The man routinely described as the best living humorist in America, David Sedaris, was recently enjoying a plate of marinated salmon over greens while signing books in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, when a fan decided he wanted more than the writer's autograph. So he reached over and grabbed a handful of food off Sedaris's plate.
Understandably, Sedaris was not pleased. In fact, he was downright annoyed, which is not a common reaction from a writer who tends to regard the world in general with wide-eyed affection and his readers in particular with real fondness ("I always think it's a good policy to like the people who like you," he says with an almost straight face). It was the fact that the man was trying to cheat.
"He just did it because he wanted to be written about," Sedaris recalls. "It was a gimmick, you know? So I ignored him because I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction." For a few moments, Sedaris's face clouds at the memory.
"But then a woman came up to me later after I read the story about the rabbit and the unicorn" in Sedaris's new collection Squirrel Meets Chipmunk "and she said: ‘You know, it's just wild that you read that story because I went to see my gynaecologist yesterday and he said my uterus is shaped like a unicorn'."
Sedaris leans back in his chair, clouds cleared and replaced with a smile of delight. "I mean, someone handed me a gold coin there."
This tale, like all Sedaris's short stories and autobiographical essays, makes wider points beyond its classically Sedaris-esque world-righted-again conclusion. Just as The Sick Rat and the Healthy Rat in Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk is partly about animal testing but really an exploration of the cruel smugness of the homoeopathic set ("I'm sorry to say it but if you have a terminal illness, it is nobody's fault but your own"), so this story about Sedaris's stolen dinner reveals why he is so popular — his delighted fascination in people's eccentricities (the real, not the faked ones).
His past five collections of essays, When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Holidays on Ice (1997) and Naked (1997), have all been bestsellers and have made celebrities out of not just Sedaris but also the most frequent subjects of his essays: his siblings and his parents.
The most unlikely subjects become hilarious in Sedaris's hands, yet his delight in eccentricities is often undercut by a sharpness and a darkness that at times can be startling in a writer who enjoys such mainstream success. In The Smoking Section, his essay about his abandonment of smoking, he writes about how he was introduced to his favourite brand of cigarettes: "Just after she started chemotherapy, my mum sent me three cartons of Kool Milds. ‘They were on sale,' she croaked. Dying or not, she should have known that I smoked Filter Kings, but then I looked at them and thought, Well, they ARE free."
That his stories are telling most of all in their detail is also shown in the saga of his pilfered dinner — the simple fact that he was eating it at a book event: "I just found that if I do an evening book signing, I don't get back to my room until 2am, and then room service takes another 45 minutes," he explains blithely over cupcakes in a New York coffee shop. "So now I just bring my dinner with me." It is a rare author whose readers regularly queue until after midnight to get his autograph.
In America at least, Sedaris is in the tiny golden circle of writers — along with Stephen King and Woody Allen — who commands rock-concert-sized audiences in venues such as Carnegie Hall and whose fans shout their love for him when he walks down the street in New York. "And," adds fellow humorist and American-abroad writer Bill Bryson, "he really ought to be as famous here in Britain as he is there. He is the funniest and most original American writer since S.J. Perelman."
In fact, it was at least partly to escape fame that Sedaris fled America for Europe several years ago. "I mean, it's nice to be told that people love you but you can't live like that and I can't write about it. So I had to go." To where people are rude to him? "Yeah," he agrees with a smile. His first refuge of rudeness was of course France but he now lives in London in a house in West Sussex.
Sedaris knew he wanted to be a writer from the age of 25, when he read a collection of Bobbie Ann Mason stories; he attempted to fulfil his ambition by "writing a lot of bad Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver".
It would take almost another decade before he found success. In the meantime, he kept himself busy dropping out of two colleges, going to art school ("I know I didn't really want to be an artist, simply because I wasn't jealous of the other students' success") and finding "jobs that needed no skills", such as cleaning people's houses and working as an elf in a department store at Christmas.
He also wrote a diary and it was while he was working in his odd jobs that Ira Glass, a host on National Public Radio (NPR), happened to hear Sedaris reading from his diary in a club in 1992. Glass immediately hired him to read on the radio and suggested that he broadcast a longer piece about his life: Sedaris wrote about his time as an elf (published as SantaLand Diaries). "Suddenly," he says, "I went from having 50 listeners to 50 million listeners." He still contributes to NPR.
If there is one issue on which Sedaris has retracted, it is technology. Although he still doesn't have a mobile phone, he recently did what he promised he would never do: switch from his beloved typewriter to a computer. However, he conflates the words "e-mail" and "internet" and can't quite figure out what the white rectangular square in his hand is — "an iPod, no, it's an iPad, no it's an iPod".
At one point, he needs to get an address from his iSomething but finds he can't operate it ("Well, this is no good!") and so reaches for his trusty, battered notebook instead. After all, when the authentic option is there in his pocket, there is no need for anything else.
