Sitting in a Room and Hating Yourself
An Interview with David Sedaris
Brendan Dowling
David
Sedaris has risen to the forefront of American essayists with Me Talk
Pretty One Day, Naked, and Barrel Fever, as well as his
frequent appearances on WBEZ’s This American Life, distributed
by Public Radio International. He is also an accomplished playwright, having
written such acclaimed off-Broadway shows as The Book of Liz and
One Woman Shoe with his sister, the actress Amy Sedaris. Sedaris
recently sold the film rights for Me Talk Pretty One Day to filmmaker
Wayne Wang (Smoke, Blue in the Face). This interview was conducted
in Chicago during Sedaris’s tour for the paperback release of Me
Talk Pretty One Day.
PL: You have a fairly rigorous touring schedule. How do you use these appearances?
DS: As an editing tool. I write new things and I read them out loud, and then I go back to the room and rewrite them. I’m going to San Francisco in a few days, and I’ve been in the Bay Area a lot lately. So I will basically be pulling things out of my ass to read when I’m in San Francisco because I just hate to repeat myself-especially for the lecture tours, because people pay. If someone is buying a ticket for thirty-five dollars, I don’t want them to say, “Wait a minute. He just read the same stuff he read the last time.” Actually, people like to hear things they’ve heard on the radio, and they don’t mind it. It’s me who minds it.
PL: You have a very loyal following. What do you like about meeting your fans?
DS: When you’re on the radio you’re sort of talking to no one, and you can’t imagine anyone on the other end. It’s the same when you write a book. You can’t really imagine who it is that buys it. [Touring is] an opportunity to meet those people. I’m genuinely interested. And, also, it’s just smart. When I go to a book signing, I’m so nervous, and I think, What am I going to say? Anything I say is going to sound so typical, and they’re going to think I’m an idiot. But you start off with a question like, “When was the last time you had sex with someone?” You can ask whatever you want! Whatever you want. I saw a woman’s hands a couple of months ago—I just saw her hands—and I said, “So how old are you?” And I heard “sixty-eight.” [laughs] I never would have asked her how old she was if I had looked up ... It’s just fun. Plus, it’s artificial, because you’re in control in that sense, which is what’s so great about it.
PL: You write so much about your family that many of your readers feel very connected to them. How do your family members feel about having their lives depicted in your work?
DS: Well, I’m working on this story about that, and I was hoping to have it finished to read today in Oak Park, but I don’t think it’s going to be ready yet. I get that question so much I thought I’d write a story about it. It depends. My brother’s fine with it, but he likes attention. He loves attention. But some other people in my family don’t love attention, and they’re kind of sick of it. They’re also kind of sick of it because my sister has that TV show [Strangers witb Candy].
And my sister Gretchen, she’s a painter. She’s really good, and she works in this garden shop ... Once a year she curates a show, and people come to this show that she’s put so much work into and say, “Aren’t you David’s sister? Are you Amy’s sister? Can you get Amy to—If I give you this can you send it to David and—” And I’d hate that, I’d absolutely hate it.
PL: You’ve said in past interviews that you allow your family to read your stories before they’re published. Has there ever been a story that they’ve deemed off limits?
DS: My older sister told me this story the last time I saw her. She was just sobbing at the end of the story, and she told me I could never write about it. So that’s what I’m writing a story about. It doesn’t include [her] story, but it’s all about how I no longer know what to do with something I can’t repeat. When people say, “You can’t tell this to anyone,” I think, Well why bother telling me? What can I possibly use it for? And that’s a problem. I mean, you shouldn’t be thinking, What can I possibly use this for? You should be thinking, Oh, you have a problem—tell me, maybe I can help. And I don’t think that way anymore. I’m not exactly thinking, Oh you have a problem. I can make money! But it’s not far from that. [laughs]
PL: You’ve been resistant to selling the rights of your books to Hollywood. What made the deal with Wayne Wang for Me Talk Pretty One Day different?
DS: Before, whenever anyone wanted to buy something that I’d written, they would always write and say in the letter, “”I can’t pay you any money.” I imagined their film would only be shown at festivals. [mimes balling up offer] Toot! Garbage can! Or else, they never talked about money at all. Or we would have a discussion and nothing would actually be said. They seem to specialize in that. You walk away, and you think, What was that about? It was like talking about air: like I’m talking about the air right here, and I’m going to give that air to you for a while for you to think about. And then I’m going to take that air back so I can show it to my people. When Wayne [Wang] optioned [Me Talk Pretty One Day], he said, “I’m willing to pay this amount of money for the option the first year, this amount of money for the second year. You get this much money based on how much the film winds up costing; you get this much money on back end. Would you like to meet with me?” So I said sure. And then I met with him, and I really liked him. That was it, mainly. He’s not funny, and he never claimed to be funny. He laughs in the right places. So he knows what’s funny. But he doesn’t want to make a slapstick comedy or anything. The book, to him, is just about a family.
PL: You mentioned last night that you were rewriting the screenplay. What has that been like?
DS: I’m going to start rewriting it on July 15. It opens with the scene [of going to the hospital]. [Wang] was there one night when I read about going to the hospital in France. So he opened the screenplay with that scene, but he made it happen at night. He has me go into the hospital, and the hospital is packed. And then some kid comes up and kicks me, and I call the kid a little shit. I would never call a kid a little shit. Even an adult could kick me! I’m spineless. I can’t do that.
I went to the hospital in the daytime. The beauty of it was that nobody was there. So I just started rewriting ... that scene, and I rewrote it as it happened. And then I have to look at it and say, “Okay, that’s the truth. How interesting is the truth? And how can I ... beef this up?” So I’m just trying to figure out “is that too slapsticky?” Like I said, I’ve never written a movie. I never claimed I knew how to write one. I never wanted to write one, so we’ll see.
PL: How does your family feel about the movie?
DS: That’s another hard thing because now they’re going to be portrayed in a movie, and again it’s divided between people who love it and people who don’t. The main thing is, who will play my mom. And I don’t know who that person would be. I would like Gena Rowlands. She’s such a good smoker.
PL: Will your sister Amy play herself?
DS: [Wang is] making the movie out of certain stories in the book. So Amy wouldn’t be portrayed as an adult. Plus, Amy can’t act. I mean, she can—like she’s great in our plays and on the TV shows where she’s got all this stuff to hide behind. But if Amy had to be a waitress and say, “Here’s your coffee,” she couldn’t do it. There’s no way she could do it!
PL: What has been different about the collaborative process of writing plays with Amy as compared to writing essays and stories?
DS: When you’re working on a book you’re alone all the time, and it’s kind of nice to be working with a group of people. The people who are in our plays are always really good and really funny, and they offer a lot. They have good ideas, and it’s smart to listen to them. But you don’t want to tip it. I mean you don’t want to make it a free-for-all. You don’t want to take every suggestion that’s given to you. You want to hear [people’s advice], but you don’t necessarily want to take it. So it’s nice. My boyfriend directed the last show, and he always does the sets. It’s going from being alone in a room for a year to this “let’s-put-on-a-show” feeling [ofl “We open in two weeks, and we don’t have an ending, and we gotta make those costumes, and we gotta do this and that!” It’s fun for that reason.
PL:In your question-and-answer session last night, you described the playwriting process as very frenzied. How do you and Amy work together?
DS: Amy came to Paris for a week in January, and we talked about some stuff. Then when I got to New York in February I had maybe twenty-five pages written. We wound up using about ten of those. What happens is we sit down and read through it, and I think, Fuck, we’re in real trouble here. At this theater we had to have a read-through for an audience of about twenty-five people, and it was the most humiliating moment. If I had defecated in my pants on the plane it would not have been as bad as having to listen to those people. They were all great. It was the script. [moans in disgust] And that sort of acts as a wake-up call ... The people who listen are all involved in the theater in one way or another. And then they’re looking at your script and thinking, That’s what’s going to be at our theater? And then they say stuff like, “It’s got a lot of heart!”
PL: In past interviews you’ve mentioned that you’re working on a novel. How is that going?
DS: I wrote sixty pages of something but ... I go on these lecture tours twice a year, and I’m not about to get up in front of people to read from sixty pages of a novel. Who wants to listen to that? I know when I’m in the audience and someone’s up there, I’d rather think that they’re going to read five or six pieces so that there will at least be something that I like. I did this thing at Lincoln Center a few weeks ago for literacy volunteers. Every year they invite five or six authors to come and read ... and it was so easy to be the best, so incredibly easy. And these people are all good writers for the most part, but they didn’t have a clue as to howto hold an audience’s attention. Not a clue. When they were told to keep it to ten minutes they would think, “Well, Elizabeth Cady Stanton is interesting. I can read for twenty minutes!” I was on stage, and I saw people [in the audience] sleeping! Some of these people write stuff that I love to read, and I really admire their work, but if people bought a ticket and they’re sitting in an audience, that’s about entertaining, it’s not about being a wordsmith.
PL: So has reading in front of an audience been a learned skill for you, or has it been intuitive?
DS: I just learned it from the first couple of times I did readings out loud. I would think, Oh, I can read for half an hour, and then I would listen to other people read and I would think, You know what? I’m not going to read this thing that’s ten minutes long. The shorter the better. And in a bookstore situation like last night—I mean, I’ve been in this area a lot ... So I didn’t want to repeat myself. When people are standing up, they can’t really listen. In a situation like that, I think people really look forward to the question-and-answer period because there’s more potential for things to happen. But when you’re reading from a page it doesn’t matter if it’s new material or old material, it’s just between you and a page. It seems to me, in a situation like that, [it’s better] to keep the reading short ... You’re really deluding yourself to think that somebody’s going to want to stand like this [folds his arms] ... among other people and want to listen to your reading take an hour.
PL: How did you get started reading your work?
DS: I went to the Art Institute [of Chicago], and we would have these critiques, and they were so incredibly boring ... You bring in your painting, and then you talk about it. And people would talk as if they were talking to a fucking therapist ... and it would just go on for eight hours. You’d have a six-hour painting class, and you’d come out and you’d be exhausted . . . And nobody cares. People are just waiting for their own turn to talk about their own work, so you make up some bullshit to engage them, and then go on even more; it’s pretty clear nobody gives a fuck. So I’d start writing these things, and I’d put my work up and then I’d read these short little things that most of the time had nothing to do with my work or else it was a parody-talking about something that didn’t exist. And people laughed, and I thought, “That feels nice.” And then I read in a couple of loft situations where somebody would curate an evening. And then Brigid Murphy saw me read at one of those things and asked me to read in Milly’s Orchid Show. And I did that, and then it sort of sells its way up to the Lincoln Center.
PL: It sounds like a natural progression.
DS: It’s basically the same stuff. But I always figured that’s the way things would happen. You’d have something published in a magazine called Another Chicago Magazine that nobody’s ever heard of, and then it would work its way up to the New Yorker. And that’s how it should happen. Often on these lecture tours I get letters ... This one woman had written something in—I don’t know—some newspaper, and she wanted to be on the radio or she wanted to get a book contract, so she said, “I had this in the paper, and what can I do? and who should I go to? and blah blah blah . . .” And I was thinking, If it was in the paper, someone should have read it and said, “Oh! We’d like you to write for this!” And then it’s like a staircase. But if nobody’s asked you—-then I can’t help you.
PL: It sounds like you’re against actively marketing yourself.
DS: I always have been. When I first moved to New York, I went to a play that was, at the time.... the most magnificent thing I had ever seen in my life. It was opening night, and at intermission, everybody in the audience handed out flyers for their own show. They were all trying to get the attention of the producer, and they didn’t even notice the show that was going on. I’ve just always been repelled by that sort of self-promotion. When I am on this tour, people come up and they always say the same thing: “I’m a starving writer, and I can’t afford your book, but here’s the book I’m trying to get published. Can you read this and maybe show it to your agent or maybe get back to me with some sort of feedback?” And I know from the second they say that they’re not a writer. That’s not their talent. Their talent is self-promotion. I don’t know. I’ve just always been really turned off by people who are really aggressive that way. It doesn’t work, and I don’t know where they got the idea that it does work.
There are a couple of students that I had at the Art Institute who I thought were really great writers, and I’m on top of them. I write them and say, “You haven’t sent me anything in a long time, and you’d be perfect for this program that Ira [Glass, of This American Life] is doing.” But I have to yank it out of them, and that’s sort of the thing that’s always made them so good. They’re writers, and they spend their time writing.
People have ideas of the life you would have if you were writing, but basically that life amounts to sitting in a room and hating yourself. That’s what it comes down to. You go on a book tour, and you get some attention and then you get millions and millions of dollars [laughs], but you still have to go back to that room and hate yourself.
PL: So has it gotten any easier than ten years ago?
DS: No. Not even a little bit. If anything, I’m even more unsure of myself then I was back then. I just feet like a complete fraud. If you’re not on the bestseller list, then it’s really easy because you say, “Oh all the books on the bestseller list are trash.” But when you’re on the bestseller list you say, “That Danielle Steele’s not so bad.” And when you go into a bookstore and there are 700 people there, you feel like a fraud. The real writers are the people who show up when there are only three people there. Their work is so meaningful, so complex, that only three people can understand it. And they’re inherently better than you. Yes, I just feel like a complete fraud . . . “Two or three hundred people stand in line, and then each one comes up and says how much they love me.” And it’s nothing. You think of a reason why each one of those two or three hundred people is nuts. Like, “Oh, they’re retarded.” Or “This is the first book they’ve ever read.” Nothing specifically against them, but it makes me more unsure ... One thing on the lec- ture tour is that people have paid, so you have to worry about that, too. “Why would anyone pay thirty-five dollars to hear this? And are they just laughing because they paid thirty-five dollars and they’re determined to have a good time?”
PL: What role have libraries played in your life?
DS: I can’t think of anything that’s played a more important role in my writing than public libraries. The public library in North Carolina—it was like its own world ... The life that I had lived wasn’t the life that I wanted, but I could find that life at the library.
In Chicago, the first thing I did was get a library card. An I couldn’t believe the stuff that I could find in the library here. Actually, the Chicago library was probably the heaviest library time in my life. I’d go every Tuesday for the free movies, and then every Friday I would go and surrender my old books and get new ones. I was at that age when I didn’t have the wherewithal to buy [books]. I still don’t hold on to books. Now I might buy them or get them for free or whatever, but then I give them away. Some books, like Remains of the Day, I hold on to because I read them again and again. But the library always suited me that way. When someone says, “I got your book at the library,” I never think, Oh, how cheap. I’m just so happy and so honored that the library would have the book. It’s one thing to be in a bookstore. But to see your book in a library, to me that really means something. Because then I can see myself at age fourteen, or at age sixteen, or at age twenty-seven, or at age thirty-five, going to the library to find that book, waiting for that book ... And then scanning the new-arrivals shelf ... and going back day after day waiting for that book. When people put a book on [the reserve] list, I think that’s so unfair. When people reserve library books, that’s not how it works. To me, you just have to be there, looking for the book. You just can’t call from home. And now they can probably do it from their computer. [groans] You get off your ass and go to the library every day and wait and pounce on it. That’s how you should do it.
PL: What are you reading now?
DS: I used to read books like absolute crazy, and once I started writing them, I stopped reading them. But I discovered crossword puzzles a few years ago, and that’s my whole life now. I love crossword puzzles ... And I’m too much of a sponge; if I’m working on something and I read something, I’ll start to write like that person. So when I’m writing, it’s better for me just to do crossword puzzles.
PL: What’s next for you?
DS: I’m going to have to rewrite that movie, and then I’ll be writing material for the next book tour. You know, I’m always chasing my tail in that way, so that I will hopefully have an hour’s worth of new material when I go out. Next October, I go on a month-long tour. I’ll start it with an hour’s worth of new material. I’ll read things, then go back to my room and rewrite them ... So I’m always just sort of desperately chasing myself that way. But I need a deadline. It’s good for me.
Brendan Dowling is the Communications Assistant at the Public Library Association. He interviewed David Sedaris in Chicago in June 2001.