David Sedaris on deciding not to cut his family out of his life — at age 11 — and writing without an audience
Pandemic has meant the author can't use live audience reaction to hone his stories
American author and humorist David Sedaris says the COVID-19 pandemic has robbed him of a key part of his creative process: the laughter and feedback of a live audience.
"Let's say I write something like eight or nine times," said Sedaris, author of books such as Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, and his newest collection The Best of Me.
"I go on tour and I read it out loud and I think, 'Wow, oh, that is actually not funny at all,'" he told The Current's Matt Galloway.
"Or: 'Boy, that went over better than I thought!'"
Sedaris uses that live feedback — what audiences like and don't like — to rewrite these unpublished stories as the tour progresses. When it ends, he sends the final versions to his editor.
"And my editor will sometimes say: 'Oh, I think we can cut this' — and I love being able to say that's actually the biggest laugh in the entire essay."
With his in-person performances cancelled because of COVID-19, Sedaris said he made up his mind at the beginning of the pandemic to avoid doing video appearances wherever possible.
"I'm telling you, it got me out of so many things, especially out of fundraisers," he joked.
Part of his reticence is that video calls just don't offer those same cues from the audience, he said.
"There are a number of things that I've written since the pandemic started, but I don't know if they're good or not," he said.
"I feel like I'm going to read these things out loud as soon as I'm able to, and then I'll probably slap my forehead and say, 'I can't believe I let that be published.'"
His new book, The Best of Me, is a collection of stories and essays from across his career — meaning the audience feedback was baked in long ago. But Sedaris said he's chosen pieces that he himself "always looked forward to reading."
The book brings together the hallmarks of Sedaris's writing, including his eye for the absurdity hidden in our daily lives, and the adventures and misadventures he shares with his brothers and sisters, and his boyfriend Hugh.
'I'm done with my family'
One of the essays in the book is Laugh, Kookaburra, in which an 11-year-old Sedaris decides to cut his family out of his life.
Sedaris and his sister, actor Amy Sedaris, stayed up late one night singing a song about the kookaburra, an Australian bird, over and over. Their father repeatedly separated them and sent young Sedaris back to his own room, only for the boy to creep back to his sister's bed and start singing again.
"For some reason nothing irritated my father like the sound of his children's laughter — awful quality for a parent," Sedaris joked.
Their father eventually lost patience and disciplined the 11-year-old boy with a paddle. In the story, first published in The New Yorker in 2009, Sedaris seethes at the injustice that he was disciplined but his sister was not.
"I just thought, 'OK, that's it, I'm done, I'm done with my family,'" Sedaris told Galloway.
But he said that conviction was short-lived, and he "can't imagine a life without my family."
"I just always thought that my family was better than everybody else's family," he said.
As a child, other families seemed predictable, like you could "guess what they were going to say about any given subject."
"Whereas my family, I don't know, I just felt like I was quite often surprised by the things they'd come out with — and I still feel that way."
At this year's Thanksgiving, for example, Sedaris had two sisters — part of his pandemic bubble — over for dinner.
"We finished the meal and my sister Amy said to my boyfriend, Hugh, who had spent all day cooking, 'I would pay $36 for that meal,'" he laughed.
His sister Gretchen also pulled out her phone to show them a picture of a friend cuddling her giant pet snail, leaving Sedaris to wonder whether either owner or pet enjoyed the intimacy.
He said he often finds himself taking notes on what his family members say or do when he spends time with them.
"I'm just constantly kind of surprised and delighted, and if the rest of my family had been here, it just would have been more surprising," he said.
Read an excerpt from David Sedaris's new book
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Excerpted from THE BEST OF ME by David Sedaris. Copyright © 2020 by David Sedaris. Used with permission of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.
Written by Padraig Moran. Produced by Howard Goldenthal.
