David Sedaris
>When your eyes are keenly and profoundly open
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Hadley Freeman @ the Guardian profiles essayist David Sedaris.
The man routinely described as the best living humorist in America, David Sedaris, was recently enjoying a plate of marinated salmon over greens while signing books in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois when a fan decided he wanted more than the writer’s autograph. So he reached over and grabbed a handful of food off the Sedaris plate. Understandably, Sedaris was not best pleased. In fact, he was downright annoyed, which is not a common reaction from a writer who tends to regard the world in general with wide-eyed affection and his readers in particular with real fondness (“I always think it’s a good policy to like the people who like you,” he says with an almost straight face). It wasn’t the hygiene issue that bugged him. It wasn’t even the loss of the food, although he was a little upset about that (“I’d been looking forward to that salmon!”) – it was the fact that the man was trying to cheat.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )“He just did it because he wanted to be written about,” recalls Sedaris, with the distaste of an artist discussing a plagiarist. “It was a gimmick, you know? So I ignored him because I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.” For a few moments, Sedaris’s face clouds at the memory. “But then a woman came up to me later after I read the story about the rabbit and the unicorn” – in Sedaris’s new collection, Squirrel Meets Chipmunk – “and she said, ‘You know it’s just wild that you read that story because I went to see my gynaecologist yesterday and he said my uterus is shaped like a unicorn.'” Sedaris leans back in his chair, clouds cleared and replaced with a smile of delight. “I mean, someone handed me a gold coin there.”
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