David Sedaris: Just a writer
by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 24 1998) -- After three bestselling volumes of riproaringly wicked autobiographical essays, David Sedaris finds himself the object of a different kind of bidding war -- this one a battle among those who want to claim him as one of their own, as a sort of poster boy or representative specimen.

"It's interesting how you can write a book and then you can sort of be claimed by different groups of people," said Sedaris, the author of "Naked," "Barrel Fever" and "Holidays on Ice," in a recent phone interview from his home in New York.

"The Greeks have recently claimed me, so now I'm on these Greek- American radio programs and doing interviews for newspapers in Athens," said Sedaris, who is of Greek extraction. "I've written one story about being Greek."

"And the Tourette Syndrome crowd embraced me based on one story that I wrote," said Sedaris, referring to "A Plague of Tics," which recounts compulsions such as licking light switches and pressing his nose against the car windshield that afflicted him as a child.

"So for the thing I'm doing in the Berkshires, the homosexual part of me will be in attendance," said Sedaris, referring to the occasion prompting our interview.

Sedaris will be the keynote speaker at the third annual Berkshire Gay and Lesbian Festival, which takes place tomorrow at the Seven Hills Inn and Resort in Lenox.

The day's events, sponsored by the Berkshire Stonewall Community Coalition, culminate at 6:30 with a dinner at which Sedaris, following in the footsteps of previous honorees including Congressman Barney Frank and author Blanche Wiesen Cook, will address the gathering. Tickets for the dinner are available on a sliding scale of $20-$40. For reservations or more information call 442-6161.

The dinner will be followed by a dance with a DJ and door prizes. There is a $5 admission fee for the dance, which is open to the lesbian, gay and transgendered community, ages 18 and over.

The rest of the days events are free and open to the public, beginning at 1 with a silent auction featuring art by local painters, photographers and crafts people, as well as an exhibition of memorabilia of Berkshire lesbian and gay history. At 2:30, dancer Dawn Lane will perform two original pieces, followed by an afternoon social at 3:30. At 4:30, Northampton-based singer-songwriter Linee will entertain, followed by a pre-dinner social at 5:30.

While Sedaris doesn't mind being identified with any of the groups that claim him for their own, his preference is to be considered a writer, period.

"I like to reserve the right to write about whatever I like," said Sedaris, 41. "Sometimes I have gay characters and sometimes I don't. I think it's harder if you're gay to just be known as a writer instead of being known as a gay writer. But personally I would rather be known as a writer rather than be segregated to that little corner of the bookstore."

Nevertheless, it's the little corners of existence -- life in the margins -- that provides the fodder for most of Sedaris's work. His writing, which has been called "a caustic mix of J.D. Salinger and John Waters," spares no one -- friends, family, co-workers -- from Sedaris's unique, distorted lens, which accentuates the hideous and grotesque aspects of ordinary life.

Sedaris acknowledges that the nastiest bits of his work are the parts that make him laugh out loud while he's writing. He is also aware that they give some people the impression that he is someone to be avoided in real life.

"I'm always surprised by people who are afraid of me," he said. "Sometimes people will just hang back at a book signing. I don't know what they think I'm going to do to them. I'm not mean in person. You could spit in my face and I'd apologize to you. I have maybe like a wicked mind, but it's not necessarily connected to my tongue."

While Sedaris's upbringing figures prominently in some of his more autobiographical works, there is little manifest sign in them of the writer to come.

"I didn't read when I was a kid," said the native of Raleigh, N.C. "I started reading when I was about twenty. I just turned into a reader one day after I dropped out of college. I started reading everything I could get my hands on, all those books that people were supposed to read. And I started reading a lot of contemporary fiction.

"At first I was just in awe of the books. I was keeping a diary at the time, but I could clearly see the difference between what was in my diary and what was in the pages of these books.

"I would read stories and if there were passages that really struck me, I just copied them down in my diary. It just felt so good to write those words. I thought if I just transcribed them then maybe I could have the same feeling of the person who wrote them."

Now, Sedaris has become one of those people who future writers will try to imitate. His work, which appears in the New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Mirabella and Harper's Magazine, is much in demand, and he is a regular commentator on the BBC and on the National Public Radio program "This American Life."

While the life of the writer is a solitary one, Sedaris is also a public figure who makes frequent appearances in front of groups and on college campuses as well as on the requisite promotional book tours.

He doesn't mind that aspect of the contemporary writer's profession. "I don't like the physical traveling part of it, but I'm always so grateful when people show up," he said. "It's nice to get a chance to meet people, because most of the time you're just by yourself -- or me, anyway, I'm just by myself writing -- and I don't have any connection whatsoever with the people on the other end. So it's just nice to get a chance to meet them."

There is, however, one aspect of the promotional book tour that Sedaris finds so intolerable that he says he is moving to France at the end of the summer.

"You go to a town and you're met by a media escort who nine times out of ten has a sign in her car that says, `Thank you for not smoking,'" said the last of the unrepentant smokers.

"Then you go the radio station and you can't smoke there. Then you run outside for a cigarette, and the escort grabs you and carries you off to some appearance on a TV show, and it's like all I'm thinking about the whole time is where my next cigarette is coming from.

"France is a smoker's paradise. You see the no-smoking signs through a haze of cigarette smoke. And it's great to see Americans trying to tell French people to put out their cigarettes. That's hilarious to me."

[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on April 24, 1998. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]