David Sedaris is a chronicler of the domestic, whose one-liners hit you when you're least expecting them
Simon O'Hagan on the American humorist, 59 today
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Your support makes all the difference.The proliferation of literary festivals means we are getting to see in the flesh, and hear with our own ears, more writers than ever. What tends to happen on these occasions is the writer is interviewed, and only briefly, if at all, do they read from their work.
It's not like that with David Sedaris. The only time I heard him interviewed – it was more of a chat than an interview – was on Clare Balding's Ramblings on Radio 4. What Sedaris does is read. His stories generally start life in The New Yorker and then he'll put on readings. Such is the delight of being read to by the funniest storyteller of the age that these performances sell out in a trice.
Points of comparison might include Woody Allen, Bill Bryson, and Alan Bennett, but a quintessential David Sedaris sentence has an ease and limpidity all its own, and the one-liners hit you when you're least expecting them.
Sedaris is a chronicler of the domestic, understanding that this is the context in which life's biggest dramas occur. Over the years we have got to know his parents, his siblings, and his family history going back to childhood. We delight in the occasional walk-on parts he gives to his partner Hugh. The vicissitudes of air travel – which Sedaris does a lot of – is a recurring theme. His own fastidiousness yields further comic riches, and cultural differences are another rich seam for a writer who grew up in North Carolina, left the US for northern France, and has now settled in West Sussex, where he made news a couple of years ago because of his dedication to clearing local lanes of litter (hence the Ramblings programme), and had a bin lorry named in his honour.
It came as a shock when, in 2013, Sedaris published a story about the suicide of his youngest sister – on the face of it, an off-limits sort of subject for a writer who has provided so much laughter. The piece was all the more moving because Sedaris never abandoned his light touch. But then a poignant undertone is present in everything Sedaris writes.
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