the sedarista revolution

By Antonella Gambotto-Burke

David Sedaris is a worrier. His forehead is bifurcated by angst. Hotwired by anxiety, gay, short, reluctantly half-Greek, a former Macy's Christmas elf, retired amphetamine addict and deeply devoted smoker, he is the funniest writer alive. Barrel Fever, The Santaland Diaries, Naked, Holidays on Ice, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim : all international bestsellers, and most read onstage since his reedy 1992 debut on US National Public Radio. Think Capote with the dazzle of Tallulah Bankhead at F. Scott Fitzgerald's easy clip. Then add a shimmer of Ted Bundy (rusting cranial saws, stuffed kittens, nests of human hair). Each essay is precise, perverse, Victorian in its emotional restraint. Autobiography as a series of sharp little bites: in prose so clean it sings, his life unfolds.  “Unlike me,” he writes of one of his five siblings, “she would never entertain deep thoughts or travel to distant lands in the company of a long-nosed proboscis monkey.”

The momentum is subtle and the impact, utterly sublime. His humor hits like a freight train. Three heavy Greek meals a day to the constipated become “an exercise akin to packing a musket.” Asked to list all purchases on a customs form, Sedaris is conscientious: a two-headed-calf skull, an ashtray in the shape of a protracted molar, a human gallstone (labeled and displayed on an elegant stand), a set of eight Limoges dessert plates custom made for a pharmacy and hand-painted with the names of lethal drugs, a suede fetus complete with umbilical cord, a French eye chart that unintentionally includes the word FAT, and illustrated guides to skin rashes and war wounds.

His favorite role is that of the emotionally isolated and masochistic naïf. In him, psychic glimmers of Mark Twain, Pollyanna, and von Sacher-Masoch's mesmerizing decadent, Severin von Kusiemski. Instead of reacting to insult with injury, Sedaris remains cool and curious, always ready for more. The boiler of his humor is stoked with intensely repressed emotion. He exploits – rather than experiences – life. There is no surrender.

As a boy, he compulsively licked light switches. Kissed alternate stairs. Jabbed butter knives at sockets. These dislocations are litters for laughter, but quietly betray anguish. In Naked , his late mother – one of the funniest and most brilliantly rendered literary monsters in memory – revels in her reckless indifference. “God only knows where he gets it from,” she shrugs, drunk. “He's probably down in his room right this minute, counting his eyelashes or gnawing at the pulls on his dresser.”

Such obsessive-compulsive rituals are replaced by the inexplicable desire to “summon high pitched noises” from the back of his throat. These sounds are delivered not in his voice, but in that of a “thimble-sized, temperamental diva clinging to the base of my uvula”. (He needed help.) Eventually, Sedaris starts smoking - “more socially acceptable than crying out in tiny voices” - and his super-anxious compensatory behaviors stall. (He now only lightly taps the backs of fellow travelers' heads on flights when not allowed to smoke.) There is grief, you feel, even the disingenuous Sedaris will never share.

Family recollections are the lodestone of his humor, and they prickle with an emotionally incestuous subtext. He forces his siblings to sign contracts stipulating they will never marry. At the age of twelve, his sister Amy – now a gifted performer in her own right - pretends to be a family friend and (weirdly) propositions their father on the phone. After reading underground incest porn, Sedaris stiffens as his mother hems his pants: “‘I just want to be friends,' I stammered. ‘Nothing more, nothing less.' She took the pins out of her mouth and studied me for a moment before sighing, ‘Damn, and here you've been leading me on all this time.'”

Homosexuality is both a refuge from his mother and a slap for his insensitive Greek father. Sedaris records his father's ridicule of gay men: “‘We go for a swim and when we get back to the hotel Philip knocks on the door, asking if he can borrow, get this, asking if he can borrow your mother's hair dryer .' That was it. End of story. He didn't stick it up his ass or anything … but my father still found it incredible.” The pain is muted, but still audible. In Me Talk Pretty , he writes of boyhood lisps as Morse Code for homosexuality and in Dress Your Family , of urges choked by a desperate nonchalance. When his gym teacher addresses the class as “a pack of tap-dancing queers”, Sedaris curdles but his peers “reacted as if they'd been called Buddhists or vampires; sure, it was an insult, but no-one would ever mistake them for the real thing.”

The Sedaris universe is riddled with the casualties of such secular freaks. “Say,” a coworker suddenly asks, “you ever put a saddle on a fat girl's back and ride her until she drops?” He rooms not with a jock, but Peg (“a fun girl with a degenerative nerve disease”). Whilst apple-picking, he is invited to view a workmate's trailer, which “served as a showplace for his vast collection of artificial penises … After taking on one of those monsters, the next step would involve sitting on a greased fire hydrant.” Mistaken for an employee of an erotic housecleaning service, he primly continues to vacuum a New York apartment as its owner masturbates. (“He said Fire Island as if it were a prearranged code, the watchwords signaling me to hand over the microfilm.”) In Paris, he is branded a thief by cornpone bigots: “I'd been up until 4am the night before, reading a book about recluse spiders, but to him the circles beneath my eyes likely reflected a long evening spent snatching flies out of the air, or whatever it is that pickpockets do for practice.”

Sedaris spins from the thread of the temporal tapestries of exhilarating eccentricity. In Dress Your Family , he works in a mental asylum (“its surrounding tree limbs resembled the palsied fingers of mad scientists tapping against the windows in search of fresh brains”). Confronted by an undressed patient, he is stunned: “I had never before seen a naked woman and hesitated just long enough for her to lurch forward and sink her remaining three teeth into my forearm.” In Me Talk Pretty, his efforts to learn French result in farce so rich that it is difficult to read. (I laughed so hard and for so long that I began to squeak.) “I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly,” he explains. “‘Is thems the thoughts of cows?' I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains … ‘I want me some lamb chop with handles on ‘em.'” Or, reporting a foreign peer's attempt to explain Easter to an Islamic girl in French: “He call his self Jesus and then he die one day on two … morsels of … lumber.”

Peculiarly old-fashioned, he spikes the current vogue for cuisine-as-art (“I'd order the skirt steak with a medley of suffocated peaches, but I'm put off by the aspirin sauce”). He unforgettably documents his experiences in a nudist camp, a realm featuring events such as Hobo Slumgullion and Nudeoween. “She was a plump woman,” he writes, musing on the smoothly shaven grandmother perspiring beside him in the sauna, “tight as a tick.” An old man's enormous testicles hang “like a wasp's nest between his shriveled legs”. Masturbating, the globally sunburned Sedaris suddenly panics, “worried that my incessant tugging might have the same effect as rubbing together two dry sticks.”

Naked, Me Talk Pretty and Dress Your Family read like spare, beautifully written novels – graceful and gracious, forgiving in their wisdom. Around the laughter, feeling flows unforced. “One naked guy on my lap and three others ready to do my bidding. It was the stuff of dreams until I remembered they were not doing these things of their own accord. This was not their pleasure, but their punishment, and once it was over they would make a point to avoid me … For now I would savor this poor imitation of tenderness, mapping Scott's shoulders, the small of his back, as he shuddered beneath my winning hand.”

Now the owner of apartments in Paris, New York, London, and a house in Normandy , the 47-year-old Sedaris – that fragile, lonely, troubled boy who made a fetish of status – shares his life with painter Hugh Hamrick, has sold over two and a half million books, regularly appears on Letterman, and packed Carnegie Hall. He tours up to twenty-two cities per month. ( Published in 1997, Holidays on Ice has been resurrected each December on the New York Times bestseller list for the past three years.)  His small voice speaks to all the world.

A one-finger typist who, until recently, eschewed computers, Sedaris is a surprisingly sophisticated seducer. “In order to get the things I want,” he explains, “it helps me to pretend I'm a character in a daytime drama, a schemer. Soap opera characters make emphatic pronouncements. They ball up their fists and state their goals out loud. ‘I will destroy Buchanan Enterprises,' they say … I turned to look in the direction of Hugh's loft. ‘You will be mine,' I commanded.” No commands needed here, David – we're all yours.

*Originally published in Men's Style