“ I’ve never sat down thinking, Oh, I’m gonna write a book. Never,” David Sedaris tells me.
We’re sitting in his publisher’s office on the first real spring afternoon of the year. His legs are crossed in contemplation, draped in gray Comme des Garçons pants. “I don’t have that much to say about anything,” he adds.
And yet he has written more than a dozen of them—the latest of which, The Land and Its People, is out this week from his longtime publisher Little, Brown and Company. In it, in typical Sedaris fashion, he meanders through topics as disparate as meeting Pope Francis (Conan O’Brien’s wife was “the perfectly dressed person” for the occasion) and maximizing his Duolingo score (Junior is his favorite character, “but only in German”). One essay even tells the story of his secret marriage to his longtime partner, Hugh Hamrick.
“Usually it’s a title that can pull it all together,” he says. “So the title did that here, because all I had to do is write about any person and put them in a place.”
He is, of course, dramatically underselling the subtle thematic links pulling the collection together: legacy, mortality, what the body can and cannot do over time. Sedaris waves away this theory with an unconvinced hand. These are just the things one starts to notice with age, he suggests—and he is one of our great living noticers. “If I’m awake, I’m judging,” he has said.
But on the occasion of this new release, perhaps he’ll forgive my urge to talk a little about the bigger picture: namely, his legacy. The degree to which his writing has infiltrated the psyche of a generation of comic writers who read Me Talk Pretty One Day too young and listened to Santaland Diaries in the back of their parents’ minivan every December cannot be overstated—and even now, more than 30 years after he was first published, people are still singing his praises on TikTok. Asked in one social media video about the funniest book they’d ever read, authors Coco Mellors, Rob Franklin, and Orlando Whitfield all replied, “Anything by David Sedaris.”
“David Sedaris was a voice I carried with me all through my preteen and teenage years,” content creator and Tefi Talks host Tefi Pessoa tells me. “He made me feel like it wasn’t crazy to think the world was bigger than my hometown, and that wanting more wasn’t something to be ashamed of. I genuinely think I subconsciously moved to New York because of his books. I really do!”
Sedaris was born in New York but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, as one of six siblings. In his early works, he told the stories of his childhood—his senile Greek “YaYa”; his naughty sister Amy, who would become famous in her own right as an actor and comedian. “Even when I was a teenager,” he wrote in the introduction to his 2020 collection, The Best of Me, “I wouldn’t have traded my parents for anyone else’s, and the same goes for my brothers and sisters.”
His breakout success began on public radio, when This American Life’s Ira Glass discovered him in a Chicago club and started putting him on his programs—first The Wild Room, then Morning Edition. In 1992, Sedaris’s essay “Santaland Diaries,” a set of dispatches from his time working as a Macy’s Christmas elf, swept the nation and earned him his first two-book deal. Almost overnight, he went from subsisting on gig work to publishing bestsellers.
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