Over last winter break, I drove across the country with a girl I couldn’t stand. She had asked me to ride with her out to her new home in San Diego; my charge being to ward off potential rapists and thugs who might accost her and her smelly dog at rest stops and hotel parking lots. At the start of the voyage, we were friends. But by the time we hit Scranton, Pennsylvania, the nature of her unbelieveable bitchiness hit me like a random nosebleed, and I realized I would need some sort of distraction to plug up the wound.
I downloaded “When You Are Engulfed in Flames,” David Sedaris’ 2008 book of essays, at a hotel after the first day of driving. Three days later, when we hit El Cajon, I had listened to every book he had ever recorded.
I was never a Sedaris fan before this trip. I tried reading “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” at the urging of every white college graduate I had ever met, and I gave up after the first story. I thought he was overly cute, his writing contrived and his snarky tone somewhat annoying. But after hearing him read these same stories, I got it.
His essays are funny, for sure, but they never struck me as illuminating in any way. There never seemed to be anything more to what he wrote than a series of hilarious anecdotes about his large, neurotic family. But to hear him tell these stories in his own voice is to understand the relationships he writes about with a different kind of clarity.
Last Friday night, a sold-out crowd at the Merrill Auditorium in Portland hungrily fed on every word of David Sedaris’ two-hour reading of new essays and diary entries. Every 15 seconds or so, the entire crowd would erupt in rolling peals of laughter that seemed to shake the auditorium. One woman in the third row – who only seemed to laugh when everybody else was listening silently – cackled so violently that Sedaris actually stop reading for a few moments.
After the first reading – an essay he had written about greed for an Italian collection about the seven deadly sins – Sedaris admitted that he had spent the previous night in a hospital in upstate New York because of kidney stones. They wanted to keep him longer, but he insisted on leaving the next morning, saying, “I have to get to Portland, Maine. My health doesn’t matter.”
“That is to say, I’m on Percocet right now,” he clarified.
The next story he read was about a trip to Australia – “Canada in a thong” – he had recently taken. For the first two stories, Sedaris scribbled in the margins of the loose leaves of paper he read from, a practice he explained later as being part of his writing process. He said that when he goes back to the hotel after each night of a tour, he rewrites the pieces he read aloud. When a particular passage caused a huge round of laughs, he made a note in the margins. When something fell flat – which it rarely did – he marked that as well.
The high point of the night was when he read from his diary. He started with the story of a woman at a Weight Watchers meeting in London, whose extreme, carnal eating habits shocked Sedaris’ friend, who was aghast of being lumped into the same category as someone who pulled over on the side of the road and ate five grocery bags full of Hershey bars. The woman described her ordeal as like it was a common tribulation for her fellow Weight Watchers. Sedaris mocked this desperate attempt at validation in subsequent entries. In one instance, he imagined the woman posing as a man and attending divinity school to get access to an unlimited supply of communion wafers.
“I will make nachos of the body of Christ. And then – just like you – I will empty the collection plate and phone in another order. See if I don’t.”
Sedaris’ knack at exposing the bizarre and ridiculous tendencies of the average person is his calling card; a skill he is most adept at when he turns the spotlight on his own follies. The opening story about greed tells of one of his first book tours, when he put out a tip jar in jest at a book-signing table. What started as a joke turned into a profitable enterprise: when the tour ended he had collected roughly $3,000 in tips clumped into “sour-smelling bales the size of bricks.” He started judging each city based on the tips he collected, not the reception from the crowd,
Now, when new writers ask Sedaris about getting published, he seems to have a different view of fame.
“Writing and getting published are two different things. If it’s notoriety you want, maybe you should take hostages, or eat small bits of people you think are cute,” he said.
My impression – that Sedaris is a better reader than he is a writer – hasn’t changed since last winter. I agree with his assertion last Friday that “a good reader can sell a bad book.” It’s not that he’s a bad writer – far from it. He is a brilliant satirist, and his cutting descriptions have summed up so many ridiculous people whom I have met in one form or another. But his dry delivery, comedic timing – and impression of his father – are the subtle touches that make him more than a funny writer. They make him brilliant.