These diaries, though, have made me appreciate Sedaris again. His books, then, are like collections of song lyrics: they go down easy, remind you of something you like – but you wish you could hear the music. He writes like a performer: one senses, reading his essays, that they were destined first and foremost for a live audience or audiobook, where his eccentric personal presentation would carry the work. His writing has remained competent and straightforward, but memorable prose was never part of Sedaris’s appeal. Sardonic condescension may have suited the squirrelly scrounger from North Carolina, but it was a poor fit for the European sophisticate he’d become, however self-mockingly he inhabited the role. He found love, moved to France, got famous. Over the years, though, I grew weary of his shtick.
Sedaris was on our team! Eye-rolling, chain-smoking, above it all, he became a mascot to the disaffected American educated class, and for the next decade I’d turn up the car radio whenever his voice came on, and dog-ear his New Yorker essays – about choosing an owl at a taxidermist’s, about being sexually propositioned while hitchhiking – to return to later as a reward for getting through the day. To hear a sardonic gay man in his thirties complain of his shitty gig as a shopping-mall elf – on a news outlet just beginning the grim process of ceding its integrity to political both-sidesism – was revelatory. The 1990s were a time of disillusionment for American Gen-X strivers the era of out-earning one’s parents had come to a close just as our student loans came due, and the rescue promised by the incoming Clinton administration was never to materialise. I first encountered Sedaris the way most Americans my age did: as a voice on National Public Radio, reciting his essay ‘Santaland Diaries’.
If you are generally well disposed to him, but find that the particular imperfections of latter-day Sedaris grate on you, you could give this new book and its predecessor a try: they’re different, if perhaps not different enough. It has earned him extraordinary acclaim and, as he writes in this book with bewilderment and delight, wealth. I don’t think it’s a slight to say that this is the formula Sedaris has leveraged to build a remarkable, sui generis career as a humorist, essayist and monologist. Instead, ‘the key is to fill the space between your skill level and perfection with charm.’ ‘I … need to be perfect.’ ‘It’s such a burden to place on yourself,’ Sedaris reflects, suggesting that perfection, being unattainable, is an unreasonable and immeasurable goal. ‘I wanted to be perfect,’ Hugh said after the recital.
‘I’ve never seen him so vulnerable,’ Sedaris wrote that night in his diary, excerpted here in a second curated volume of entries, which he has said are a small fraction of the nearly ten million words he has ‘handwritten or typed’ as part of this project since 1977.
Hugh had practised with obsessive intensity for many hours a day, but ultimately performed poorly, disappointing himself in front of a room full of his fellow students and their parents. I n late 2016, David Sedaris attended a piano recital delivered by his longtime partner, Hugh.