David Sedaris, forever the outsider, has learned to read the room

David Sedaris is an outsider wherever he goes — and by his own count he’s been to 62 countries.
In France, where he lived for decades with his partner, Hugh Hamrick, shopkeepers were forever asking how long he’d be visiting. “I’ve been here for 25 years,” he’d tell them.
In England, where he is an afterthought, people talk around him, despite the lack of a language barrier. “They speak English in England and I speak English, but because I’m an American, I don’t really count to a lot of people,” he says. “(People think) ‘He doesn’t understand, he’ll never understand.’”
Sedaris was an outsider on his first trip to Tokyo, where he realized he was the only one smoking a cigarette on the street. “I thought, ‘I’ll put the cigarette out,’” he recalls. “And then I saw no cigarette butts on the ground, so I crushed the cigarette butt and I put it in the hem of my pants.”
Sedaris has been an outsider all his life, keeping a diary from which he spins cutting essays on things profound and mundane.
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“The vantage point from the outside looking in has always served me well,” he says. It has helped him hone his considerable powers of observation, to be the fly on the wall, to read the room, unnoticed.
And the resulting bestsellers have made him rich and famous.
Sedaris, the American abroad, says he’s only brought into the fold by Europeans for two predictable and recurring conversations.
They are fascinated by former president Donald Trump and when they learn Sedaris is an American, he’s all they want to talk about. Sedaris says that reality should make people think twice about announcing their post-election plans, should Trump win.
“All these people who say: ‘If Donald Trump wins, I’m leaving the country.’ Oh, really,” he says. “Because you’re going to leave the country and every time you open your mouth, people are going to ask you about Donald Trump. You’re better off staying in America. You have no idea what you’re in for.”
There is another topic that sends Europeans scrambling for Sedaris to offer American insight.
“Whenever there’s a school shooting, I get asked about it,” he says. “In England. In France. (They ask) ‘How could you let that happen?’ And it’s like ‘I, personally, had nothing to do with it.’ (Then they say) ‘And then you let that other school shooting happen? Six months ago? What about that?’ It’s like ‘I don’t even live there.’”
Sedaris, who works in words, concedes he’s at a loss.
“I can’t explain gun culture to foreigners because it doesn’t make sense to me, either,” he says.
Even when people who would seem to know better tell him he’s an insider, and invite him inside rarefied places, Sedaris entertains his doubts.
Last spring, Pope Francis invited dozens of global comedians to the Vatican, including Americans Stephen Colbert, Jim Gaffigan, Jimmy Fallon, Chris Rock, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and on and on. Sedaris made the list, which made him uneasy.
He wrote in The New Yorker: “What was I doing there? Why not Garrison Keillor, Tina Fey, or Donald Glover, to name just three of a thousand more qualified people? It was like a reproduction of ‘The Last Supper’ with one of the disciples replaced by Snoopy.”
The Vatican visit is one of the stories he might be telling on this tour, a grueling string of mostly back-to-back-to-back dates where the author will stand at a lectern and read from his latest essays, including eight stories he wrote this summer. Among those essays:
People who don’t vote and why. “If the alternative to voting was cleaning up garbage on a mile of interstate,” Sedaris says, “everyone would vote.” One woman told Sedaris’ sister, actress-comedian Amy Sedaris, that she refused to vote because it might expose her to the prospect of jury duty. “We love jury duty in my family, just love it,” Sedaris says. “And if we didn’t vote, we never would have had those adventures. My mother had a capital murder trial. She loved it.”
Crabby travelers. “Hugh and I went to Maine this summer, and I didn’t realize that I would come out of it with an essay. When I’m writing about something like that, I try to think, ‘How can I make this so that everyone can relate to it?’ Because not everybody’s been to Maine and not everyone’s gone to an island and not everyone has friends who have won a Tony Award. But I think everybody kind of knows somebody who just gets really crabby when he travels. And that’s Hugh. He is such a pain in the ass to travel with. So I thought, ‘I bet a lot of people could relate to that.’ So I just started writing about it and then I thought, that’s the angle for it.”
Things that ruin movies or TV shows. “Everybody’s got something that pulls them out of a movie or a TV show, and they just are so distracted they can’t get back into it,” Sedaris says. “For me, it’s language. I saw something that takes place in 1969. And the main character, who is a woman, says to a Marine, ‘Thank you for your service.’ Nobody said that in 1969. And later someone comes up to her, an activist, who says: ‘This money will really help women of color.’ No one said ‘women of color’ in 1969. They said ‘colored women.’ I couldn’t watch it any more.” He uses that as a starting point, and has been polling audience members at book signings for their pet peeves on the subject.
Sedaris, a life-long diarist, mines his daily jottings for contributions to his essays, including conversations he has had with cab drivers. Cabbies find their way regularly into his writings.
“Most people are comfortable in the illusion that they’re in control. I never learned to drive a car, so I’ve never gone anywhere on my own,” he says. “I have to be in an airplane and I have to be on a train. I have to be in a car. I have to be on a bus. I’m forced to be around people. And I feel like I might as well take advantage of it.”
Those brushes with brief stories — including the cab driver who talked about driving 8 hours to ride a rollercoaster, but not taking the time to go to his local polling place (“It’s all rigged and they know who they want to win and that’s who wins,” he says) — find their way into longer essays. So, too, do observations Sedaris makes when he is dismissed as an outsider, unworthy of attention, unless about Trump or school shootings.
“People will talk in front of you in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise,” he says. “That to me is like they’re giving me gold.”
The stories Sedaris will read on this tour, in his thin, rather high voice, are works in progress. At each stop, he’ll read from the pages in front of him, pen in hand. When the audience responds, or doesn’t, he’ll note the reaction in the page’s margin.
“It’s such a privilege to have 2,000 editors,” he says of each audience.
“My editor at The New Yorker will say, ‘I think we can lose this right here.’ And I say, ‘That’s my biggest laugh in the whole thing.’ And if I hadn’t read it out loud on stage 30 times, I wouldn’t know that. And I would just go along. But I’m not going to lose my biggest laugh.”
He has come to trust his audience — unless he can see them.
“The audience doesn’t lie,” he says, then offers a clarification born of many tours.
“The audience … well, it depends. If the lights are up, if I can see the audience, then they’ll lie. Because they can see me looking at them and they’re polite people and so they want to show that they’re paying attention and that they’re appreciative. They’ll fake laugh a lot. But if they know I can’t see them, they’re not going to lie.”
It’s that kind of honesty that Sedaris’ fans flock to, the kind of nuance they expect from the man who burst onto the scene in 1992 by pulling back the curtain on one of New York’s cherished traditions: Macy’s Santaland. His hilarious “Santaland Diaries” essay on National Public Radio introduced him as a talent to watch. He has burnished his reputation with essays refined at countless lecterns over the years, 2,000 editors at a time.
That work continues at a lectern near you.