Life Advice From David Sedaris

The out-of-control memorabilia pile

I was first introduced to David Sedaris through my mom. A copy of Naked sat on our bookshelves and I was in need of a book. I swiped it and snuck it up to my bedroom, feeling a bit rebellious at the somewhat provocative title. The truth is, anything on the bookshelf was fair game. Despite my mom’s extreme ban on anything sexually explicit, books with sexual content seemed not to phase her. Or she just didn’t remember what they contained after she finished them and placed them on the shelf. Most likely though, it’s because reading generally happened in private and she was less concerned with the content I was actually consuming and more concerned with what other people thought of the content I consumed.

(I was once grounded for leaving my birth control pills — which I took NOT because I was having sex, but to help control debilitating acne that covered my entire body and made me a pariah amongst my peers — visible on my dresser. Birth control pills I was explicitly told were to be hidden and never spoken of. Another time, I had to have a friend help me sneak home a copy of Beyoncé’s 2003 Dangerously in Love album because while shopping for groceries at Walmart, she took one look at Beyoncé’s bejeweled top and cleavage on the cover of the album and said absolutely not. And last for this post, but certainly not the final hilarious memory, I once left my copy of NOW 14 in the car CD player which my mom ended up listening to on her drive to work. When she got home, she confronted me saying, “I’m not sure I want you listening to this. There’s a song on here I really don’t like.” My head immediately raced to Right Thurr by Chingy and In Those Jeans by Ginuwine, but as it turns out the song she was most riled up about was Stacy’s Mom by Fountains of Wayne. “I’m sorry,” she said, “But that song is just entirely inappropriate and I don’t want you listening to it.” A story I gleefully shared with every single person in my high school the next day.) 

Reading Naked in the midst of my mom’s sexual fears is especially funny now because some 17 years later, the only scenes I can recall from the book are something about genital crabs (which at the time I thought were actual tiny little crabs that lived in your pubic hair), a room filled with dildos (a word I had to Google on our family computer), and a story about a nudist colony and Sedaris’ description of stubby little penises. Maybe her content fears were right, just misplaced.

I also recall the fact that the plot of the book confused me greatly because up until that point, I had only read novels and assumed all books were novels, so this collection of nonfiction essays made for a very confusing novel. (It wasn’t until college when I heard David Sedaris referred to as an essayist that I thought, Oh my god, I’m not stupid for not understanding the plot of Naked, I’m stupid for not knowing it was a collection of essays. Thank god my literary prowess is still intact!)

David Sedaris was a foundational part of my college years, some through his written publications, but mostly through his sporadic appearances on the radio show This American Life. By 19, I was working early mornings at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh as a curatorial assistant, which is a fancy title that really meant entering data on hundreds and hundreds of dead birds into an ancient computer. I’d work in four-hour stints (the longest I could fathom being at a job — oh sweet, innocent Anja) and pass the time listening to one episode of This American Life after another, beginning with the first episode which aired in 1995 and working my way forward in time. When I graduated in 2015, I had successfully made it through 20 years of radio.

David Sedaris’ stories regularly made me burst out laughing, to which one day my boss leaned over from his desk, which sat catty-corner to mine, and asked if I was actually getting any work done listening to that. And that maybe we should think about taking out the headphones in the future. He was joking, a little, but after that, I saved these funnier episodes to listen to at home. 

In a testament to how small and communal I believed the world was (and sometimes still do), I wrote David Sedaris a letter that year that said something like:

“Dear Mr. Sedaris, I really admire your writing and hope to be a writer like you someday. However, you might be the reason I get fired. I’m laughing so much listening to your stories at work, my boss wants me to stop listening to This American Life altogether. Which I just refuse to do. So thanks for that.” 

To my great surprise (and maybe horror?) HE WROTE ME BACK on a blue postcard from The British Museum and said:

Dear Anja,

Thank you for your kind card. I’m so glad I don’t have a boss. Even a nice one would get on my nerves. How dare your’s not know my name! Is he a sports guy? I think you should set his car on fire when he’s not looking.”

Sincerely,
David Sedaris

Here’s the proof!

My senior year of college, I heard David Sedaris read the Santaland Diaries — his recounting of two Christmas seasons spent working as an elf at Macy's in New York City — on a holiday special of This American Life. I wasn’t the only one gripped by the irreverent Christmas tale. According to the This American Life website, “When a shorter version of this story first aired on NPR's Morning Edition, it generated more tape requests than any story in the show's history to that point.”

I loved the Santaland Diaries, its humor, its brutal look at the farse of Christmas magic — two sentiments not often held in high regard around the holidays. Finals week had just wrapped and my five other roommates had left to see their families. Living only 45 minutes away from my mom, I decided a week alone in my giant, drafty, Pittsburgh house before making my way back for Christmas wouldn’t be so bad. 

After my last shift at the museum and my last final, I picked up a $5 cheese pizza from the college dive across the street, bought a bottle of Yellowtail white wine, (“No, but which specific kind of white?” You might be asking. To which I would answer, “Just white. The white kind of wine. The kind that pairs best with a $5 cheese pizza and being freshly 21.”). I queued up This American Life while sitting on the floor of my bedroom, a massive blanket draped around both my shoulders and a space heater to create a kind of heating tent in a house so ancient and uninsulated that my bedroom regularly could not get above 55 degrees in the dead of winter.

I’d been waiting all day to listen to this episode and with a little snow falling down through the night sky making confetti under the orange sodium streetlights, I couldn’t have been more content. And the story from David Sedaris? Absolutely perfect. I sat there, the space heater burning a black line into the synthetic blanket, a pine-scented Christmas candle masking the smell of melting plastic, having a sort of knowing that I’d just created a memory, something I’d look back on for years or maybe the rest of my life. 

And it spooks me now to know that I was right. Anytime I think of David Sedaris, I remember this night, how so many simple things could make me so happy, and how complicated it’s all become since. Every year around the holidays I play this story, trying to get that feeling back, but never quite capture it.

Last week, I was lucky enough to snag a ticket to see David Sedaris give a reading at the University of Colorado’s campus in Mackey Auditorium. The last book of his I’d read was Calypso published in 2018, though I know he’s published several since (the title of the book refers to an essay about how white women love to name calico cats Calypso and god bless me I had a calico cat named Calypso). 

The funniest part of the night (to me) was when he mentioned how Italian book reviewers and interviewers are regularly confused by his “novels” which he and his agents explain again and again are not novels but essay collections. Still, they ask him, “Why did you write the father character like this?” and “Why did you make the narrator gay?” I thought, At least we are all stupid, together.

Seeing Sedaris — but mostly hearing his voice — brought back a decade’s worth of memories. I don’t think I could have cataloged birds eight hours a day as a full time job after college, but I regularly wonder what it would have been like to continue my life as it was after graduation rather than packing up, going to grad school across the country, and realizing I did not want to return. I miss the feeling of small pleasures adding up to a very meaningful, very substantial life and sometimes worry I missed my chance to really appreciate that era. I can’t remember the last time I cleared an evening to sit and listen to a radio show or podcast I love. My days seem too busy. (i.e. I’ve made my days too busy.) Instead, I hastily download shows to Spotify and tune in while I do other things like go to the gym or cook dinner. Sitting in that auditorium for 1.5 hours, lights dimmed, just listening to Sedaris read essays he was workshopping, was a powerful reminder of what I should re-introduce to my life.

I wished I’d had my mom’s copy of Naked to have David Sedaris sign — the whole sex fear thing long behind us both — but that book is still parked on a bookshelf in her home in Pennsylvania. I also thought about bringing that postcard, just to show him I still carried it around all these years later, but what was I going to say? “You wrote this postcard to me a decade ago telling me to burn down my boss’s car and I just wanted to let you know I thought that was real nice.”

Who does that? 

Instead, I left space for the students to take their place in line at the end of his reading, not wanting to be that ancient 30-year-old millennial clogging up the atmosphere for cool, Gen-Z college kids who, thank god, still love David Sedaris. I had also skipped dinner and it was 9pm and I was dreaming about the burrito I was going to order. C’est la vie.