DAVID SEDARIS is the author of thirteen books, most recently Happy-GoLucky (2022) and The Best of Me (2020), both published by Little, Brown. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, CBS Sunday Morning, and BBC Radio 4. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the recipient of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, the Jonathan Swift International Prize for Satire and Humor, and the Terry Southern Prize for Humor.
I WAS in Central Park one afternoon, tying my shoe, when two sparrows landed on the back of a nearby bench. A child seated not far away noticed them as I and said to the woman I assumed was her nanny, "Look, they're friends!"
It's what a kid would say. Honestly, though, how close could the two birds be when their survival meant competing for the same meager crumbs? It's like that with writers, too, and it's the reason I hang out with so few of them. When my old friend Ted tells a funny or interesting story and I laugh at it, he's pleased. When a writer tells an interesting story, they'll most often follow it with, "I'm already using that."
It's why I spend time with laypeople, mainly graphic designers for some reason. When I do meet other authors, I tend to steer them toward shoptalk. The publishing business has changed drastically since my first collection, Barrel Fever, was released in 1994. It used to be you'd fly to, say, Kansas City on a book tour and be interviewed on a local NPR culture show. Those are gone for the most part, as is the arts coverage in so many newspapers. Now it's mainly podcasts. "This one's about cooking," I'll be told.
"Yes," I'll say to my publicist. "But mine is not a cookbook."
"Okay, but you eat, right?"
This story is from the September - October 2022 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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This story is from the September - October 2022 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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