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 ALASDAIR DUNCAN discusses his love of DAVID SEDARIS, with examples.
Raleigh, North Carolina’s David Sedaris is that rarest of writers, a memoirist who is totally self-absorbed yet somehow also insightful, truthful and hysterically funny. These days, Sedaris resides in France with his long-suffering boyfriend Hugh, but he tours the world regularly, telling acutely embarrassing stories and reading from essay collections like Me Talk Pretty One Day and When You Are Engulfed In Flames. I met him at one such reading two years ago where, in an embarrassing outpouring of fanboy-ish glee, I tackled him and made him sign a New Yorker in which one of his articles appeared. He seemed terrified, and scanned the room for exits, but was nice enough to submit to my will.
To prove to you that I am not a total crackpot, I have compiled a list of the top 10 pieces of wisdom I learned from reading David Sedaris, which will hopefully inspire you to check him out on his next tour, which rolls into town this week. Maybe you can hound him for an autograph, too!
1. Crystal meth is a hell of a drug
During his tumultuous years as a university undergrad, Sedaris discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. “Either one of these things is dangerous,” he says, “but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.”
2. Smoking is also pretty bad for you
In Letting Go, Sedaris recalls how, as a child, he stole and destroyed a packet of his mother’s cigarettes. “She beat me for twenty seconds,” he says of the consequences, “at which point she ran out of breath and stood there panting ‘that’s ... not ... funny’.”
3. Love is sometimes a bitch
“A broken heart is a rite of passage,” Sedaris said, of his early relationships with men, “and, looking back, I must have wanted one pretty badly. ‘Kick me,’ I demanded, and when somebody finally did, I burst like a cheap piñata.”
4. Christmas is a time for hideous behaviour
“My boyfriend’s mother was a handful,” Sedaris said, “and every year, just before Christmas, she would schedule a mammogram, knowing she would not get the results until after the holidays. The remote possibility of cancer was something to hang over her children’s heads, just out of reach, like mistletoe, and she took great pleasure in arranging it.”
5. The French language exists only to make life difficult for foreigners
After relocating to France, Sedaris railed against the degrading and demoralising experience of learning the language, particularly the notion of assigning random gender pronouns to inanimate objects. “Why refer to lady crack pipe or good sir dishrag,” he asked, “when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”
6. Saying ‘yes’ to everything can land you in hot water
For the first few months in France, the only word Sedaris knew was ‘d’accord’, which translates to ‘I am in agreement’. After saying this to his French dentist, he found his gums sliced open and scraped. “If I’d had any idea this was going to happen,” he says, “I’d never have said d’accord to my French publisher, who’d scheduled me the following evening for a television appearance.”
7. Art is in the eye of the beholder
“A few of my canvases are French or English, portraits mainly, dating from the eighteen-hundreds,” Sedaris says of his art collection, “but the ones I most care about are Dutch. Monkey Eating Peaches, Man Fleeing a Burning Village, Peasant Woman Changing a Dirty Diaper – how can you go wrong with such straightforward titles?”
8. It’s nice to have someone practical about the house
“Hugh had picked them the previous day,” Sedaris says of some flowers his boyfriend, Hugh, once brought home, “and it broke my heart to think of him marching across a muddy field with a bouquet in his hand. He does these things that are somehow beyond faggy and seem better suited to some hardscrabble pioneer wife: making jam, say, or sewing bedroom curtains out of burlap.”
9. House-hunting, though, can be a let-down
Sedaris and his boyfriend had spent months looking for a suitable apartment to buy in Paris when, on a trip to Amsterdam, he fell in love with Anne Frank’s house. “I thought the room beside the kitchen might be my office,” he said of the place, “but then I saw the attic, with its enchanting dormer windows, and the room beside the kitchen became a little leisure nook.”
10. Always be prepared with a witty anecdote
“I’m so afraid that Hugh and I won’t have anything to talk about that now, before leaving home, I’ll comb the papers and jot down a half dozen topics that might keep a conversation going at least through the entrées,” Sedaris says. “The waiter takes our orders, and as he walks away I turned to Hugh, saying, ‘so, anyway, I hear that monkeys can really become surly once they reach breeding age’.”
The Tivoli presents AN EVENING WITH DAVID SEDARIS this Friday Jan 15. Tickets are $58 through Ticketek. www.barclayagency.com/sedaris.html
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