HUMOURA David Sedaris title is a bestseller before it's written. Ruadhán Mac Cormaic meets the 'self-proclaimed half-Greek homosexual with an obsessive compulsive disorder' whose hilarious essays defy categorisation. hotographs: Bryan O'Brien
In Raleigh, North Carolina, they're not in the business of forging heroes. When his father was transferred there and the family moved from western New York state "at the tail end of the Lassie years", David Sedaris, self-proclaimed half-Greek homosexual with an obsessive compulsive disorder, a dysfunctional family and a pronounced lisp, was consigned to a childhood of unremitting torment and a career unravelling it all for the crowd.
Raleigh is the lens and the mirror that informs it all. The summers whiled away at the North Hills Mall, the afternoons spent throwing stones at stop signs, and the adolescent predilection for licking light switches and touching people on the head, twice. That town where pen has two syllables and "rumours circulated that the locals ran stills out of their tool sheds and referred to their house cats as good eatin'", and where he feels he never belonged.
In the US, Raleigh's unlikely son is revered. A Sedaris title is a bestseller before it's written. As well as four published collections of his quirky autobiographical stories, he is a regular in the pages of Esquire and The New Yorker. Carnegie Hall sells out when he comes to read aloud.
He sits up, leans forward. Fingers foiled by the smoking ban. "In New York, they phased it out slowly," he says, "hoping that smokers wouldn't notice. In France, though, you can smoke in hospital; and you barely see the No Smoking sign through the cloud." For every question, another returns. "Do you use that expression here?" "What's the custom for when two people are on the stairs and it's only wide enough for one?" "How did I get started?"
David Sedaris took the coast road to his mid-30s. He studied art in college but reckons he never had the talent for it. Then he floated for 15 years, hitching, labouring, picking apples in Oregon, and then settled in New York where he worked as a house-cleaner and full-time removal man.
"It was great, because there was always something new. I'd go into a new house every day and meet people. I don't have any skills really. I don't know how to drive a car. I can only type with one finger. I've never had a real job."
With the days rolling into one, at night Sedaris would write short stories; vignettes about his childhood, about the neighbours back in Raleigh, about the Communist removal man he worked for, and the oddballs they moved. In December 1992 he gave a reading at a small club in Chicago, where, it turned out, the National Public Radio producer Ira Glass was among the crowd. When he got home, Glass had called and left a number.
"I was always a radio listener, but you had to have a sonorous voice to be on the radio. I have a girlie, irritating voice, so it never occurred to me that I could be on the radio. That would be like me dreaming of being a model. You know, there's really no point in having that dream. And I felt that way about radio."
"Ira asked me if I had anything Christmassy that might work. I'd worked as Santa's helper in a department store for two years, and I'd written something on it. [Sedaris to child: "If you're bad, Santa will come to your house and steal things"]. So he put that on national radio. Everyone seemed to be listening that day. It changed everything for me. Afterwards the phone started ringing like crazy. This woman called and said 'I'm not supposed to be talking to you, I'm a telephone operator. I heard your story on the radio and loved it'."
"And it was like someone waving a wand and saying 'We're going to give you your every wish.' Three publishers called and said 'Do you have a book?' And I had a lot of material stored up - Xeroxed and stapled, but never conventionally published - so we made a book out of them."
His early collections, Barrel Fever and Holidays on Ice, were favourably received, but it was his 1997 volume, Naked, that brought national acclaim, featuring on the New York Times best-seller list for nine weeks. Sedaris became an icon.
The latest book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, is classic Sedaris, shifting from North Carolina to New York to Paris, where he spent a few years with his boyfriend Hugh Hamrick. In one chapter, his mother has a nervous breakdown ("Get the hell out of my house," she bawls at the kids, re-filling her goblet) and in another he recalls his experience on a volunteer job helping to guide blind people through a Paris Metro station. None show up, and he spends his days in a storage closet being ignored by an employer with a rubber hand.
Critics fond of labels struggle with David Sedaris. The style is an elusive blend of observation, satire and bittersweet sentimentality, delivered with a punchy, conversational rhythm. He's funny, but what sort of funny? Salinger? Twain? Woody Allen? The review cuttings on the latest book form a running debate on the lineage of his method.
"I know that people mean well when they're making comparisons. Well, when they compare you to Hitler, they probably don't mean well. But to be compared to Mark Twain? I'm no Mark Twain. I don't know where I fit in. They always want to put something on the book so that booksellers will know where to put it on the shelves. I never want it in the humour section. I'd rather decide that something's funny; I don't want anyone deciding for me. Essay doesn't work, that's sort of dry. Maybe Self-Absorbed Essay. That's it. That's where it should go."
His extended family provide him with his finest characters, and it's tempting to overlook the melancholic thread that runs alongside the punchlines. His mother, the most complex of his characters, serves as an emotional intermediary between father and son. The feeling that the boy could never be the all-American, ball-playing "son o' mine" that his father craves is one that recurs. It wasn't a peculiar childhood, says Sedaris.
"I think I've gotten better at making something out of my life. Really, nothing big ever happened to me. I wait for things to happen. I'm the venus fly-trap of writers."
"I'll give you an example. I was in Bristol, walking down the street, and I'm thinking, there aren't many trees here. Then all of a sudden a Frenchman comes up and says to me 'there aren't many trees around here.' 'I was just thinking that,' I say. 'That's because this is a fascist country,' he starts, 'and you know what they did to me? You wait till six or eight people jump you from behind and you'll end up in hospital. That's what happened to me. Then I went to a Chinese doctor.' And suddenly he's talking about a court case, September 11th, and he had a premonition, and he pulls this drawing out of his pocket, a drawing of the Manhattan skyline with him as a little stick figure. And that's connected to pop music, you know? Completely insane. And I'm standing in the corner, thinking, I'm never leaving this corner. Things just sort of happen to me."
Sedaris is a regular on the US lecture circuit, and his voice can still occasionally be heard on national radio. Offers of acting roles arrive all the time (he was asked to audition for Jack Nicholson's gay neighbour in As Good As It Gets), but he is no actor, he says. "Even if I could say the lines, I wouldn't know what to do with my hands." He leans forward, earnest-looking, lays his hands awkwardly on the table. "Come quick, Pa's been hurt really bad. See?"
In America, he says, people presume you'll want to write for screen. Bigger audience, bigger money. "I don't know how I'd go about translating everything to a film. The only subject I ever thought about was zombies. I love zombies.
"Have you seen Dawn of the Dead? Well, these people are in a mall and it's surrounded by zombies. They're safe in the mall. But then they decide to make a run for it. And they make a run for it in shorts and T-shirts. Now, if you knew that zombies bite, and you were in a mall, wouldn't you wear a leather jacket? And anyway, zombies don't have brains, you know. So it shouldn't really be that hard to outwit them. But nobody ever does."
With enhanced status in the States has come a clamour for a stake in his success. A lot of people make a claim. "I never feel enough of what they want me to be. I don't feel gay enough, or I don't feel Greek enough. I was claimed by the Tourette's Syndrome Association and by the obsessive compulsives. And worst of all, living in Paris, I was claimed by the Americans, who seemed to just perch there and wait for things to happen. The Greeks, they're really cheap, you know. They always want you to do stuff for free. And I say, I'm only half-Greek. I don't feel Greek enough to give you total Greekosity. Maybe they could pay me half of nothing."
SEDARIS ON ...
... HIS PATERNAL GRANDMOTHER: "It was difficult to imagine her raising a child of her own, and chilling to realise that she had."
SLEEP: "We were the family that never shut down, the family whose TV was so hot we needed an oven mitt in order to change the channel. My mother was apt to lie down anywhere, waking with carpet burns on her face or the pattern of the sofa embossed into the soft flesh of her upper arms."
TRAVELLING IN AMERICA: "What really interests me are the local gun laws. Can I carry a concealed weapon and, if so, under what circumstances? What's the waiting period for a Tommy gun? Could I buy a Glock 17 if I were recently divorced or fired from my job? I've learned, for example, that the blind can legally hunt in both Texas and Michigan. Which raises the question: How do they find whatever it is they just shot?"
STRANGERS' HEADS: "Sometimes when I'm in a tight situation, I'll feel a need to touch somebody's head. It happens a lot on airplanes. I'll look at the person seated in front of me, and within a moment the idea will have grown from a possibility to a compulsion. There is no option - I simply have to do it."
LEARNING FRENCH: "My only comfort was the knowledge that I was not alone. Huddled in the hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overheard in refugee camps. 'Sometime me cry alone at night.' 'That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. Much work and someday you talk pretty. People start love you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay?'"
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, by David Sedaris, is published in paperback by Abacus (€16.25)