David Sedaris



David Raymond Sedaris (born December 26, 1956) is an American humorist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. He was publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "SantaLand Diaries". He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994.

His next five essay collections, Naked (1997), Holidays on Ice (1997), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004), and When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008), became New York Times Best Sellers. In 2010, he released a collection of stories, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary. Sedaris released a collection of essays, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, in 2013, and in 2017 published a collection of his 1977–2002 diaries, Theft By Finding.

Much of Sedaris' humor is ostensibly autobiographical and self-deprecating, and often concerns his family life, his middle-class upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, his Greek heritage, homosexuality, jobs, education, drug use, and obsessive behaviors, and his life in France, London, and the English South Downs.

Early life
Sedaris was born in Johnson City, New York, the son of Sharon Elizabeth (née Leonard) and Louis Harry "Lou" Sedaris, an IBM engineer. He grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. His father is of Greek descent, while his mother is Anglo-American. His mother was Protestant and his father is Greek Orthodox. He was raised in his father's Greek Orthodox faith.

Sedaris was raised in a suburb of Raleigh and is the second child of six. His siblings, from oldest to youngest, are Lisa, Gretchen, Amy, Tiffany, and Paul (The Rooster). Tiffany Sedaris committed suicide in May 2013. In his teens and twenties, he dabbled in visual and performance art. He describes his lack of success in several of his essays.

After graduating from Jesse O. Sanderson High School in Raleigh, Sedaris briefly attended Western Carolina University before transferring to and dropping out of Kent State University in 1977. He moved to Chicago in 1983 and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987. (He did not attend Princeton University, although he spoke fondly of doing so in "What I Learned", a comic baccalaureate address delivered at Princeton in June 2006. )

Career
While working odd jobs across Raleigh, Chicago, and New York City, Sedaris was discovered in a Chicago club by radio host Ira Glass; Sedaris was reading a diary he had kept since 1977. Glass asked him to appear on his weekly local program, The Wild Room. Sedaris said, "I owe everything to Ira ... My life just changed completely, like someone waved a magic wand." Sedaris' success on The Wild Room led to his National Public Radio debut on December 23, 1992, when he read a radio essay on Morning Edition titled "SantaLand Diaries", which described his purported experiences as an elf at Macy's department store during Christmas in New York.

"SantaLand Diaries" was a success with listeners, and made Sedaris what The New York Times called "a minor phenomenon". He began recording a monthly segment for NPR based on his diary entries, edited and produced by Glass, and signed a two-book deal with Little, Brown and Company. In 1993, Sedaris told The New York Times he was publishing his first book, a collection of stories and essays, and had 70 pages written of his second book, a novel "about a man who keeps a diary and whom Mr. Sedaris described as 'not me, but a lot like me'".

Collections and mainstream success
In 1994, Sedaris published Barrel Fever, a collection of stories and essays. He became a frequent contributor when Ira Glass began a weekly hour-long PRI/Chicago Public Radio show, This American Life, in 1995. Sedaris began writing essays for Esquire and The New Yorker. In 1997, he published another collection of essays, Naked, which won the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Non-Fiction from Publishing Triangle in 1998.

He wrote his next book, Me Talk Pretty One Day, mostly in France over seven months and published it in 2000 to "practically unanimous rave reviews". For that book, Sedaris won the 2001 Thurber Prize for American Humor.

In April 2001, Variety reported Sedaris had sold the Me Talk Pretty One Day film rights to director Wayne Wang, who was adapting four stories from the book for Columbia Pictures. Wang had completed the script and begun casting when Sedaris asked to "get out of it", after he and his sister worried how their family might be portrayed. He wrote about the conversation and its aftermath in the essay "Repeat After Me". Sedaris recounted that Wang was "a real prince ... I didn't want him to be mad at me, but he was so grown up about it. I never saw how it could be turned into a movie anyway."

In 2004, Sedaris published Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, which reached number 1 on The New York Times Nonfiction Best Seller List on June 20, 2004. The audiobook of Dress Your Family, read by Sedaris, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album; the same year, Sedaris was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for his recording Live at Carnegie Hall. In March 2006, Ira Glass said that Sedaris' next book would be a collection of animal fables; that year, Sedaris included several animal fables in his US book tour, and three of his fables were broadcast on This American Life.

In September 2007, a new Sedaris collection was announced for publication on June 3, 2008. The collection's working title was All the Beauty You Will Ever Need, but Sedaris retitled it Indefinite Leave to Remain and finally settled on the title When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Although at least one news source assumed the book would be fables, Sedaris said in October 2007 that the collection might include a "surprisingly brief story about [his] decision to quit smoking ... along with stories about a Polish crybaby, throwing shit in a paraplegic's yard, chimpanzees at a typing school, and people visiting [him] in France."

In December 2008, Sedaris received an honorary doctorate from Binghamton University.

In April 2010, BBC Radio 4 aired Meet David Sedaris, a four-part series of essays which Sedaris read before a live audience. A second series of 6 programmes began airing on BBC Radio 4 Extra on June 13, 2011, with third series beginning on September 30, 2012. As of 2016 five series have aired.

Sedaris released Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, a collection of fables "detailing animals in strange adult situations", on September 28, 2010.

In July 2011, Sedaris' essay, "Chicken Toenails, Anyone?", published in The Guardian, garnered some criticism over concerns that it was insensitive towards China and Chinese culture.

A frequent guest of late-night US talk show host Craig Ferguson, in April 2012, Sedaris joined Ferguson and the cast of CBS's The Late, Late Show in Scotland for a theme week in and around Ferguson's hometown between Glasgow and Edinburgh. The five weeknight episodes aired in May 2012, during the high-profile rating sweeps.

On April 23, 2013, Sedaris' ninth book, Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls, was released.

In 2014, he participated in Do I Sound Gay?, a documentary film by David Thorpe about stereotypes of gay men's speech patterns.

He appeared along with his sister Amy as special guest judges on season 8 episode 8 of RuPaul's Drag Race.

Veracity of nonfiction work
In 2007, in an article in The New Republic, Alexander S. Heard stated that much of Sedaris' work is insufficiently factual to justify being marketed as nonfiction. Several published responses to Heard's article argued that Sedaris' readers are aware that his descriptions and stories are intentionally exaggerated and manipulated to maximize comic effect, while others used the controversy as a springboard for discussing the liberties publishers are willing to take when calling books 'nonfiction'.

Subsequently, in the wake of a controversy involving Mike Daisey's dramatizing and embellishing his personal experiences at Chinese factories, during an excerpt from his theatrical monologue for This American Life, new attention has been paid to the veracity of Sedaris' nonfiction stories. NPR will label stories from Sedaris, such as "SantaLand Diaries", as fiction, while This American Life will fact check stories to the extent that memories and long-ago conversations can be checked. The New Yorker already subjects nonfiction stories written for that magazine to its comprehensive fact-checking policy.

The Talent Family
Sedaris is also a playwright, having written with his sister, actress Amy Sedaris, several plays under the name "The Talent Family". These include Stump the Host (1993), Stitches (1994), and The Little Frieda Mysteries (1997). All were produced and presented by Meryl Vladimer when she was the artistic director of "the CLUB" at La MaMa, E.T.C., and The Book of Liz (2002) was produced by Ania A. Shapiro.

Sedaris also co-authored Incident at Cobbler's Knob, presented and produced by David Rockwell at the Lincoln Center Festival. Sets for those performances were designed by Sedaris' longtime boyfriend, Hugh Hamrick, who also directed two of them, The Book of Liz and Incident at Cobbler's Knob.

Sedaris and his sister Amy shared "The Talent Family" credit on the latter's short-lived sketch comedy show Exit 57, while David was a contributing writer.

The New Yorker
Sedaris has contributed over 40 essays to The New Yorker magazine and blog.

Personal life
Sedaris currently lives in the Horsham District of West Sussex, England, with his boyfriend Hugh Hamrick, whom Sedaris mentions in a number of his stories. Sedaris describes them as the "sort of couple who wouldn't get married". He enjoys collecting litter in the local area, where he is known as "Pig Pen", and has a garbage truck named after him.

Story and essay collections

 * Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000)
 * Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004)
 * Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (editor, 2005)
 * When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008)
 * Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary (2010)
 * Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls (April 2013)
 * Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) (May 2017)
 * When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008)
 * Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary (2010)
 * Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls (April 2013)
 * Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) (May 2017)

Articles

 * "Old Faithful"
 * "What I Learned" (delivered at Princeton in June 2006), a comic baccalaureate address
 * "Dentists Without Borders", a humorous essay on socialized medicine in France
 * "I Brake for Traditional Marriage" (2010), a heterosexual perspective of California's repeal of Proposition 8
 * "The Poo Corner" (2005), a piece addressing public defecation in department stores, hotels, and college dorm washing machines

Audio recordings

 * Barrel Fever and Other Stories (1994)
 * Naked (1997)
 * Holidays on Ice (1998)
 * Me Talk Pretty One Day (2001)
 * The David Sedaris Box Set (2002)
 * Live At Carnegie Hall (2003)
 * Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004)
 * When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008)
 * Live For Your Listening Pleasure (2009)
 * Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary (2010)
 * Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (2013)
 * Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977–2002)  (2017)