Look out, world, David Sedaris is back. After a long pandemic hiatus, the famed writer is returning to the road with a new collection of essays and heâll be swinging by the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Tuesday, November 22 for a reading.
You may know him for The Santaland Diaries or Me Talk Pretty One Day; or his new book Happy-Go-Lucky or 2021's A Carnival of Snackery, which just came out in paperback. Or you mightâve seen the fuss over a recent CBS Sunday Morning musing in which Sedaris takes a winding path to avoid the word âqueer.â Over the last 30ish years, Sedaris has staked out a position as one of the worldâs foremost humorists, mixing wry, deadpan observations with pathos and heart.
Ahead of his visit, Sedaris spoke to us about what heâs been up to. Our conversation swerved between topics that included his travel plans, how he helped his sister Amy learn her Star Wars dialogue, and what he considers âthe scariest thing ever.â He also shared his fondest Thanksgiving wish, which is to find a human body.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Is there stuff youâre looking forward to doing when you come to town?
Mostly I just go to the Target near my hotel and watch people shoplift.
What do you like about watching people shoplift?
Itâs just shocking to me. I always like watching people shoplift because they thought they were so stealthy. But now you donât even have to be stealthy, so itâs fascinating to me. The Target near the hotel, itâs just insane. People just walk in, fill bags, and walk out of the store. I just canât watch it enough.
Now that youâre back on the road, have you had to re-learn certain skills?
I just jumped right back into it. I was really sad when everything shut down. I didnât know what I was going to do with myself. I think I missed out on three or four tours altogether. So last fall I went to 70 cities and then 45 in the spring and then a 20-city US book tour and a 20-city UK book tour. Itâs funny, it didnât take any getting used to at all. I was just dying to do it.
Iâve read that live audiences sometimes help you hone your writing.
Thatâll be interesting on this tour because I have something new that I read in England. ⌠It worked really well, but that doesnât mean itâll work in the United States, because in the US, when you talk about race in any way, the audience freaks out. They get super self-conscious and think itâs a trap of some sort, or they worry that if they laugh at something, that makes them racist. If all thatâs going through their mind, they canât follow the story Iâm trying to tell. Itâs not really a problem in England, that sort of thing.
Itâs something I wouldnât even have thought about ten years ago. Itâs really an essay about when you mention somebodyâs race in your writing. Sometimes it seems really important.
I mean, Iâm more apt to notice something than I would have been five years ago as well. Itâs not like Iâm that Sex in the City update, like I woke up saying, âWhat happened?â The changes happened slowly and subtly and I think itâs something that everybodyâs noticed.
That said, you never can tell whatâs going to set somebody off. Somebody was set off recently because I put out a diary book and said my sister Gretchen fed her turtle crickets. A person at a pet store said depending on what kind of turtle you have, itâs best to cut the legs off with scissors. But she didnât have any scissors, so she just pulled the legs off.Â
I got the angriest letter from some guy, furious. I wasnât the one tearing the legs off the crickets! Youâve got the wrong person.
What did you spend your time doing when all your tours were canceled?
I still traveled as much as I could. I was going a lot between North Carolina and New York, which is like going between the North Pole and the South Pole. Well, I donât know. Iâve never been to either pole. And arenât they both kind of cold?
I imagine theyâre similar.
North Carolina and New York are not similar at all. So it was interesting to go from one place where you had to wear a mask on the street to a place where if you wore a mask you were suspect. I liked going from one extreme to another. But God, when I think back on that⌠itâs funny, I wrote a couple essays about it while it was going on but now that itâs in the rear-view mirror for the most part, itâs just such a dark time.
Dark subjects are often what you explore in your writing.
Yeah, but when I was in the middle of it it didnât seem that dark. It was a drag, but it didnât seem like a dark time in history. I mean it was an inconvenient time in history. But when I look back on it Iâm so grateful. I havenât worn a mask since⌠mid-June? I mean, Iâve been in England and Finland and Norway and Denmark and Sweden and Austria. And I havenât worn one once. I donât know what itâs like in the United States right now. Are there places around town that make you wear a mask?
A handfulâa bookstore near me requires masks, but not the gym. I still wear one because I donât want to get sick. But people are pretty mask-off these days.
On my spring lecture tour, I got COVID in my last city. It was the perfect time to get it because I had a week off. I had to take a test to go on television and the test came back positive. I was shocked. I didnât know I had it.
Have you seen your sister Amy on the Star Wars TV shows?
That show doesnât make any sense at all to her. She said, âThe dialogue is just meaningless. How am I supposed to remember it?â So I helped her run lines.
She said [in character], âWe must defeat âtie-ranny.ââ And I said, âIâm pretty sure, I mean I havenât seen the show, but Iâm pretty sure itâs âtyranny.ââ She thought âTie-rannyâ was the name of a character.
Have you watched the finished product?
No, I havenât. She hasnât watched it either. But the guy who made it, Jon Favreau, was a dishwasher when she was in Second City. Amyâs always super nice, especially to people on the crew or somebody whoâs in the back washing dishes, and he never forgot it. He put her in so many things. Weâre not Star Wars people, really. Iâm not averse to watching it. But I donât have⌠is it Disney+ that you need to have?
Yes. Is there anything that you have enjoyed watching recently?
Do you watch Indian Matchmaking? Itâs on Netflix. Itâs a matchmaking show, and it just seems to be, I donât know this for a fact but it seems to me like a lot of the unmarried men on the show are gay. It just seems to me. Like if you have a picture of yourself on the doorknob of your walk-in closet⌠I donât know, itâs a different culture, so what do I know?Â
And Iâm watching that⌠what is it, the Lord of the Rings prequel, The Rings of Power. Iâm not a fantasy person, but I love those Lord of the Rings movies, I just love them.
How do you feel the new show compares to the Peter Jackson films?
I guess theyâre all built on a footnote, is that correct?
Yeah, the source is a little thin, so theyâve fleshed it out.Â
Well, itâs still really scary to me. I think orcs are the scariest thing ever. So I watch it for the orcs.
Do you enjoy being scared?
Yeah. Orcs scare me. And theyâve got to smell pretty bad I think. And you never see a she-orc. There are she-dwarves. One of them has a pretty big part in this new show. But you never see a she-orc.
Anything else you want folks to know about the tour as youâre coming through the Pacific Northwest?
I canât think of anything. I think itâs going to be pretty close to Thanksgiving, isnât it? Hugh [HamrickâSedaris' husband] has a brother who lives [northwest of Seattle]. Iâm going to go there for Thanksgiving.
A human torso recently washed up on the beach near there.
Oh really! And thereâs no head? Are there arms attached?
I donât know how intact it is.
Wow. I spend a whole lot of time in England picking up trash on the side of the road, and thatâs my dream, to find a human body. Whenever I smell a dead deer or something in the woods I get so excited. Oh, itâs finally my time!
Iâve said in print before that I want to find a human body, so if I do at this point Iâm going to be the number one suspect. I spent ten days at a medical examinerâs office in Phoenix and every kind of dead person came through there and it was GRUESOME. If you never saw a thing like that and you saw a torso, God, that would just fuck you up for life.
When you were at the medical examinerâs office, did you get used to it?
I never got used to it. You usually donât smell peopleâs insides. Your insides have a particular smell that weâre all protected from. I donât know that itâs an awful smell, itâs just a new smell. Well, Iâm going to say itâs awful. Itâs just kind of a sour smell that tells you to run, to get as far away from it as possible. And thatâs like if you die and in two days they do an autopsy, not if youâve been lying on the floor for a week. People came in disinterred, just every horrible thing. People were shot, who were hit by cars. I thought that if you committed suicide, if you put a gun to your head, youâd have a little ladylike hole there, but if itâs a rifle your headâs just gone. It was chilling.
And for a while, there was a sheriff ⌠making people convicted of drunk driving witness autopsies. And they had to stop because they didnât have enough funds to clean up all the vomit. Itâs not a bad punishment.Â
What inspired you to go to the medical examinerâs office?
Esquire hired me and said I could write about whatever I wanted to, and Iâd always wanted to write about dead people but I knew I couldnât get in on my own. So they called and got me in. And the article was a complete flop because Iâm not a journalist. I think the worst thing for somebody in your position would be to write about somebody whoâs never been written about before. Because theyâre going to be all excited about it and tell all their friends about it. And I thought, well, I have to make them look good because theyâre really looking forward to this.
It was a flop for that reason. And I always tell people, âWhatever you write here, rest assured, I am never going to read it.â Isnât that such a relief? Donât you breathe a sigh of relief when somebody tells you that?
For sure. Thatâs one of my great terrors. Thereâs one particular LGBTQ+ organization that I know Iâll hear from at length whenever I write about them.
What happened to gay people? We used to be so funny.
David Sedaris will be at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Tuesday, November 22.
