh-a-minute generator, which sitcoms, The Onion– style satire, late-night comedy, and Twitter comedians have trained many of us to expect from things that market themselves on their humor. In long moments without a joke, sometimes you’ll wonder where the humor was in a Sedaris story — but sitting and thinking about the core issues at play will eventually lead you to the realization that yes, modern life is indeed inherently confusing, and many of the cultural conceits we have come to abide by are inherently absurd.

It is odd, for example, to expect young children to endure blatant personal disrespect from adults simply on account of their age. It is also odd to expect that everyone ought to fall into line believing that “formalwear” should constitute a narrow set of specific clothing items, under a rigid set of gender norms — and Sedaris played with this concept in his own ebullient fashion selection for the performance. Whether or not you agree with his specific conclusions about issues with particular conceits, he makes the act of hearing him out quite entertaining. Sedaris’ most frequent subject across his work seems to be frustration with unspoken societal demands for propriety when something demands what he views to be “common sense”; he explores this subject with a subtle, confident wit that doesn’t seem to care whether you disagree. If there ever were a cat person — and I don’t know if he has cats, but I stand by that assertion — or a person who reminded me of a cat, it’s Sedaris.

If you fancy yourself a fan of “comedy,” “humor,” and ha-ha s generally, it is worth investigating Sedaris’ work to broaden your palette. He comments on social issues and the mundane in such a subtle way that you forget he’s writing “about” something while you’re reading — or listening to, in a theater or on the radio — his work. In this way, Sedaris feels like the introvert’s Larry David. Instead of being upset in the moment about the trope as it is being inflicted on him, he smiles and waves while it’s happening and then waits until he’s in front of an audience to complain.

I have to say: some of Sedaris’ commentary on cultural issues left a bitter taste in my mouth. One “joke” was him asking why when a person of color commits a crime, “we” are terrified of mentioning their race, but when a person of color does something admirable, “we” are eager to revel as much as possible in the fact they were in fact a person of color. End of “joke” (a paraphrase, but barely). That line felt like something Charlie Kirk might say. I was surprised to hear commentary like this from Sedaris that seemed so willingly blind to key social contexts, especially as someone who writes for highbrow literati and presents himself as one, if an offbeat, funny one. Some of the most memorable stories Sedaris told on stage framed women or people of color as the individuals we’re supposed to laugh at, for what Sedaris perceived as their inability to abide by particular norms — all while he, the comedic straight-man, attempted to deal with their “antics.” In one extended story, he described how during a visit to a city a woman of color who may have been mentally ill sexually harassed him. He described in depth how he had to duck into an apartment building and pretend to be a resident in order to get the doorman to help him evade her. Sedaris did acknowledge explicitly as part of his narrative that he felt the weight of his privilege as a white man who would not immediately be barred from using the building to escape, but this caveat was not enough to counteract the core ethos of Sedaris’ interpretation of the anecdote. He also addressed the fact that it is odd to joke about sexual assault but continued to tell the story anyway. Why tell a story like that? Who does that help? Why is it worth our time to laugh at the mentally ill, or the impoverished? Why frame a story like that in a way that makes light of any part of it?

I may need to listen to the story again to attempt to gather more of the nuance of Sedaris’ humor — but self-satire is unlikely, and the bulk of the story was spent describing this woman’s outlandish behavior. It is hard to know what purpose that kind of story serves besides punching down. While I don’t think his more concerning stories during this performance were intentional satire of those who lack a sense of nuance and compassion toward underprivileged groups — given that his style’s key rhetorical technique is analytical, even overanalytical thought — maybe there is something I’m missing.

I am interested in looking into more of Sedaris’ work in order to better understand his approach, which would be fascinating to write a paper on. I think he’s somewhere on a political-incorrectness-whether-you-like-it-or-not spectrum between Wanda Sykes and Philip Roth. I was entertained by an enormous amount of the show, and apart from that, anyone interested in fodder for rich “what is the responsibility of comedy?” conversations with friends should definitely spend time in Sedaris’ work.

Running Time: Approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.

David Sedaris performed on October 14, 2022, in the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Concert Hall, 2700 F Street NW, Washington, DC.

The David Sedaris program is online here.

Information about future comedy performances at Kennedy Center is online here.

COVID Safety: Masks are optional in all Kennedy Center spaces for visitors and staff. If you prefer to wear a mask, you are welcome to do so. See Kennedy Center’s complete COVID Safety Plan here.

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The Hot Dogs and the Notebook

How david sedaris turned me into one of his freaks..

As soon as the last word of my story’s punchline left my lips, David Sedaris erupted in a fit of laughter. Eyelids clenched, mouth agape, he cackled at the ceiling of the posh lobby abutting the colossal hall where he had just performed a near-sold-out show.

A surge of satisfaction washed over me. I had just put Sedaris, a master humorist, on the other side of the laughs after he had held a couple thousand people rapt in their seats. But my joy turned to panic when Sedaris pulled out a notebook and pen and began writing down everything I had just told him, repeating it back to me—as if talking to himself, looking right through me—to get the tone and wording right.

Alarm bells went off in my head. My heartbeat went haywire. Like a switch, my reptilian brain flipped on, commanding me to choose, right then and there, whether I would fight, flee, or freeze at the thought of Sedaris turning me into one of his freaks before my eyes. I am an early-career writer—my stories are all I have! And this one was, um, personal . But with Sedaris done with me and people waiting in line behind me to get his autograph, I only had a few seconds to decide what to do.

You’re never safe around a writer, they say. The digital age exacerbates the hazards of this adage, where every living breath seems captive and commodified online. But Sedaris has been at this since before the internet, siphoning up experiences (and making them his own , so to speak), ready to turn anything into material. I just hadn’t quite understood what that looked like as I watched him wield his notebook like an eager bookie who’d found his latest chump.

I hadn’t read much by the famed entertainer at all before his tour stop in Tucson, Arizona, just before the pandemic. One afternoon, I sat in my university library room co-working with a then–love interest, who revealed herself as a longtime Sedaris enthusiast by citing books of his that I had never heard of.

I told her I had just noticed a posting about an upcoming local tour stop. She eagerly looked up tickets and slumped in her chair upon learning the student-forbidding price: $80. I offered to look up Sedaris’ publicist and see about writing a review of the show. The scheme was our ticket in.

The show was mostly marvelous. Sedaris had the 2,000 of us licking the palm of his hand. Looking around, the cavernous hall was packed, mainly with straight, white, over-50-somethings, bedecked in Patagonia wear on a wintry Sonoran night.

In one of the funniest sketches of the evening, Sedaris narrated the sorry circumstances of people who mistake him for a proctologist, presumably because his first- and middle-name initials form the title “D.R. Sedaris.” These hapless woebegones, blushing for shame from their anal curiosities, tried to fib Sedaris about the conditions under which they stuck objects up their anuses. One person, he claimed, said they fell on an aerosol spray can (leaving out, unexplained, how the can was spread with Vaseline). Another used a peppercorn grinder, and yet another a lightbulb. Sedaris got his shock and awe from the audience, right up to the squeamish climax: a frozen glass dildo that didn’t survive the rapid temperature change from freezer to rectum and shattered inside its unfortunate host.

After the show, my date wanted to wait in the meet-and-greet line leading to the lobby to shake Sedaris’ hand. For longer than the duration of his show, Sedaris sat alone at a wide table, ignoring a bag of tortilla chips but picking at a whole rotisserie chicken between guests. When it was our turn, I stood next to my date while she and Sedaris traded banter over her refusal of his small, hotel-size bottle of lotion he attempted to bestow on her as a pity gift after he learned we didn’t have any books to get autographed like everyone else in line; we just wanted to pay our respects. My date told him she’d rather have the tortilla chips he was not eating.

“Take them,” he beamed, giving her the whole bag. “I like you,” he said as he pointed at her. “You’re very frank!”

Then he turned to me, alertly leaning forward in his chair. Did he expect me to entertain him now? I hadn’t planned on saying anything to him, except possibly nodding in gratitude when my date was done and ready to leave. But then a distant memory popped in mind. I blurted out: “Your anal insertions stories gave me flashbacks to childhood!”

Sedaris’ facial expression dropped. He looked horrified. Who knows where he thought I was going with my story? Rape. Incest. Molestation? Not quite.

On cue, I proceeded to recount being around 12, with my anal insert of choice differing from every other hapless adult protagonist of his collection. You see, when I was 12, frozen hot dogs were a household favorite all to myself. And what else was an anal-curious kid to do? I couldn’t exactly go to an adult sex store or wait for my birthday to ask my parents for a dildo as a gift.

“What!?” Sedaris said, collapsing backward in his chair. “You stuck a frozen hot dog up your butt?!”

“It wasn’t pleasant,” I said, conceding his point. I didn’t tell Sedaris that my household dildo repertoire discreetly included whatever phallic food items I could find in the fridge. Besides hot dogs, carrots were the other main choice, with occasional futile attempts to insert a cucumber or the handle of a bathroom plunger. (No one seemed to miss the produce I kept tossing out.)

Sedaris was intrigued. “Why would you use a frozen hot dog?” he said.

I now believe this was a rhetorical question, but in the moment, I stepped back into my 12-year-old life. His question confused me; I wanted to set him straight.

“Because a frozen one is solid,” I said, raising my pitch to an assertive, instructive tone: “You can’t stick a flaccid one up there.”

Sedaris’ cackling guffaw was volcanic, punctuated by a series of coughs. I thought he might choke. He jerked his thumb toward the archways at the lobby exit. “You should go check yourself into a mental asylum,” he said. Then he whipped out the notebook, zigzagging his writing hand into it. He’d found a hot bet that couldn’t lose.

I stared, startled by his bizarre comment about asylums (which I later learned is a frequent topic in his written work) and fixated on the notebook as his pen scratched at it. I thought to myself: Wait, what’s going on here? If he’s going to use my story, why isn’t he asking my name? Did I just become one of his faceless caricatures, entertainment for the Patagonia-clad theatergoers who, from the profits of these shows, pay Sedaris’ bills? But then I froze. I walked away, horrified for both of us.

I woke up the next morning with a start. Could I tell Sedaris … not to tell people about my childhood hot dogs? Although I recounted this story discreetly to Sedaris on a misguided whim, I did feel some ownership over the secret of how I masturbated as a child. Would he really just assume that it was his to tell?

You might remember that I said I wasn’t particularly familiar with Sedaris before that night.

If I had been, I might have known the whole Sedaris gimmick. I might have read his 2002 piece for Esquire, “Repeat After Me,” in which Sedaris writes, “I swear to my family I won’t tell their secrets, but they know my word is no better than that of my sister’s parrot.” Like the time his sister Lisa confessed a traumatic incident that “began with a quick trip to the grocery store and ended, unexpectedly, with a wounded animal stuffed into a pillowcase and held to the tailpipe of her car.” When Lisa reached the end of her story and Sedaris started to laugh, she started sobbing. Sedaris takes us through what happened next:

I instinctively reached for the notebook I keep in my pocket, and she grabbed my hand to stop me. “If you ever,” she said, “ ever repeat that story, I’ll never talk to you again.” … My immediate goal was simply to change her mind. “Oh, come on,” I said. “The story’s really funny, and, I mean, it’s not like you’re going to do anything with it.”

Perhaps that’s what he might have said to me, were I not frozen like a lizard and asked him not to use my story. He might’ve told me, assuming I’m not a writer, that it’s not like I’m going to do anything with it.

The kind of writer that Sedaris embodies seems motivated by a compulsive, self-righteous duty to act as a one-man literary extraction industry, indivisible, to serve one’s own greater glory. If he doesn’t repeat these stories, then they’ll be lost forever or not exist at all, like how some metaphysicists perceive a tree falling in a forest with nobody around to hear it.

It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. Sedaris ends his Esquire essay by reflecting on the costs of breaking his promise not to keep secret his sister’s anguished tale:

She’s afraid to tell me anything important, knowing I’ll only turn around and write about it. In my mind, I’m like a friendly junkman, building things from the little pieces of scrap I find here and there, but my family’s started to see things differently. Their personal lives are the so-called pieces of scrap I so casually pick up, and they’re sick of it. Our conversations now start with the words, “You have to swear you will never repeat this.” I always promise, but it’s generally understood that my word is no better than Henry’s [Lisa’s parrot].

The essay ends with Sedaris sitting in front of his sister’s parrot late one night, “repeating slowly and clearly the words, ‘Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.’ ” Sedaris summarizes it as “an act of contrition, of sorts, in the form of a funny story.”

Ultimately, whether speaking up or staying silent, my and Lisa’s fate were the same. Sedaris did repeat my story, just as he repeated Lisa’s.

I got confirmation of this days later from Sedaris’ tour publicist, who relished the story firsthand while on the job. “Funny enough,” he wrote me in an email, “we were at the show here in Chicago and he did mention the hot dog story. Quite the funny addition!” Slate confirmed this with someone at the same show as well.

In our era of Bad Art Friends and viral short stories cribbed from real life , I realize Sedaris’ transgression here—if you even consider it one—might not seem huge. I’m the one who told him the story, and I probably should have known better (though, again, I did not at the time). But it still felt more than a little icky to me that a 12-year-old sticking frozen hot dogs up their butt had become fodder for a naughty night of upper-middle-class guffaws, the testimony of a Sedaris-ian lost soul disappearing into the minds of an adoring crowd. It also seemed unethical to me, frankly, and something I wouldn’t do as a writer without permission. I am now repeating the story here under my real name. But it is mine to tell, isn’t it? I suppose, as the recent debates about authorial responsibility have shown, it depends who you ask.

I decided to ask Sedaris. Did he think everything anyone ever told him became his? Did he think he should credit where he gets his stories? He responded promptly.

“Perhaps when I pulled out my notebook you might have said, ‘Please don’t repeat that to anyone.’ Had you done so, I would have respected your wishes,” he wrote.

Fair enough, except: Shouldn’t he have been asking me ? He seemed to anticipate that question and went on to make a claim I instantly doubted: “At book signings, people tell me things specifically hoping I’ll repeat them, or at least put them in my diary. I’ve run into folks I’ve written about, and so far no one has complained.”

Besides, he wrote, “I don’t always know that I’m going to repeat something that someone told me. I had my hair cut yesterday by a 20-year-old Russian barber who talked about his grandmother. Should I have gotten his name and contact information should I decide to mention him in an essay ten years down the line?”

Sedaris concluded with the familiar fault lines of these debates: “What if I weren’t a writer? Would I be allowed to repeat a story at a cocktail party? Are comedians allowed to repeat things on stage? How far do the ethics reach? Did my repeating your story ‘steal’ it from you? Did it mean you couldn’t write about it in the future?”

I supposed it didn’t, because I am now. I followed up and said I preferred to reframe the question by asking not how far do the ethics reach, but how far the nonfiction writer reaches to obtain at least some form of consent from the sources that wittingly or unwittingly help construct the writer’s stories. Sedaris didn’t respond to that or other questions.

I’ve seen many fellow journalists take the Sedaris approach, assuming anything a source tells them is fair game unless the source explicitly says at the time that this or that is “off the record.” To me, it’s one issue to quote someone on or off the record. It’s another issue entirely to take a story that isn’t yours—using the source’s wording or unique expression—and to profit from it, publish it, or publicize it without permission. It’s fair to say Sedaris sees things differently.

As it happens, I am a teenage sexual assault survivor (that’s another story). Sedaris appearing to be compulsively attracted to my story in this way felt like a violation of a certain order, aside from these unspoken literary “rules,” perhaps specifically because of the intimate nature of the tale. He couldn’t have known that. He probably didn’t notice how I froze in that moment, how I wanted to tell him to stop writing but couldn’t. He did what he does, and I just stood there. At any rate, he wasn’t really looking at me anymore once he grabbed his notebook. He had moved on to the next venture.

In the time since we had this exchange, Sedaris released a book, sparked a few minicontroversies online , and used his press tour to air his bemusement at annoying letters from his readers . Another leg of his live shows launched this month, with more than two dozen locations scheduled before Thanksgiving.

I have no idea if my hot dogs are still part of the material, but if you attend a stop, now you know where Sedaris finds his weirdos: all around him, whether they’re willing or not.

With 'Pretty Ugly,' David Sedaris launches new tour, new kids' book, new insights

Author and humorist David Sedaris at a reading. (Courtesy of Prudence Upton)

Humorist, writer, social commentator and observer of the human condition David Sedaris is known for his sharp wit, cynicism and knack for telling a story. He’s shared with readers his decades-old tale of working as a Macy’s Christmas Elf in his “Santaland Diaries” essay and musings about the pandemic realities of isolation in his book “Happy Go Lucky.”

Now, Sedaris adds the children’s book “ Pretty Ugly ” to his vast collection of books and essays. He’s setting off on a 7-month whirlwind international tour where he’ll introduce new essays, observations and hours-long book-signing sessions to the mix.

Sedaris joins host Robin Young to talk about his career, and of course, what bugs him these days.

Find tour dates here .

Book excerpt: ‘Pretty Ugly’

By David Sedaris

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

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Author Interviews

David sedaris reflects on the driving force of his life: his war with his dad.

Terry Gross

"My father was not a good person, but he was a great character," Sedaris says. The humorist reflected on his late father in the memoir Happy-Go-Lucky . Originally broadcast May 31, 2022.

Hear The Original Interview

David Sedaris reflects on the driving force of his life: His war with his dad

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. David Sedaris is a famous humorist who got his start by reading his personal essays on the public radio show This American Life. He's had bestselling collections of his personal essays, and he's received The Thurber Prize for American Humor, the Jonathan Swift prize for satire and humor and the Terry Southern Prize for humor. Yet several of the essays in his latest book take a pretty serious turn. Those essays are about his father, with whom Sedaris had a lifelong combative relationship. He says, quote, "as long as my father had power, he used it to hurt me," unquote. In Sedaris' new book, he writes about when his father was in his 90s and his power was continually diminishing in assisted living and in the ICU. The new book is called "Happy-Go-Lucky" and is now out in paperback. Terry Gross spoke with David Sedaris last year.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

TERRY GROSS: David Sedaris, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So great to talk to you again.

DAVID SEDARIS: Oh, thank you so much, Terry.

GROSS: So I have to start with your author photo before we get into the heavy stuff. So you're standing in front of, like, a library of bookshelves wearing an elegant suit, holding a pipe in your hands, looking off to the side. There's something so, like, 1950s movie about it. Like, what is this photo about?

SEDARIS: Hugh has an old friend who he went to college with, a photographer named Anne Fishbein. And so I needed an author photo, so I asked Anne if she would do it. And so she arranged to get into the LA County Library Children's Department before they opened. And she'd been taking photographs of authors smoking pipes - you know, fake pipes. And so that's what we wound up with. It's like a Playboy magazine author photo.

GROSS: (Laughter) Yes, that's right - or like a Hugh Hefner photo. Didn't he always have a pipe...

SEDARIS: Yeah.

GROSS: ...And look to the side like that?

SEDARIS: And I think some places are - you know, have a problem with it because they say, he's smoking, but it's just a fake - you know, if you look at it, it's so clearly a fake pipe, but it's just a really fun prop, a pipe. Like, nobody smokes a pipe anymore.

GROSS: I know. I've been wondering that. Like, what happened to the pipe (laughter)?

SEDARIS: It's just for pot now, you know.

GROSS: Yes, that's right.

SEDARIS: But nobody smokes tobacco out of it.

GROSS: Right. But anyways, for anybody who knows you, that's not, like - or reads you - that's not, like, a David Sedaris real pose. That's just - that's...

SEDARIS: Right. I was playing, like, a character.

GROSS: Yeah, exactly.

SEDARIS: I was the author in his study.

GROSS: So why not just pose as you?

SEDARIS: Oh, gosh, I just can't think of anything worse. But I really - I've known Anne for - I don't know. I met her shortly after I met Hugh. So it's been, like, 30 years, so I feel super comfortable in front of her. But that said, I feel more comfortable with - you know, with a prop, if there's something I can kind of hide behind.

GROSS: Right. OK. Understood. So I want to talk with you about your father who died not long ago. When was it exactly?

SEDARIS: It was a year ago yesterday.

GROSS: Oh, all right.

SEDARIS: Like, May 22, 2021.

GROSS: You have some beautiful and very conflicted writing about him in your book. Several of the essays are about your father in his later years and about his death. So I want to start with an excerpt of one of them toward the end of the book.

SEDARIS: (Reading) It used to be that people's parents died in their 60s and 70s, cleanly of good old-fashioned cancers and heart attacks, meaning the child was on his or her own by the age of 45 or so. Now, though, with people living longer and longer, you can be a grandparent and still be somebody's son or daughter. The woman across the road from us in Normandy was 80 when her mother died - 80. That, to me, is terrifying. It's disfiguring to be a child for that long. Or at least it is if your relationship with that parent is troubled. For years, I'd felt like one of those pollarded plane trees I'll forever associate with Paris, the sort that's been brutally pruned since saplinghood and in winter resembles a towering fist.

(Reading) As long as my father had power, he used it to hurt me. In my youth, I just took it. Then I started to write about it, to actually profit from it. The money was a comfort, but better yet was the roar of live audiences as they laughed at how petty and arrogant he was. Well, I feel sorry for him, Hugh has taken to saying. Nobody was born acting the way he did. Something must have happened that made him that mean. This is true. But getting to the root of my father was virtually impossible. He never answered questions about his youth, saying only, what do you want to know that for?

GROSS: David, you've written about your father for years. Did how you wrote about him change after his death and even before that, when he was too out of it to read what you'd written?

SEDARIS: Well, I think what changed was - you know, there's a real person, and then there's a character of that person. And when you're in a story or an essay, you're the character of who you are, right? My father was not a good person, but he was a great character, right? I know plenty of people who are good people but terrible characters. You know, they just don't work in an essay. They just don't advance anything. When I wrote about my father in the past, he was like, oh, that naught (ph), you know? Gee, he can be tough some time, but it's lovable Lou. But that's not really who he was, you know? And that - now that he is dead, I just feel like I can kind of let that aspect of it go. You know, it's tricky because you don't want to be - you don't want to be a 65-year-old man whining, you know, that your dad was mean to you, right? So here I am (laughter), 65. And hopefully it's not whining. But, I mean, I figured there's a lot of people in the same situation that I was in. I hear from them all the time.

GROSS: You know, I don't feel like you're whining. I feel like you've put your father and your relationship with your father on the examining table, and you're reporting on the findings, kind of like forensics.

SEDARIS: Well, I think - I mean, because the way I've always made sense of things is to write about it. When my mother died, she couldn't be buried in the Greek Orthodox Church because she wanted to be cremated, and you can't be cremated there. So we had to have a funeral at the funeral home. And so I wanted something personal, you know? So I got up, and I wrote something about my mother, and I read it out loud. And it was the easiest thing ever to remind a roomful of people why my mother was such a wonderful person, you know? And my father said, I want you to do that when I die.

So the Greek Orthodox Church, it's a priest's show. Like, you can't really have any stage time. But they allowed me to say a few words in the break room after the ceremony was over. And I - you know, he'd asked me to do it. And so I read a little something, and there was not a single good thing in what I read. It was just, you know, about how he used to ram other cars at the supermarket when somebody took his parking space and the comments that he made to people and how nobody understood his jokes.

But I said at the end, you know, people say, oh, I know you're going to miss him terribly, and the fact is, we will. You know, as for why, we'll have to get back to you on that because it's complicated and it's allowed to be complicated. I think now people are more inclined to say, like, well, that's a bad person. We all hate that person now because they're bad. But it's more nuanced than that, you know? You can still love a mean person. You can still love a difficult person. It's - your mind as an adult, you should be big enough to hold all of these things. So, you know, I just - could easily just spend the rest of my life trying to sort through the feelings that I had from my dad.

GROSS: Did your siblings have similar reactions to your father?

SEDARIS: You know, it's interesting. Everybody in the family can have a different parent. You know, Amy had said - Amy said last Christmas - she said, this is the first Christmas without Dad. And I thought, yeah, I guess (laughter). But her - you know, when she said, you know, like, the checks he used to send us every Christmas. But my father never sent me the checks. Like, he - when my mother died, my father became uncharacteristically generous, and he started sending checks to people. And at first, it was, like, $5,000, and then it went up. So it was, like, the limit you could give people and they didn't have to pay taxes on. And he said to me, I sent it to your banker, and they put it directly into your account. So every Christmas I would write my father a thank-you letter. That is so generous of you, so kind. You know, I spent the money doing this or this.

And a couple years ago, I was talking to my banker, and I said - I was going to Japan. And I said, I figured I'll - you know, I'll use the money Dad gave me for Christmas and, you know, treat myself to, like, a first-class ticket. And she said, your father's never put a dime into your account. And so when I confronted him about it, he said, you don't need it. And I said, well, why didn't you tell me this years ago? Like, why did you accept thank-you letters? I mean, I'm the only one in the family who sent them, right? Why didn't you tell me that sooner? So I think there was something, you know, he enjoyed about that.

GROSS: He lied to you. He pretended to be generous to you when he was just lying.

SEDARIS: Well, you know, my - I mean, my father was a perfect preparation for having Donald Trump as president, you know? - just outrageous lies. You know, like, it's 1 o'clock in the morning; go to bed. And it's like, Dad, it's 9:45. It's 1 o'clock in the morning. And it's like, then how come "Barnaby Jones" is still on (laughter)?

GROSS: So that wasn't dementia? That was, like, earlier...

SEDARIS: No, no, no. This was early, growing up. Like, anything he would lie about. You know, talking about his daughters in a sexual way was something that was Trump-like, not paying people for the work that they did. When I was getting ready to move to New York City, he had a rental property, and he said, well, paint the rental property; it'll give you some money to move to New York with. And so we agreed on a price. I painted the rental property. He offered me half what he had promised and then offered to fill it in with S&H Green Stamps...

GROSS: (Laughter) Oh, gee.

SEDARIS: ...That he had brought from New York state when we moved south in 1964. And I said, Green Stamps? I mean, they're worthless. No, I heard you can redeem them in Florida (laughter).

GROSS: For anybody who doesn't know what S&H Green Stamps were, they were kind of, like, stamps that you could use as cash equivalent in certain markets and stores, and that's, like, from the early 1960s, late 1950s, maybe.

GROSS: Yeah.

SEDARIS: And you could get toaster ovens and things like that with them.

GROSS: Yes. Right, right, right. Sounds like your father had a lot of money.

SEDARIS: Yeah, he did, but it was my mother's money. My mother had a wealthy aunt who died. We never knew how much money it was, but in 1970, our lives kind of changed. And my parents went to the funeral in Ohio and came back in a Cadillac. And they sold the Cadillac, but the Cadillac had, like, a fur throw in the back seat. My aunt had married - my mother's great-aunt had married two wealthy men in Cleveland. And one was associated with Black & Decker. Like, you know, maybe he founded it or something like that. And the other one had a big department store. And she was childless, the aunt, and so the money was divided between nieces and nephews. And so we never knew the amount, but in 1970, my mother got $250,000, which was a fortune back then.

So my father took it away from her and invested it. But if you went to my father's house, you know, the air conditioner was set to, like, 87. The last time I went to my dad's house and he was, you know, cognizant, he led me around through the house with a flashlight. And I said, oh, are the lights out? No, he just didn't want to burn the electricity, right? If you saw him on the street, you would think, that old man is going to ask me for money. So he lived - in his later life, I mean, he lived like a pauper.

GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here and take a break, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is David Sedaris, and his new collection of essays is called "Happy-Go-Lucky." We'll be back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF BEASTIE BOYS' "GROOVE HOLMES")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with David Sedaris. His new collection of personal essays is called "Happy-Go-Lucky."

I want you to read another excerpt of one of your essays. And this is basically about you and your siblings around your father's deathbed.

SEDARIS: (Reading) You always think that if you gather round and really concentrate, the person on the bed will let go. We were all there, you imagine yourself saying to friends, and in an odd way, it was sort of beautiful. So you become solemn and silently sit, watching the chest unsteadily rise and fall. You look at the hands as they occasionally stir, doing some imaginary last-minute busywork.

GROSS: So you're imagining a deathbed scene as you and your siblings are sitting around your father's bed. But it didn't work out in that kind of beautiful way where everybody's together as the parent kind of, you know, dies. How did it work out?

SEDARIS: He lived for another four or five days but just sort of in a weird kind of neither-here-nor-there state. And he was on morphine, so he wasn't in pain. But it really wasn't a bad death at all. I mean, my father fell when he was 95. And he couldn't return home anymore, so he moved into this place, this assisted living facility. And then, as he got even older, he kind of developed dementia, and he forgot that he was a difficult person. And the last time I saw my father and he was cognizant, he was fantastic. He was just this little gnome, this little cheerful gnome. Nothing bothered him. He had no criticism for anyone. And, you know, I don't know if he was there all along and he was just, like, an onion and covered in these layers of, like, rage and disappointment and that was his little core finally, like, shining through. But I was - I felt so fortunate that I was able to be in the presence of that lovely person.

GROSS: One of the things that really changed about him is he said, at some point, you know, that he voted for Trump, but he realizes now that was a mistake, that Trump had lied and that, you know, Biden is OK. And you were astonished.

SEDARIS: Oh, I never thought I would heard my - hear my father say, I was wrong, you know?

GROSS: About anything?

SEDARIS: About anything. But one of the differences, though - and it was something my father and I shared, you know? After the election, I let it all go, you know? I mean, I could have won any news quiz during the Trump years. Any - you know The New York Times has that weekly news quiz - always aced it. I knew everything that was going on. And I just kind of let everything go. And my father, when he moved into the assisted living facility, the television was too complicated. And he couldn't figure it out. And he lived with listening to Fox News and conservative talk radio. That was on all the time. And it kept him at a constant boiling point. And now for the first time, he didn't know how to make that happen. And then he kind of forgot that he cared about it in the first place.

GROSS: You know, those - the conservative news networks are, among other things, pretty homophobic. So did that ever influence his feelings about you, watching all that ultra-conservative news?

SEDARIS: Well, I remember a couple of years ago when there was a vote in North Carolina to make gay marriage unconstitutional. Like, and it was already unconstitutional in the state. But this was to make it extra, extra, extra unconstitutional. And my father voted for it. And I was in North Carolina. And he told me he voted for it. And I said, why would you do that? And he said, it sends the wrong message. It says that anyone can do anything, boy on boy or girl on girl. Or - and he said it as if there were more to come (laughter), you know? But he didn't - when I questioned him on it, he didn't even - he didn't have a straight answer for me, you know? I said, you know, my niece - her aunt is gay and wants to marry her girlfriend. How is that sending a wrong message to Madeline? But he couldn't even - it was just something he'd been told by his networks, right? But he didn't exactly remember the exact reason, you know?

GROSS: He had cut you out of his will without telling you. He wanted you to find out after he died. But you found out before he died. And you were really offended. It's not like you needed the money. You have plenty of money. But for him to do that and not tell you seemed like a real insult. And you confronted him about it. And then he told you that maybe he'd leave you a modest sum, but you couldn't let your boyfriend, Hugh - your boyfriend of 30 years, Hugh, have any of it, that he couldn't touch it. What message did that send you both about yourself and about your relationship with Hugh?

SEDARIS: Well, he had said a number of things in the past, you know, like that Hugh was just with me because he - you know, for money or - you know, which to me sends a message that, you know, I'd be completely unlovable, that someone might take advantage of me, but nobody would ever love me, you know? And likewise, Hugh and I had been together for, like, 25 years. And when he...

GROSS: When he said that?

SEDARIS: No. There was a woman I used to live with in Chicago. She just - she had an extra room in her house. And I was getting ready to move to New York. And she said, well, why don't you move in here, you know? I won't charge you any rent. You can save up money for New York. Her name was Evelyn (ph). And my dad met Evelyn. And Hugh and I had been together for 25 years. And I said, oh, I'm going to go to Chicago and I'm going to see Evelyn. He said, she's a great gal. Why don't you marry her?

GROSS: (Laughter).

SEDARIS: And I said, but - I said, I've been with Hugh for 25 years. And she's - why would she want to marry a gay man, right? What makes you think she has so little respect for herself that she'd want to marry - oh, you can perform once a month. And I thought, ick.

SEDARIS: But, I mean, 25 years Hugh and I had been together. And just when I thought that my father could kind of wrap his mind around it, I realized he hadn't at all.

BIANCULLI: David Sedaris, speaking with Terry Gross last year. His collection of personal essays, titled "Happy-Go-Lucky," is now out in paperback. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break, and Justin Chang will review the latest "Mission Impossible" film. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, professor of television studies at Rowan University. Let's get back to Terry's 2022 interview with David Sedaris. His latest collection of personal essays is now out in paperback. Its title is "Happy-Go-Lucky," but don't let the title fool you; there's some pretty emotional stuff in this book.

GROSS: OK, David, there's another reading I want you to do, and this is also about your father. And set it up for us. Where is your father at the time of this passage?

SEDARIS: I got a call that he was dying and that his heart was failing. And so I caught the next plane from London. And by the time I got to North Carolina, he was out of the hospital, and he was back at his assisted living place. And he lived another two years after this. He got better. He recovered. But he was kind of in a - he was in bed, but he was - he would come to and then kind of drift away. He was just kind of in a nether state. And we were all there in his room because we thought he might die at any moment.

(Reading) David, he said, as if he'd just realized who I was, you've accomplished so many fantastic things in your life. You're - well, I want to tell you, you - you - you won. I couldn't tell if he meant you won, as in you won the game of life, or you won over me, your father, who told you - assured you when you were small and then kept reassuring you - that you were worthless. Whichever way he intended those two faint words, I will take them and, in doing so, throw down this lance I've been hoisting for the past 60 years. For I am old, myself, now. And it is so very, very heavy.

GROSS: I love that passage, but were you really able to put down that lance?

SEDARIS: I thought I did. I just picked it up again a month later (laughter).

GROSS: Yeah, 'cause that's hard to do, right?

SEDARIS: Well, it's interesting, like...

GROSS: And, oh, wait. And I also think, when you think somebody is dying, and you're trying to make peace with them, and then they come back to life, all the grievances can come back to life, too.

SEDARIS: Well, they do. I mean, just when you think - because I really convinced myself, in that moment, I thought, it's over - you know, just over. I can finally - because it's been the driving force in my life, the animosity that - you know, the war that my father and I started when I was young and fought every day of our lives. And there were so many places in this book - you know, when I wrote the title story, "Happy-Go-Lucky," I thought, well, that's a really good place to end the book because it was the day I saw my dad, and he was so kind and just so gentle and just this little glowing presence. And that's a really good place to end the book.

But then I kept going, right? And that - it's complicated because you'd like to end, like, there on a nice note, and you'd like to think, oh, look; everything just resolved itself. Now it's time for me to start a new chapter in my life. And then you realize, oh, no, the lance is still right here, right where it was, always was. I mean, one day, I'll be able to lay it down, but I guess a part of me will just always be angry or always be, you know, distrusting of people, you know, just waiting for the - you know, it's like a cat. Every now and then, the cat will get on your lap, and you think, oh, this is pretty nice. And then you - (laughter) we used to have this cat growing up, and I would just remember each one of us, at separate times, with the cat's claws dug into our temples, you know, (laughter)...

GROSS: Yeah (laughter).

SEDARIS: ...To your face. And she'd go, (imitating cat) and just...

SEDARIS: I think everyone in my family has marks next to their eyes from this cat. And that's what my dad was like, you know, just - you know, I would do shows in Raleigh and, you know, go on tour and the theater there - I don't know how many people it seats. I don't know, maybe it's 2,200 people, something like that. And my father would say, God, it's good, you know? Yeah, you're home, and you're - you know, you're - you're on top of the world. And then he would say, you've told me that that show was sold out, but I counted 16 empty seats.

SEDARIS: That's not sold out. And I would think, who does that?

GROSS: (Laughter) Do you think that one of the reasons why you're writing about your father so much now and have been thinking about him so much is because your contentious - your awful relationship with him, which was based on him, you know, belittling and insulting you and you trying to defend yourself - or at least, that's how you've portrayed it - do you think some of the - one of the reasons why you're so absorbed in that relationship is because you want to know how it shaped you? Like, who are you, and how did those battles, those constant battles, shape who you are? Is this about trying to understand yourself?

SEDARIS: Well, I think - I mean, I'm fortunate that - I think that I was equally shaped by both parents, you know?

GROSS: Oh, and you loved your mother.

SEDARIS: And my mother really loved me, you know? And so when she died, then it was hard 'cause then I was alone in the family. I mean, you know, I had siblings, but, I mean, I didn't have anybody in the office that I could go to anymore, you know? But also, it changed things a bit. Like, my father - you know, in my family, you either belong to one parent or the other, and you would be punished by whichever parent you didn't belong to for not belonging to them, right? So I would come home from college and my mother would say, what do you want? I'll make you whatever you want. And that would infuriate my father. And then she would serve me first and, boy, then it was just on, you know - if she put the plate in front of me before she put it in front of him.

GROSS: I want to bring up something else that you write about about your father, that he hit you a lot as a kid. And you say he clamped your hands around your neck, lifted you off the ground and pinned you to the wall. He hit you with paddles. He shoved you into trees and whacked you over the head with heavy serving spoons. Was this while your mother was still alive? And did she know about it?

SEDARIS: Yeah. But it was like a Three Stooges cartoon. I mean, (laughter) that's really what it was like. I mean, it sounds horrible today...

GROSS: Yeah, it sounds horrible today.

SEDARIS: ...But back then, you know, everybody got punished, right? Everybody got punished by their parents. And it was normal to be hit by a parent. But it was different - you know, like, my mother might have slapped me across the face a few times, you know? Everybody got slapped across the face a few times, you know, usually for sassing her or something like that. But with my dad, it was more like just a feeling like, this person doesn't like me. This person wants me out of his life. I mean, I remember him saying once, the only reason I don't hit you right now is that I know I'd never be able to stop. And that kind of was worse than being hit over the head with a spoon, you know?

GROSS: Let's take another break here, then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is David Sedaris. His new collection of personal essays is called "Happy-Go-Lucky." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIJAY IYER'S "BLACK AND TAN FANTASY")

I want to get to another chapter about your father, and this is the most probably sensitive - I don't even know what word to use. Like, I hardly even know how to approach this chapter. And this is about the possibility that your father sexually abused your sister Tiffany. Your sister Tiffany had, like, very serious mental health problems. And you found her - once these mental health problems started to be a very unreliable narrator about her life. She lied a lot. She misled everybody a lot. And at some point, she told you that your father had sexually abused her. And you write, (reading) in the wake of #MeToo - I know how brutal this sounds - but it was hard to believe much of what she said.

Can you describe being in that position a little bit, about having a sister who had serious mental health problems, who wasn't reliable, who was telling you this awful thing about your father but wasn't giving you enough information so that you could really understand what it was she was telling you? She was very vague. And anyways, why don't you tell us about the position you felt you were in?

SEDARIS: My understanding, you know, from Tiffany, was that she went to a therapist in the 1980s who said, if you don't remember being sexually abused, that's a pretty good sign that you were sexually abused, right? And then she said, I remember Dad coming into my room in the middle of the night. And then it became, Dad sexually abused me. And we'd say, how? You know, what did he do? And there was never an answer. I never said that he had intercourse with me. I never said that. I never said that he held me down and raped me. I never said that. I didn't say he raped me. So it could be - well, then what are you saying? Well, I didn't say he did that.

And then she told someone later that I had sexually abused her - right? - which, I mean, I - I mean, you know, kids do things, but I don't remember ever doing anything that could be, you know, construed as sexual abuse towards her. You know, I mean, you might - you know, like, we had this butterfly chair, and you always wanted to sit in the butterfly chair in front of the TV. And, you know, if some people were in the butterfly chair, I'd come up from behind, and I'd stick a pin through it so they'd jump up, and I could have the chair. I don't think that's sexual abuse, you know, when you're 8 and the other person is, like, 4. I just think that's just called being a pain in the - you know, being an older brother.

But at the same time, our dad did and said a lot of things that were, like, definitely beyond the pale. You know, like, when my older sister was 17, he tried to get her to go into the woods and pose topless for him, right? He'd just gotten this Nikon camera, and he said he was going to take some art photos, you know? I've got magazines. I can show you. It's art; it's not smut. And, you know, there were the photos that you see in those photo magazines, you know, like the kind that have articles about what the best light for if you're photographing meat - you know, like Photography Today or whatever those magazines are called. And the way that he would talk about his daughters, you know, talk about their bodies and stuff like that, it - again, it was a different time, but he didn't help his case any - right? - by being creepy in that way, right?

So when that's introduced in a family, it really - you know, you don't know what to think. I mean, on the one hand, you know, I felt like Tiffany behaved like a sexually abused person would behave, right? She didn't - sex was a negotiation to her. It was - I mean, I knew that she had sex with people for money. It - she had sex with people for rides. It was a way of getting what you wanted from somebody. So something had happened to her, something had knocked something loose in her. But I don't know if it was just her mental illness or if it was something awful that had happened to her as a child.

GROSS: You had stopped talking to her in 2004. What was behind the break?

SEDARIS: I just couldn't - when you talked with Tiffany, it was sort of like everything was a gunfight. You know, like, certain people you might argue with - and let's say you're going to argue over - you know, if you're going to say, well, you said you were going to make rice for dinner, and instead, you made noodles, but you said you were going to make rice. Oh, yeah? And maybe you, you know - and then they pull out the - they just hit you - you know, the - all of a sudden, you've got to - you're just bleeding, right? And the argument wasn't even about that, but they, like, pull out, like, the most painful thing that you can think of in your life, and it just takes you weeks to recover. And that's what it was like with Tiffany. It would just - every encounter just took so long to get over. And I think - I just couldn't do it anymore.

She called me one day. Tiffany said - asked me never to write about her. And I said, that's no problem. And then she called and said, everyone thinks you don't like me. Will you write a story about me? So I did. And I sent it to her, and I said, is this OK? And she said, yeah, I love it, and it's really funny, and you capture me perfectly. And then the book came out, and then she was like, I can't believe he did this to me. I can't believe that he would betray me like this. And it's like - you see, you just couldn't trust her, you know?

I mean, it's been interesting. After she died, I've gotten so many letters from people who have had a sibling, you know, take their own life. And the people who don't understand it are like, I can't believe you wouldn't, you know, talk to somebody who was vulnerable, that you wouldn't reach out a hand to somebody who was vulnerable. And the people who have someone like that in their family are like, I know just what you're going through, you know, that sometimes you just can't do it anymore. Sometimes you just have to - I mean, it sounds very selfish to say, you know, I have to protect myself, but sometimes you do, you know? Sometimes it can just be so brutal that you just have to take some time out. And I never meant for the time out to last so long. And I always thought Tiffany and I would find our way back, you know, to each other and - you know, and then she killed herself.

GROSS: You've read the story about Tiffany's accusation that your father sexually abused her. You've read that to audiences.

SEDARIS: Yes.

GROSS: I'm wondering what reaction you get and if any women come up to you afterwards who are really angry that you don't just out and out believe your sister.

SEDARIS: No, a lot of women come up and they - you know, they tell me they had similar experiences, you know, with their father. Not that he - just that he was the same sort of man as my father appears to be in the essay. But no, I mean, I'm sure I'll get letters when the book comes out. But no, nobody came up to me - I mean, people will do that sometimes. During a question and answer, I had somebody a couple of weeks ago say, why do you think it's OK to say such and such? And I thought, well, I really kind of admired them for being - you know, standing up in a room and making the point that they wanted to make. But again, it was - when it was, like - Tiffany wasn't a reliable person that way, you know? It's really - it's something me and the rest of my family will spend the rest of our lives wondering.

GROSS: I think this is the most just kind of, like, serious conversation we've ever had on the air. By serious, I mean just dealing with, you know, death and trouble and, like, really troubled relationship with your father. And anyways, thank you for talking about it. And thank you for feeling like it wasn't your duty to be funny about it, either as a writer or in this interview.

SEDARIS: Well, I always think that's kind of irritating. Like, Marc Maron, his podcast, you know, he just wants - he tries to get people to drop the shtick, and then some people just won't do it, and those interviews don't work. So I just trust you to - you know, whatever you think. You know, it was a pleasure for me.

GROSS: Well, it was a pleasure for me, even though we were talking about really painful things. But I appreciate you sharing them. And I think we all learn a lot about ourselves by reading painful things that good writers like you write about.

SEDARIS: Well, thank you.

BIANCULLI: David Sedaris, speaking with Terry Gross last year. His latest collection of personal essays, titled "Happy-Go-Lucky," is now out in paperback. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the latest "Mission Impossible" film, starring Tom Cruise. This is FRESH AIR.

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David Sedaris review — the world expert in misanthropic humour

David Sedaris’s live show falls somewhere between stand-up comedy and book tour

Challenge yourself with today’s puzzles.

★★★★☆ The staging is simplicity itself: a lectern, a microphone, and a table bearing a jug of water and a glass. Indeed, the most elaborate aspect of David Sedaris’s reading tour of the UK (which opened in Edinburgh on Sunday) is our host’s outfit, which teams a jacket and shorts in blue-and-white Andy Pandy stripes with an outsized white shirt, the tail of which hangs well past his thighs. This ensemble is more “assembled” than “co-ordinated”, as the prolific essayist happily acknowledges.

For the uninitiated, Sedaris’s live appearances are difficult to classify, falling somewhere between stand-up comedy and book tour, albeit on a grand scale (there aren’t many writers who can commandeer the 2,200-seat Usher Hall). Aficionados will recognise the dramatis personae in these readings

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Theatre Review: ‘David Sedaris’ at Strathmore Music Hall

David Sedaris once said, “what other people call dark and despairing, I call funny.” Mr. Sedaris brought his unique and particular brand of comedy to the Strathmore stage this past week, with his usual acerbic wit on display.

David Sedaris has embraced the old adage of “write what you know,” in that much of his writing consists of stories from his childhood and personal experiences. He first gained notoriety from his essay “Santaland Diaries,” which detailed his time working as an elf at Macy’s during their holiday season. The hilarious and relatable story made a splash and led to Sedaris becoming a regular contributor on NPR’s “This American Life,” and to his first collection of essays, “Barrel Fever,” in 1994.

…I now look forward to seeing more from this emerging writer, who has a great deal of promise.

Since then, he has become one of America’s most prolific writers, publishing 11 books and seemingly countless articles in the last 25 years. Some particular favorites of this reviewer are “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” an examination of speech and language, and “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim,” a comedic, yet sometimes melancholic deep-dive into Sedaris’ relationship with his family, both past and present.

In addition to the massive amount of writing that he produces, Sedaris also frequently tours to do live readings and signings. His most recent tour kicked off right here in Bethesda at Strathmore. Something that Sedaris is known for is his staunch support for other writers, as he felt that he was helped greatly in his early career by Ira Glass.

He kicked things off by introducing writer John Thorson, who read one of his short stories “Jason and the Astronauts.” It was a bit macabre, but an absolute laugh riot. Sedaris’ goal was realized in that I now look forward to seeing more from this emerging writer, who has a great deal of promise.

Running Time: 90 minutes, with no intermission.

David Sedaris appeared for one night only at the Music Center at Strathmore, 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda, MD. Tickets for the continuation of Strathmore’s season can be purchased here . David Sedaris’ remaining tour dates can be found here .

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Theatre Review: 'David Sedaris' at Strathmore Music Hall

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About the author, kristin franco.

Kristin Franco has a bachelor's degree in English from Penn State University and a master's degree in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University. She developed an intense love of theater at age 4, when she saw her first live production of "Annie" and never looked back. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, watching British TV, and performing.

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Entertainment | David Sedaris bringing trademark wit to the Bay…

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Entertainment, entertainment | david sedaris bringing trademark wit to the bay area.

“If I were to read things from a book or to read old things, the audience would think, ‘God, haven’t you done anything since we saw you three years ago?’” he said in an interview with the Sentinel.

Thus, Sedaris’ current tour consists of essays he recently wrote but has not yet published, inspired by his travels and other topics. His sardonic wit and way with words will be front and center when he stops by UC Berkeley, Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa this May.

Sedaris grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, as the second oldest of six siblings — including his sister Amy, a comedienne and actress with many credits — and his upbringing is a frequent subject in his writing. In the early ’90s, future “This American Life” host Ira Glass saw Sedaris reading a diary he had kept since 1977 at a Chicago club and asked him to appear on his local radio show “The Wild Room.” That led to his first NPR appearance in 1992, where he read his essay “The Santaland Diaries” about his experiences working as a Christmas elf at Macy’s iconic Herald Square location in New York City.

The reading was a success, even going so far as to be adapted into a one-act play at New York’s Atlantic Theater Company with Timothy Olyphant in the starring role. It also launched Sedaris’ writing career, propelling him to write 11 essay collections, including “Barrel Fever,” “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim,” “Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls,” “Calypso” and “Happy-Go-Lucky.” Many of his books have topped the New York Times Best Seller list, and he is also the recipient of two Lambda Literary Awards and two Audie Awards for his audiobook readings.

Sedaris’ newest book, “Pretty Ugly,” is his first children’s book. Illustrated by the late Ian Falconer, it tells the story of an ogre girl whose attempts to gross out her family backfire so she becomes stuck with a face that her ogre peers consider hideous: that of a picturesque, rosy-cheeked human girl.

The story was actually first published in 2001 in Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman’s comic book anthology “Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids.” Mouly, the art director for the New Yorker, recruited well-known illustrators such as Jules Feiffer, Crockett Johnson, Barbara McClintock and Maurice Sendak. She paired Sedaris with Falconer, best known nowadays for his “Olivia” series and for creating the covers for 30 New Yorker issues, who also previously worked with Sedaris on the set design for “The Santaland Diaries” and later did the illustrations for Sedaris’ short story collection “Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk.”

The story was republished in February as a standalone book by Mouly’s Toon Books. Sedaris said he never expected to write a children’s book, as he never had any interest in it, but it took him five minutes to write the story.

Falconer never got to see the story’s wider publication as he died in 2023. Sedaris praised him as a brilliant artist and loved the way the book turned out, despite the story and illustrations being worked on separately.

“I handed (the story) over to Ian, and he came up with the drawings and I didn’t question them,” he said. “We just completely left each other alone, and it worked out great. I don’t know what the experience is like for other people — I don’t know if there’s a big back and forth between the illustrator and the author — but there have been times in my life when I’m working with a professional, and I figure this is what they do for a living, and they’ve made a name for themselves, and I’m certainly not going to tell them what to do, and that was the case with Ian.”

Sedaris hasn’t gotten many reactions from kids to “Pretty Ugly,” except for the goddaughter of his partner Hugh Hamrick who said she wanted to have it read to her over and over again.

“That seems like a pretty good endorsement,” he said.

Apart from that, children’s books are a new world for Sedaris.

“As a rule, I’d say it’s a pretty bad idea to write books for people that don’t have any money,” he said. “It’s not like children can go out and buy the books themselves, so I guess the real audience are parents and grandparents.”

Sedaris will not be reading from “Pretty Ugly” on his tour, nor will he read from any of his other published books. Instead, he will be reading from essays he recently wrote.

“Some of them I wrote a few months ago, and then I just put them in a file called ‘Spring 2024,’” he said. “I’m looking back on them and saying ‘Hmm, OK, this ending isn’t strong enough’ or ‘Wow, this really works’ or ‘Maybe I need to scrap this.’”

Sedaris said the process allows him to test out and tinker with his essays if they ever do get published.

“I had an essay in the New Yorker in January ,” he said. “It’s one of the ones I brought with me on my fall tour, so I read it out loud, I don’t know, 30 times? Every night, I would change it, even if I was just changing a word or two, but I had the audience in front of me, so I thought, ‘Why would I waste this opportunity to discover if this word works better than this one?’ By the time I gave it to the New Yorker, the rewriting was really minimal.”

Most of the essays Sedaris is reading on his tour are about places he has visited, such as France, England, Kenya, Tanzania and Pakistan. He said these essays have taught him why he does not write for travel magazines.

“Travel magazines, you can never say anything bad about a place because the hotels and the restaurants and such are the advertisers, so they simply don’t allow it,” he said.

Thankfully, Sedaris had positive experiences in all the places he visited, especially Pakistan.

“I’ve never been to Disneyland, but it would really have to work to outdo Pakistan for the title of ‘The Friendliest Place on Earth,’” he said. “It was insane how friendly people were, how welcoming they were, complete strangers stopping you over and over and over in the street: ‘Can we get a picture together?’ ‘Can you talk to my wife on the telephone?’ … They don’t get any visitors, so when you bother going there, they’re just so friendly and honored.”

In addition, Santa Cruz audiences might hear some essays Sedaris had written during the previous tour alongside stories he wrote for this tour.

“Depending on how the new stuff goes, I might find myself reading things from the last tour at this show as well, but none of it will have been published in a book,” he said.

BAY AREA TOUR DATES

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MAY 6: SANTA CRUZ | SANTA CRUZ CIVIC AUDITORIUM

MAY 7: SANTA ROSA | LUTHER BURBANK CENTER FOR THE ARTS

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[Press Release]
Mar 26, 2023

Author David Sedaris to Tour to 44 Cities Promoting "Happy Go Lucky"

Starting March 30, author David Sedaris ("Me Talk Pretty One Day") will begin on a 44-city world tour. The tour will be promoting his latest book, "Happy Go Lucky."

Sedaris appeared on "Real Time with Bill Maher" this week to promote the upcoming tour.

From Sedaris' website:

Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask—or not—was a decision made mostly on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things. As Happy-Go-Lucky opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes.

But then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he’s stuck in lockdown, unable to tour and read for audiences, the part of his work he loves most. To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. He vacuums his apartment twice a day, fails to hoard anything, and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine.

As the world gradually settles into a new reality, Sedaris too finds himself changed. His offer to fix a stranger’s teeth rebuffed, he straightens his own, and ventures into the world with new confidence. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone’s son. And back on the road, he discovers a battle-scarred America: people weary, storefronts empty or festooned with Help Wanted signs, walls painted with graffiti reflecting the contradictory messages of our time: Eat the Rich. Trump 2024. Black Lives Matter.

In Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.

Tour dates listed below:

THU, MAR 30 AT 4:30 PM PDT

Frederick MD An Evening with David Sedaris

Weinberg Center for the Arts

FRI, MAR 31 AT 4:30 PM PDT

Lebanon NH An Evening with David Sedaris

Lebanon Opera House

SAT, APR 1 AT 4:30 PM PDT

New Bedford MA An Evening with David Sedaris

Zeiterion Theatre

SUN, APR 2 AT 4 PM PDT

Boston MA An Evening with David Sedaris

Symphony Hall Boston

MON, APR 3 AT 5 PM PDT

Patchogue NY An Evening with David Sedaris

Patchogue Theatre

TUE, APR 4 AT 4:30 PM PDT

New Brunswick NJ An Evening with David Sedaris

State Theatre New Jersey

THU, APR 6 AT 5 PM PDT

Ashland KY An Evening with David Sedaris

Paramount Arts Center

FRI, APR 7 AT 4 PM PDT

Knoxville TN An Evening with David Sedaris

Bijou Theatre

SAT, APR 8 AT 5 PM PDT

Nashville TN An Evening with David Sedaris

Polk Theatre

TUE, APR 11 AT 4 PM PDT

Chattanooga TN An Evening with David Sedaris

Tivoli Theatre • Walker Theatre • Memorial Auditorium

THU, APR 13 AT 4:30 PM PDT

Greenville SC An Evening with David Sedaris

Peace Center

FRI, APR 14 AT 5 PM PDT

GPB PRESENTS AN EVENING WITH DAVID SEDARIS

Miller Theater

SAT, APR 15 AT 8 PM PDT

An Evening With David Sedaris

SUN, APR 16 AT 5 PM PDT

Dallas TX An Evening with David Sedaris

McFarlin Memorial Auditorium - Southern Methodist University

TUE, APR 18 AT 4:30 PM PDT

The State Theatre

State College

WED, APR 19 AT 6:30 PM PDT

David Sedaris

Fisher Theatre

THU, APR 20 AT 5 PM PDT

Alpena MI An Evening with David Sedaris

Alpena High School

FRI, APR 21 AT 5:30 PM PD

Iowa City, IA An Evening with David Sedaris

The Englert Theatre

SAT, APR 22 AT 5:30 PM PDT

SUN, APR 23 AT 1 PM PDT

Glen Ellyn, IL An Evening with David Sedaris

McAninch Arts Center at College of DuPage

MON, APR 24 AT 5 PM PDT

Little Rock AR An Evening with David Sedaris

Robinson Center Music Hall

TUE, APR 25 AT 5 PM PDT

Fayetteville AR An Evening with David Sedaris

Walton Arts Center

WED, APR 26 AT 6:30 PM PDT

Durango CO An Evening with David Sedaris

Community Concert Hall at Fort Lewis College

THU, APR 27 AT 6:30 PM PDT

Denver CO An Evening with David Sedaris

Paramount Denver

FRI, APR 28 AT 8 PM

Carmel CA An Evening with David Sedaris

Sunset Cultural Center

SAT, APR 29 AT 8:30 PM

Los Angeles CA (Night 1) An Evening with David Sedaris

The Theatre at Ace Hotel DTLA

SUN, APR 30 AT 7:30 PM

Los Angeles CA (Night 2) An Evening with David Sedaris

MON, MAY 1 AT 8 PM

Irvine CA An Evening with David Sedaris

Irvine Barclay Theatre

TUE, MAY 2 AT 8 PM

San Diego CA An Evening with David Sedaris

Balboa Theatre - San Diego

WED, MAY 3 AT 7 PM

Astoria OR An Evening with David Sedaris

Liberty Theatre

THU, MAY 4 AT 8 PM

Napa CA An Evening with David Sedaris

Uptown Theatre Napa

FRI, MAY 5 AT 7 PM PDT

The Egyptian Theatre

SAT, MAY 6 AT 6 PM PDT

St. Cloud, MN | An Evening with David Sedaris

Paramount Center for the Arts

MON, MAY 8 AT 6 PM PDT

Eau Claire, WI | An Evening with David Sedaris

Pablo Center at the Confluence

TUE, MAY 9 AT 5 PM PDT

Viroqua WI An Evening with David Sedaris

The Historic Temple Theatre

WED, MAY 10 AT 5:30 PM PDT

An Evening with David Sedaris

Meyer Theatre

FRI, MAY 12 AT 5 PM PDT

Butler Arts & Events Center

SAT, MAY 13 AT 4:30 PM PDT

Pittsfield MA An Evening with David Sedaris

The Colonial Theatre

THU, MAY 18 AT 7 PM

New York, NY (Night 1) An Evening with David Sedaris

The Town Hall

FRI, MAY 19 AT 7 PM

New York, NY (Night 2) An Evening with David Sedaris

SAT, MAY 20 AT 7 PM

New York, NY (Night 3) An Evening with David Sedaris

TUE, JUN 27 AT 10 AM PDT

Amsterdam Netherlands An Evening with David Sedaris

· Amsterdam

David Sedaris | Amsterdam

WED, JUN 28 AT 10 AM PDT

Copenhagen Denmark An Evening with David Sedaris

Bremen Teater

SAT, JUL 1 AT 10 AM PDT

Ein Abend mit David Sedaris | Berlin

Urania Berlin

WED, JUL 19 AT 7 PM

Beaver Creek CO An Evening with David Sedaris

Vilar Performing Arts Center

FRI, JUL 21 AT 7 PM

Telluride CO An Evening with David Sedaris

721 W Colorado Ave, Telluride, CO 81435-9145, United States

SAT, OCT 28 AT 6 PM PDT

Fargo, ND | An Evening with David Sedaris

The Fargo Theatre

MON, OCT 30 AT 6 PM PDT

Sioux Falls, SD | An Evening with David Sedaris

Sioux Falls Orpheum Theater Center

THU, NOV 9 AT 7:30 PM

Flagstaff AZ An Evening with David Sedaris

NAU Prochnow Auditorium

FRI, NOV 10 AT 7:30 PM

Portland OR An Evening with David Sedaris

Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall

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Friday, 7:00 pm

August 24, 2024

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Sunday, 3:00 pm

An Evening with David Sedaris

On sale now! One of America’s pre-eminent humor writers. Featuring a book signing for all attendees.

Tickets start at $29

Amplify the Arts

Member Benefits All members get priority access and save 10%. Amplify members and above pay no fees. Exclusions apply, see memberships for details.

Book Signing All ticket holders are invited to a post-show book signing with David Sedaris.

A master of satire and incisive social critique

David Sedaris is a Houston favorite, which makes him one of our favorites. One of America’s pre-eminent humor writers, a master of satire and incisive social critique, Sedaris is beloved for his personal essays and short stories. He’s the author of Holidays on Ice, Naked, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, and Calypso. In 2020, the New York Public Library voted Me Talk Pretty One Day one of the 125 most important books of the last 125 years.

“Sedaris’s droll assessment of the mundane and the eccentrics who inhabit the world’s crevices make him one of the greatest humorists writing today.” Chicago Tribune

Photo by Anne Fishbein

The views and opinions expressed in this presentation are those of the artist and do not necessarily represent the official views or opinions of Performing Arts Houston or its partners.

For ADA information, please contact the Box Office at 713-227-4772 or email [email protected] .

Amplify the arts and save

Members enjoy priority access, discounts, donor benefits, and more.

Edinburgh Festivals

An Evening with David Sedaris, UK Tour 2024

David Sedaris is known for being one of America’s most celebrated satirists and humour writers. He is also the star of his largely popular Radio 4 series ‘Meet David Sedaris’.

Sedaris has now announced new tour dates for 2024, beginning with two nights at London’s Festival Hall on 4th & 5th July and finishing at Brighton’s Dome on 13th July. Throughout the tour, he will read new and unpublished stories, take questions from the audience and sign books while meet his audience.

Through his work, Sedaris has provoked us to consider the absurdities of human nature and modern life: family, travel, relationships, aging, the pandemic, political upheavals, and of course roadside trash! He is capable at making us laugh, think and be deeply moved, all simultaneously.

Sedaris also wrote the New York Times best-sellers Barrel Fever, Holidays on Ice, Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, and Calypso. He is also the author of The Best of Me which collects 42 previously published stories and essays. Sedaris’ Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary is a collection of fables with illustrations by Ian Falconer.

Other work by Sedaris includes being the editor of Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories. His pieces regularly appear in The New Yorker and have twice been included in “The Best American Essays.” The two volumes of his diaries, Theft By Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) and A Carnival of Snackery, Diaries (2003-2020) were New York Times bestsellers. An art book of Sedaris’s diary covers, David Sedaris Diaries: A Visual Compendium, was edited by Jeffrey Jenkins. His most recent book, Happy-Go-Lucky, debuted at No.1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The audio version of Happy-Go-Lucky, also narrated by Sedaris, won the 2023 Audie Award. His next book is set to be a short graphic novel for children titled Pretty Ugly (TOON Books, February 27, 2024).

He has released an impressive amount of book, with over 16 million copies of his books in print which have been translated into 32 languages. He has been awarded the Terry Southern Prize for Humor, Thurber Prize for American Humor, Jonathan Swift International Literature Prize for Satire and Humor, Time 2001 Humorist of the Year Award, as well as the Medal for Spoken Language from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In March 2019 he was elected as a member into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2020 the New York Public Library voted Me Talk Pretty One Day one of the 125 most important books of the last 125 years.

UK 2024 Tour Dates:

Fri 4th & Sat 5th LONDON – Royal Festival Hall

Mon 6th BRISTOL – Beacon

Tues 9th MANCHESTER – Bridgewater Hall

Wed 10th EDINBURGH – Usher Hall

Fri 12th CAMBRIDGE – Corn Exchange

Sat 13th BRIGHTON – Dome

Buy tickets here

http://www.davidsedarisbooks.com/

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REVIEW: An Evening with David Sedaris

I’ve been told that evenings with David Sedaris are memorable and hilarious, and I’m excited to say that it’s true.

A woman from Michigan Radio introduced him with an anecdote about him calling into the station to make a donation, leaving everyone on the other line starstruck. It seemed that the same starstruck feeling echoed in the almost-full auditorium of Michigan Theater as he walked out in a long dress shirt, untucked and down to his calves, beneath a jacket that had seen some scissors. He modeled for us as a start to the evening before his anecdotal debut: a quick mention of a time when he called into another radio station, who told him that he sounded like Piglet.

His timing there must have been on purpose, because I and several others afterwards discussed not being able to get that out of our minds as he spoke for the next two hours. Nothing that he brought was content that I’ve read before, so it was nice to hear something new to me.

Sedaris brought a couple of short stories to read, sprinkling in small anecdotes and some selections of his latest diary collection, Theft by Finding — along with some from his upcoming second selection of diaries. After reading an essay simultaneously about mysterious dental pain and traveling to Japan, he brought up something that I’ve been wondering since first reading Me Talk Pretty One Day : he never wants to write about just one thing at a time. He has a way of associating seemingly very separate things in order to avoid writing about just one thing. “I wanted to write this essay about my tooth, but I also was thinking about my visit to Japan, and it just had to fit.” And in some magical Sedarisian way, it worked. He seems to have the life experience to associate anything.

Another story that he read was called “Active Shooter,” about him and his sister going to a shooting range because they’d never done it before. His sister was interested in learning how to handle a gun, specifically just in case she was about to be killed and her killer dropped his gun — much of the story hinged on his sister’s oddly particular foresight and thinking of the most specific instances. It followed their journey through a long class about how to handle guns and ended with the sister being praised for her skills, while the teacher consistently called David by the name of Mike. Both siblings left without feeling the need to shoot again.

My favorite diary entry that he read — which made me and several cry laughing — was one about trying to translate the English idiom about the pot calling the kettle black into French (directed toward his French teacher who called him a sadist), which turned out something like “That is like a pan…saying to a dark pan…’you are a pan.'” I instantly thought of all my foreign language experience trying to translate what was in my head directly, and how often it just doesn’t work.

One of the final bits that he read was “And While You’re Up There, Check My Prostate.” This essay explored international methods of dealing with road rage, many sayings translating clunkily but funnily to English from various European languages and dialects. I liked the general theme of translation-based disconnects that evening, and also appreciated their delivery. They were hilarious enough to make anybody laugh no matter their translation experience.

Following the reading and before the signing, he requested to bring the lights up for a Q&A session with the large audience. I loved seeing how appreciated he was to locals here, and figured it made sense with his wit and attention to social culture. The question I best remember was somebody asking him whether he still picked up garbage (mostly as a gesture to preserving the environment) — to which he responded, yes. I couldn’t help but wonder whether he was the only one in the room who did that.

What I love about Sedaris’s writing is that it’s largely about the human condition, but also is so full of rich comedic timing and phrasing. It’s honest and fun, rarely distant, and always makes me wonder how much of it he’s actually experienced. Following the reading, I braved the long line to have him sign my copy of When You Are Engulfed in Flames and was delighted to find that he was just as funny and surprising on a conversational whim. I left Michigan Theater feeling ecstatic, especially after getting to meet him.

He’s returning in June to Ann Arbor, and I highly recommend going to see him read and speak! You’ll laugh and learn so much.

Haley is a senior studying creative writing & literature with a strong love for visual art, poetry, and solitude. Find her where the coffee is.

One thought to “REVIEW: An Evening with David Sedaris”

I just saw him last night here in Eugene and it was as good as you said. He can switch smoothly from a very moving memoir about his 95-year-old father to a list of hysterically dirty puns in a matter of minutes. You really don’t know what to expect next.

Review: ‘Happy-Go-Lucky,’ an amusing look at life’s ironies

This cover image released by Little, Brown and Company shows “Happy-Go-Lucky” by David Sedaris. (Little, Brown and Company via AP)

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“Happy-Go-Lucky,” by David Sedaris (Little, Brown and Company)

Almost everyone has a dysfunctional family, but few expose their relatives’ funny, embarrassing and even disturbing quirks quite like writer and humorist David Sedaris.

Anyone who has read Sedaris’ essays in The New Yorker magazine knows about his large Greek American family and his boyfriend, Hugh, who form an awkward but loving ensemble cast. In one unforgettable piece nearly a decade ago, Sedaris even wrote of his sister Tiffany’s suicide, “Now We are Five.”

In “Happy-Go-Lucky,” a new collection of poignant, honest and funny essays, Sedaris is bothered when he notices the crepe-like skin between one sister’s chest and neck, lamenting that his once beautiful sisters are aging.

“It just seems cruel,” he says.

Writing about his teen years, Sedaris is simultaneously amusing and brutal while unflinchingly exposing the ironies of his family and life in general.

In one anecdote, his father, Lou, yanks a sister naked out of the shower. In another, Lou subjects the young David to a humiliating examination when he claimed to be sick.

Elsewhere in this latest collection of essays, Sedaris shines a harsh light on his experiences during the coronavirus pandemic, from grocery shopping early on to his return to nonstop travel for work, walking through empty airports, past shuttered businesses, closed lounges, painting a somewhat troubling picture of life in America today.

In the airport at Charlotte, North Carolina, he encounters what initially appears to be a fig that turns out to be a turd, most likely a dog’s.

“What has this world come to?” he wonders.

Sedaris also reflects on the little things from pre-pandemic life that he never appreciated before: being handed a restaurant menu, reading banal text messages over a stranger’s shoulder.

“The America I saw while on tour in the fall of 2021 was weary and battle-scarred,” Sedaris wrote in one piece in the book, an essay entitled “Lucky-Go-Happy,” published in The New Yorker this spring. “Its sidewalks were cracked, its mailboxes bashed in.”

Going up to a store or a restaurant he’d remembered from an earlier trip, he’d find it “boarded up, or maybe burned out, the plywood that blocked the doors covered with graffiti.”

But the most haunting image was one of a person Sedaris never met face to face.

It was a young woman he imagined was the owner of items he spotted in a gutter near a baggage carousel at one airport: among them two pairs of panties, three AA batteries and a brush with long strawberry-blond strands of hair.

“I thought of her for months to come,” he wrote. “wondering, as I moved from place to place in this divided, beat-up country of ours, where she was and she what she imagined had become of her panties.”

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By Andrew Sean Greer

Published Nov. 2, 2020 Updated Oct. 25, 2021

THE BEST OF ME By David Sedaris

I began reading “The Best of Me,” David Sedaris ’s new collection, on an airplane over the Atlantic. I was covered in prophylactic measures and heavily dosed on sleeping pills, which might explain the curious notes I have since discovered in the margins. “I had a brother-in-law named The Rooster” is one poignant example, but what is one to make of the terrifying scribble, “AH FEAR!,” I ask you? Or, most mysterious of all: “348263947” — either a stranger’s passport number or the combination to a bank vault. Was I planning a false identity? A heist? Perhaps we shall never know, so let us rely instead upon my final note, which reads: “ This is the best thing Sedaris has ever written .”

In the non-narcotic light of day, I stand by it. Strange, since “The Best of Me” is a collection of writing. Ordinary readers (and I am the most ordinary of readers) will be expecting a flamboyance of favorites, from his leap to NPR stardom with “Santaland Diaries” and his quarter-century rock-star journey from 1994’s “Barrel Fever” to 2018’s “ Calypso .” Ordinary readers, however, will be wrong. This is not some Sedarian immaculate collection; instead, as he himself writes in the introduction, the pieces “are the sort I hoped to produce back when I first started writing, at the age of 20.” They are what he hoped he would be. They are the best of him. Has Sedaris included “Santaland Diaries”? He has not. Has Sedaris included “The Motherless Bear,” a work of fiction that elicited a great deal of hate mail, including entreaties to donate to bear-rescue organizations? He has. Is Amy here? Yep. His mom? His dad? The Rooster who becomes The Juicester? Bien sûr . In fact, this book is all about his family and … all right, I’ll say it: love.

No point planning a heist; Sedaris has opened the vault himself. The genius of “The Best of Me” is that it reveals the growth of a writer, a sense of how his outlook has changed and where he finds humor. In his early fiction — the hilariously petty tyrants of “Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 2” and “Front Row Center With Thaddeus Bristol” — Sedaris finds it in cruelty: “In the role of Mary,” Thaddeus remarks in his review of Sacred Heart Elementary’s Christmas pageant, “6-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin.” That cruelty continues in Sedaris’s pseudo-autobiographical work, but the monster we are seeing through is “David Sedaris.” In “The Incomplete Quad,” he imagines his family envying his life: “Me, the winner.” Paragraph break, next paragraph: “I was cooking spaghetti and ketchup in my electric skillet one night. …” It is a delicious pleasure to understand an obliviousness that Sedaris (supposedly) does not. “There weren’t many people I truly hated back then,” he tells us about his prepubescent self in “Memory Laps,” “30, maybe 45 at most.” The subject, in many of the pieces Sedaris has selected, is the judgment and pain we inflict on one another, and by “we” Sedaris does not mean people in general. He means him. And he means you. And he means me.

Then, after the wicked glee of finding humor in pain (and I recommend reading the first volume of Sedaris’s diaries, “Theft by Finding,” to see how true this is to his nature), we arrive at a series of grace notes. The dangers of taking chances for gay men in a previous era, and the loves thereby lost, are movingly described in “A Guy Walks Into a Bar Car,” and for those obsessed with the character of Hugh, there is much of him as well, appearing almost in reverse: as a front-seat passenger in “Possession” and a dubious boyfriend in “Dentists Without Borders,” until at last, 300 pages in, he and David are introduced. But it is the Sedaris family that carries the book: from childhood — when David persuades the toddler Tiffany to lie down in front of cars to cause grief to their mother, who has locked them out in the snow for being insufferable — to adulthood, cackling over bestiality magazines with Amy — to growing old, with its concomitant sorrows and, most surprising of all, happiness. “Happiness is harder to put into words,” Sedaris writes in “Leviathan,” one of the final essays. “It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow.” It is miraculous to read these pieces placed close together, the earliest written without any knowledge of where things would lead, the last guffawing at the ridiculousness of where they did. “Look how our lives turned out!” he imagines himself and his sisters thinking as they shop for absurd clothing in “The Perfect Fit.” “What a surprise!”

Not everything turns out OK. If you have not read all of Sedaris, then I will not spoil the grief, or the joy, of his family’s arc. And if you have read all of Sedaris, well, then you have probably spent the intervening years entering the cartoon contests in the back of The New Yorker and baking prune challahs and pickling your children in adoration and rage and have therefore forgotten everything. Time to start again. You must read “The Best of Me.” It will be a new experience, knowing that enough time has passed to find humor in the hardest parts of life. More than ever — we’re allowed to laugh.

Andrew Sean Greer’s most recent novel, “Less,” won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize.

THE BEST OF ME By David Sedaris 338 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $30.

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Calypso by David Sedaris review – a family affair

T here’s nobody quite like David Sedaris . He’s been likened to an American Alan Bennett , or an “evil Garrison Keillor ”, but neither is precisely right: his collections of wry, sidelong diary-essays (there isn’t a label for what he does; he’s the lone inhabitant of a category of his own invention) have sold in their millions around the world, and his regular TV and radio appearances and sell-out reading tours have garnered him legions of fans. Devotees are well acquainted by now with the wider Sedaris clan. His smart, adoring, yarn-spinning mother, who died in 1991; his father, distant and reactionary (a man “who laughs appreciatively at such bumper stickers as DON’T BLAME ME, I VOTED FOR THE AMERICAN”) though softening at the edges as he ages; his clutch of wayward, wise-cracking siblings, against whom he measures himself, and on whom he relies. They’re the animating force behind his writing; the wellspring of his humour, the source of his grace.

Calypso , Sedaris’s 10th collection, is, more emphatically than ever, a family affair. The action revolves around the Sea Section, an oceanfront cottage on the North Carolina coast that Sedaris and his husband, Hugh, purchased in order to realise his childhood dream that “one day I would buy a beach house and it would be everyone’s, as long as they followed my draconian rules and never stopped thanking me for it”. The Sedarises gather and regather there: for Thanksgivings and summer vacations. Between confidences shared, board games played and sunscreen slathered, the anecdotes pile up. The time Sedaris and his sister Lisa went for an evening walk on the beach and then couldn’t work out which house was theirs; the spectacle of his brother Paul living out his midlife crisis via juicing (“Everything goes into his Omega J8006 – kale, carrots, celery, some kind of powder scraped off the knuckles of bees”); the occasion on which Sedaris himself fed the benign tumour he’d had removed by an audience member from one of his readings (yes) to a turtle (that’s right).

Through disarmingly frank descriptions of their collective idiosyncrasies, vulgarities and charms, he conjures the sort of warts-and-all closeness that family alone can offer, and to feel yourself a part of that is as beguiling an experience as ever. But while the surface of this collection glitters just as brightly as the others, the shadows that swarm the depths are darker. Questions of ageing and mortality hover, and as life moves forward and the tragedies pile up, it turns out there are some things it’s impossible to play for laughs. For all its warmth and wit, Calypso is a rawer, jaggeder, sadder book than its predecessors, and one in which, for the first time, Sedaris appears to pull the curtain back; to show us where, behind the illusion of intimacy, the levers are located, and how they are being pulled.

First, though, Sedaris reinducts us into his universe in the collection’s opening piece, “Company Man”, in which he tackles the indignities of mid-life with gusto. Confronted with his opening gambit that “there are few real joys to middle age. The only perk I can see is that, with luck, you’ll acquire a guest room,” it’s impossible not to relax: to snort in recognition at his observations, so conspiratorially delivered; to understand, from the combination of pith and perfect timing, that you’re in the hands of a comic master. There’s something, too, about his writing that flatters his readers: the confiding tone; the approachable intelligence; his trick of exposing and then skewering his foibles and thus allowing us to feel better about our own. It’s hard not to feel smug by the end of the first piece. We may be navigating the seas of mid-life ourselves (his fans are apparently ageing with him), but at least we’re reading Sedaris while we’re doing it.

All, then, is as it should be – until the first line of the second piece, when he sharply pulls the rug from under us. “In late May 2013,” he writes, “a few weeks shy of her fiftieth birthday, my youngest sister, Tiffany, committed suicide.” It’s a bald, brutal admission, delivered without decoration (though not without care: look at the way the sentence itself constitutes an act of dramatic withholding, delivering the gut-punch of suicide only in the final clause) – and its jolt is all the more destabilising for coming in the wake of the light, familiar wit of the opening essay. Tiffany’s suicide, and the questions it raises, are unequivocally the subjects of this volume, and a lesser author wouldn’t have had the chops to keep them back until chapter two. But in doing so, Sedaris gives us a shock that is an echo of the way in which the news intruded into his congenial, guest-room-rich life. “A person expects his parents to die,” he reflects. “But a sibling? I felt I’d lost the identity I’d enjoyed since 1968.”

‘There are few real joys to middle age’ … David Sedaris.

Sedaris explores the double blow of losing Tiffany and of losing his own status as one of six over the course of the collection, circling back repeatedly as he tries to make sense of who his sister was, and who he was in relation to her. She’s constantly in the thoughts and on the tongues of his family; she appears to him in his dreams. She comes across as funny, prickly, angry, unwell. She left a will in which “she decreed that we, her family, could not have her body or attend her memorial service”. On the question of why she did it, his father claims to believe that it may not have had anything to do with them. “But how could it have not?” Sedaris wonders. “Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?”

From the evidence here, the answer is an emphatic yes. There’s no question of the impact of Tiffany’s death on Sedaris’s identity as a brother; what’s intriguing from a reader’s perspective is the impact it has had on his identity as a writer, too. Oh, there’s plenty in this collection that’s vintage Sedaris: bright, trenchant essays on “upselling” (“the practice of pushing more stuff on you … as if in order to properly read a copy of US Weekly you’ll have to first rinse your eyes out with a four-dollar bottle of Evian”), or the addictive properties of a Fitbit (“Before, once we’d eaten dinner, I was in for the evening. Now, though, as soon as I’m finished with the dishes, I walk to the pub and back, a distance of 3,895 steps”).

But the fact of Tiffany’s death, the sense that the worst has happened and he has found a way to write about it, appears to have loosened something in him; to have freed him up to lift the lid on other aspects of his life that don’t fit the comedy bill.

In “A Number of Reasons I’ve Been Depressed Lately” he tackles Trump’s election and the “great screaming fight” it touches off with his Republican father. In the superb “Why Aren’t You Laughing?”, he reveals his mother’s alcoholism, sketching the transition from the “cheerful and charismatic” woman of daylight hours whose speciality, like her son’s, “was the real-life story, perfected and condensed”, to the night-time version, who swore and slurred, looked “different, raw, like you’d taken the lady she was earlier and peeled her”.

All of these are warm-ups, though, for the most remarkable revelation, which comes just pages before the end, at the conclusion of an essay on ghosts. Though his family are ghost-mad, Sedaris affects not to believe in them. But it turns out he’s haunted, just the same. In a few brief, uninflected paragraphs, he describes the last time he saw Tiffany, when she turned up at the stage door of one of his readings. At this point, he explains, they hadn’t spoken in four years. “There was a security guard holding the door open, and I said to him, ‘Will you close that, please?’”, he writes. “And so the man did. He shut the door in my sister’s face and I never saw her or spoke to her again.”

The admission shocks not just because of Sedaris’s action, but because it exposes the illusion that his readers have collectively bought into: that his frankness on certain subjects is equivalent to honesty. This is exposure of a deeper, darker kind than he’s attempted before: exposure of himself, and of his former careful management of his and his family’s stories. Looking for truth in the courtroom sense in Sedaris’s essays has always been a mug’s game, missing the point. Truthfulness, though – emotional, spiritual – he’s always traded on these. And with Calypso , he’s given us his most truthful work yet.

David Sedaris
Book of the week
Autobiography and memoir

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David Sedaris Tour 2024 Review . An evening with david sedaris, uk tour 2024. The performance has been a unique.

Monday july 11 2022, 12.00pm, the. I offered to look up sedaris’ publicist and see about writing.

Writer And Humorist David Sedaris Is Confirmed For A Return Visit To The State Theatre At 7:30 Pm On Wednesday, November 6, 2024.

Humorist and author david sedaris has announced a 2024 tour which has him out.

“When I Go On A Book Tour, I Write To Everyone Who Interviews Me, To Every Store And Media Escort,” Sedaris Humbly Brags In “A Speech To The Graduates,” His.

Monday july 11 2022, 12.00pm, the.

I Offered To Look Up Sedaris’ Publicist And See About Writing.

Images references :, apr 10 | wednesday, 2024 7:30 pm buy tickets about the event an evening with david sedaris, author of the previous bestsellers calypso, naked, me talk pretty one day,..

The second instalment of the flâneur’s diaries takes in family relationships, book.

Humorist David Sedaris Is Bringing His Tour To A.

Writer and humorist david sedaris is confirmed for a return visit to the state theatre at 7:30 pm on wednesday, november 6, 2024.

April 18 / 2024 / Paramount Hudson Valley Arts.

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Event Review: AN EVENING WITH DAVID SEDARIS (Tour)
Perhaps they didn't understand that they had come to hear David Sedaris and simply weren't prepared for the writer's distinctive and brutally hilarious vision of himself — and all the rest of us. An Evening with David Sedaris. presented by Celebrity Series of Boston. reviewed April 12, 2024, at Symphony Hall in Boston.
Unpacking what was funny and not in David Sedaris' show at Kennedy
The show was a one-night-only stop on his tour promoting his new collection of personal essays about life during the pandemic, Happy-Go-Lucky, his first personal essay collection since 2018. This performance consisted of Sedaris reading several essays and a few short passages, and taking some questions from the audience.
David Sedaris tour: what happened when he made me one of his freaks
How David Sedaris turned me into one of his freaks. By Gabb Schivone. Oct 22, 20237:00 PM. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images. As soon as the last word of ...
With 'Pretty Ugly,' David Sedaris launches new tour, new kids' book
Now, Sedaris adds the children's book " Pretty Ugly " to his vast collection of books and essays. He's setting off on a 7-month whirlwind international tour where he'll introduce new essays, observations and hours-long book-signing sessions to the mix. Sedaris joins host Robin Young to talk about his career, and of course, what bugs ...
David Sedaris Tickets
DAVID SEDARIS ON TOUR: Beloved humorist and perennial New York Times best-seller David Sedaris has been bringing his signature self-deprecation to both the page and the stage ever since his comic debut in the late-'70s.
David Sedaris reflects on the driving force of his life: His war with
In Sedaris' new book, he writes about when his father was in his 90s and his power was continually diminishing in assisted living and in the ICU. The new book is called "Happy-Go-Lucky" and is now ...
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"When I go on a book tour, I write to everyone who interviews me, to every store and media escort," Sedaris humbly brags in "A Speech to the Graduates," his commencement address for the ...
David Sedaris review
FIRST NIGHT | COMEDY. David Sedaris review — the world expert in misanthropic humour. Usher Hall, Edinburgh. Allan Radcliffe. Monday July 11 2022, 12.00pm, The Times. David Sedaris's live show ...
Theatre Review: 'David Sedaris' at Strathmore Music Hall
Running Time: 90 minutes, with no intermission. David Sedaris appeared for one night only at the Music Center at Strathmore, 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda, MD. Tickets for the continuation of Strathmore's season can be purchased here. David Sedaris' remaining tour dates can be found here.
David Sedaris Live on Tour
Germantown Performing Arts Center. BUY TICKETS. Sunday, April 28, 2024
TOUR
May 8 / 2024 / Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. Davis, CA / 7:30PM. More Information.
David Sedaris bringing trademark wit to the Bay Area
Sedaris' current tour consists of essays he recently wrote but has not yet published, inspired by his travels and other topics. ... Review: 'Hangmen' at San Jose Stage is dark, twisted and ...
Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris review
D avid Sedaris got his start in comedy as Crumpet the Christmas elf, campily dancing attendance in Santa's grotto at Macy's department store while clad in green knickers and a spangled bonnet ...
Author David Sedaris to Tour to 44 Cities Promoting "Happy Go Lucky"
Starting March 30, author David Sedaris ("Me Talk Pretty One Day") will begin on a 44-city world tour. The tour will be promoting his latest book, "Happy Go Lucky." Sedaris appeared on "Real Time with Bill Maher" this week to promote the upcoming tour. From Sedaris' website:Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask—or not—was a decision made mostly on ...
David Sedaris announces 2024 tour
December 4, 2023. Humorist and author David Sedaris has announced a 2024 tour which has him out around the world starting in the spring with North America before heading to the UK and Europe in ...
Performing Arts Houston
David Sedaris on his trip to the Apple Store. Venue Photo. For ADA information, please contact the Box Office at 713-227-4772 or email [email protected]. Discover upcoming events at Performing Arts Houston, including live concerts, comedy shows, dance shows, musicals, broadway shows, lectures and more.
David Sedaris on Tour
David Sedaris on Tour. 4,981 likes · 2 talking about this. Catch the best selling author and celebrated NPR humorist as he hits the road to a city near you!
An Evening with David Sedaris, UK Tour 2024
David Sedaris is known for being one of America's most celebrated satirists and humour writers. He is also the star of his largely popular Radio 4 series 'Meet David Sedaris'. Sedaris has now announced new tour dates for 2024, beginning with two nights at London's Festival Hall on 4th & 5th July and finishing at Brighton's Dome on ...
REVIEW: An Evening with David Sedaris
REVIEW: An Evening with David Sedaris. April 21, 2018 fragolina Arts, Literary Arts. I've been told that evenings with David Sedaris are memorable and hilarious, and I'm excited to say that it's true. A woman from Michigan Radio introduced him with an anecdote about him calling into the station to make a donation, leaving everyone on the ...
Book Review: 'Happy-Go-Lucky,' by David Sedaris
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, by David Sedaris | 259 pp. | Little, Brown | $29. Henry Alford is the author of six books, including, most recently, "And Then We Danced.". Audio produced by Tally Abecassis. A ...
Review: 'Happy-Go-Lucky,' an amusing look at life's ironies
In one unforgettable piece nearly a decade ago, Sedaris even wrote of his sister Tiffany's suicide, "Now We are Five.". In "Happy-Go-Lucky," a new collection of poignant, honest and funny essays, Sedaris is bothered when he notices the crepe-like skin between one sister's chest and neck, lamenting that his once beautiful sisters are ...
Book Review: 'The Best of Me,' by David Sedaris
The genius of "The Best of Me" is that it reveals the growth of a writer, a sense of how his outlook has changed and where he finds humor. In his early fiction — the hilariously petty ...
A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris review
Nowhere is this more apparent than in his interactions with the audiences who pack out theatres and then queue for hours to chat with him. In Pennsylvania, a 19-year-old asks him to inscribe a ...
Calypso by David Sedaris review
Calypso, Sedaris's 10th collection, is, more emphatically than ever, a family affair. The action revolves around the Sea Section, an oceanfront cottage on the North Carolina coast that Sedaris ...
David Sedaris Tour 2024 Review
David Sedaris Tour 2024 Review. An evening with david sedaris, uk tour 2024. The performance has been a unique. Monday july 11 2022, 12.00pm, the. I offered to look up sedaris' publicist and see about writing. Writer And Humorist David Sedaris Is Confirmed For A Return Visit To The State Theatre At 7:30 Pm On

Event Review: AN EVENING WITH DAVID SEDARIS (Tour)

WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN SEDARIS

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Author David Sedaris to Tour to 44 Cities Promoting "Happy Go Lucky"

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An Evening with David Sedaris

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A master of satire and incisive social critique

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An Evening with David Sedaris, UK Tour 2024

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Hanukkah 2024 Time

Writer And Humorist David Sedaris Is Confirmed For A Return Visit To The State Theatre At 7:30 Pm On Wednesday, November 6, 2024.

“When I Go On A Book Tour, I Write To Everyone Who Interviews Me, To Every Store And Media Escort,” Sedaris Humbly Brags In “A Speech To The Graduates,” His.

I Offered To Look Up Sedaris’ Publicist And See About Writing.

Humorist David Sedaris Is Bringing His Tour To A.

April 18 / 2024 / Paramount Hudson Valley Arts.

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