The Wry's the Limit

Interviewing American humorist David Sedaris feels a little odd. It’s not that I don’t want to ask him questions, I do, but they’re the wrong kind of questions. I want to know how his boyfriend Hugh is doing, if his brother Paul is as crude as ever and if his youngest sister Tiffany has finally got herself, and her disgusting feet, sorted?

It might seem nosey of me to be snooping around in his personal life, but since the majority of Sedaris’ work is autobiographical, I’m sure he’d be happy enough to tell me, if I could actually get a question in, that is. Like his essays, his conversation keeps veering off in charming but unexpected directions.
Since sitting down Sedaris has been telling me about seeing New Kids on the Block at swish sushi restaurant, Nobu – “they gotta do something about the word ‘Kids’”; lamenting the state of his barnet – “Look at it! It’s like a collie’s hair”; and updating me on how he’s coping without cigarettes – “It hasn’t been too bad, but yesterday if you had said to me that there’s a cigarette inside a child’s shoulder, I would have ripped that baby’s arm off to get it.”
Sedaris’ difficulty quitting – although his mother died of lung cancer – is detailed in ‘The Smoking Section’. This essay, ‘The Monster Mash’ and ‘Momento Mori’ all have Sedaris preoccupied with death and ageing. Bleak subject matter aside, When You Are Engulfed in Flames is Sedaris’ funniest book yet. This time however, there’s been a slight shift in style. The humour is gentler, but the language is sharper and tighter.
While Sedaris aims to find humour both in words and images, he claims to be unsure of exactly where the laughs come from.
“I laughed out loud at the typewriter the other day, but I don’t know how to guarantee that. I know from having read things out loud that there’s a description of going shopping with my sister Amy (in ‘Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie?’ Sedaris’ sister persuades him to buy women’s clothes). I’m standing at the urinal when I remember that these trouser zip up the back. I don’t know how it is on paper, but when you read it out loud, the audience gets a mental image of it and it gets the biggest laugh. It’s the greatest feeling, isn’t it? To laugh out loud when you read a book. But I can’t speak in terms of people reading my books. Except at the typewriter sometimes, I just surprise myself.”
Writing autobiographical humour without offending friends and family can be tricky, a subject Sedaris has tackled in ‘Repeat After Me’ (from Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim). But while others’ foibles may be played for laughs, the biggest joke is generally on Sedaris himself. Does the self-deprecation allow him to get away with it?
“For some people that’s not good enough!” he jokes. “But seriously, whenever I write about my family I check with them first, to see if there’s anything they want me to change and I feel that the affection is there on the page.”
Others have not been so forgiving, including an ex-boyfriend, who is briefly touched upon in ‘Old Faithful’.
“I was writing about fidelity so it was important to talk about infidelity, and he wrote me a really angry letter saying, ‘You’re never allowed to write about me again.’ But I felt it was my life too, and I really bent over backwards to say in the nicest possible way what went on. I’ll never name him, but I’m not going to block out six years of my life.”
Luckily though, Hugh Hamrick, Sedaris’ long-term boyfriend (he doesn’t like the term ‘partner’) is happy to let him write whatever he likes. Unlike previous books where the family took precedence, Hugh is more visible in When You Are Engulfed In Flames. As a bestselling author and a gay man, does Sedaris feel somewhat responsible for his depiction of gay relationships?
“What’s been interesting to me is that, thirty years ago, if I put the word ‘boyfriend’ in a book, I’d be in the gay section. This guy interviewed me and he said ‘Why do you have to keep saying boyfriend. We get it, okay, can you just move on?’ But I’m not trying to make a big deal out of it; I would love for it not to be a big deal. When I write about my relationship, I’m writing about trying to make a life with somebody, and I don’t think it’s that different.”
Being marginalised in the bookshop is something Sedaris needn’t worry about. His books are bestsellers, his reading tours attract crowds in rock star proportions and he is the only writer to have a listing on the wildly popular website Stuff White People Like.
Luckily then, for his many fans, Sedaris is unlikely to run out of material any time soon. He is, he’ll confess, a ‘weirdo magnet’ and this time around, this idiosyncrasy has given us ‘Road Trips’, ‘That’s Amore’, ‘Town and Country’ and the comic-tragic ‘The Man in the Hut’, where he accidentally befriends a child molester.
“It’s because I’m spineless,” he says. “I’m not threatening in any way. I intimidate people on no level.” But, he notes, this has its uses.
“I let people walk all over me and then, while their footprints are still wet on my face, I write about it.”

When You are Engulfed in Flames is published by Little, Brown