VOICES: THE PEOPLE and IDEAS SHAPING the CULTURE

If there’s an ART to EXPOSING the ABSURDITIES in everyday life, then DAVID SEDARIS is one of its GREATEST living practitioners. Here, the author OPENS UP about finding HUMOR in all the CHAOS and why UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF often REQUIRES an AUDIENCE.

- AS TOLD TO KAITLYN GREENIDGE / ARTWORK BY DAVID SHRIGLEY AS TOLD TO

THE CADENCE OF David Sedaris’s voice is sometimes more familiar to me than my own.

Like many of his admirers, I first heard him on the radio. A friend in high school used to call me up on Sundays and trick me into listening to his essays. “Is this going to be NPR?” I would ask her warily. “No,” she would lie. “Just listen.” A few years later, that same friend and I moved across the country to Alaska, with less than a thousand dollars between us and knowing nobody. It was the hubris only 19-year-olds could have, and David Sedaris was the reason we survived. A man on the ferry to Juneau overheard us talking about one of Sedaris’s essays, struck up a conversation, and offered us jobs at the local public-television station when we arrived. When I tell Sedaris this story at the start of our conversation, he says only, “Oh. That’s funny.” It’s an understandable response; by his own account, Sedaris is the type of writer who people feel compelled to tell things to. He has written 14 books in which the more absurd aspects of daily life are explored with a deadpan, cutting humor. His latest essay collection, The Land and Its People, explores being a stranger in a strange land (Sedaris lives in West Sussex, England) and his relationship with his husband, Hugh, and his many siblings. Here, Sedaris talks about aging, the art of humor writing, and the pleasures of being part of a big family.