I’m nine-years-old on a six-hour cross country flight with my mother when she starts howling with laughter so hard that she drops the book she’s reading. You know how it’s fun to see a comedy with a full audience, with all that laughter amplified? Yeah, well my mother by herself can stand in for a packed crowd. Her laugh is joyful and full-bodied and LOUD. It’s a delightful thing… just not on an airplane! And the process kept repeating, where my mother would pick the book back up, manage to read a few more sentences, and then dissolve into raucous chuckles all over again. As a nine-year-old, I was mortified. Finally I said to her, “You cannot read that book until we’ve landed!” The book was Holidays on Ice, and thus was my introduction to David Sedaris.
David has a new book of essays out this week called The Land and Its People, and luckily for air travelers everywhere my mother’s next plane ticket isn’t until next year. Though in all fairness to her, I myself erupted into fits of giggles (my laugh has more of a wheeze quality than my mother’s) when reading an interview David did with NPR to promote the book. A few highlights:
On finally marrying his longtime boyfriend Hugh: We got married. I don’t even know when it was. I know it was before the pandemic. It was a shotgun wedding arranged by my banker. And I never told anybody about it. And I told Hugh he couldn’t tell anybody about it, because I don’t like when a man says the word, “my husband.” It’s like “my unicycle.” I met a woman at a book signing once, and she used the phrase, “my son-in-law’s unicycle.” And I thought, “Oh, that must pain you every time you have to say, my son-in-law’s unicycle.” I wanted gay people to get the right to marry, and then I wanted not a one of us to do it. I thought that would have been perfect. To say … “We spit on your marriage. We just want the right to do it.”
This is adorable: I drew up contracts all the time when I was a kid. … I made [my sisters] sign a contract swearing they’d never get married. But I didn’t want to lose them. I was just afraid because I didn’t have a word for what I was at the time, but I just knew that I wasn’t like the other boys. And I just thought, ‘Well, I’m gonna be alone for the rest of my life, and I want my sisters to be with me.” I couldn’t bear the thought of being alone without them, so I got them to sign contracts, swearing they’d never get married. But only Amy and Gretchen. … Neither Amy nor Gretchen got married.
Notes on diary writing: I never really wrote about my feelings in my diary. Like, that’s really embarrassing if you look through an old diary and it’s all about your feelings. If it’s about a conversation you had at the barber shop, that’s not embarrassing, right? I could put out a whole book of haircuts, just haircuts I’ve had over the years and conversations with different barbers. Every one of them is recounted in my diary. I don’t recall ever getting a haircut and not writing about it afterwards.
Great, thanks David, now I have another item to add to my list of ways in which I’ve been wasting time in life: not putting pen to paper after each haircut!! I could be publishing my own book by now! And not to rub it in (I’m about to rub it in), but I have a glorious head of curly hair that’s seen layers and angled bobs — I dare say I have more to work with from coif to content than David in this department. But no, it’s not really about the hair (or is it ALWAYS about the hair?), but about the absurd, idiosyncratic behaviors and thoughts we humans engage in. And nowhere is that peculiarity of humanity on better display than in David’s comments on how he and Hugh got married. Truly, that monologue is pure perfection. A work of art that should be studied in acting classes and research labs on the human mind. “It was a shotgun wedding arranged by my banker” is a real stonker of a statement on its own, but it zings on a whole other level when in the context of a wedding between two men. (Think about it.) And while I agree that “my son-in-law’s unicycle” is a burdensome sentence to carry, I have no idea how David is making a connection between the words “husband” and “unicycle.” And that’s ok — I love it so much more for the WTF-ery of it all! Then the concluding thought, that upon gaining the right to marry all gay people as a cultural/voting bloc should have said “We spit on your marriage!” and then not engage (marriage pun!) in the institution… it’s just so punk.
Photos credit: Getty Images and via YouTube/CBS Mornings and Late Night with Seth Meyers
Thanks for reminding me of a somewhat similar Sedaris airplane experience. I was escorting 2 very elderly great aunts from Boston to Atlanta to visit a cousin. On the plane, I was seated several rows behind my aunts and I was reading Dress Your Famikh On Cordoroy and Denim and laughing quite a lot, which was annoying one of the aunts. The cute guy next to me was familiar with Sedaris but hadn’t read that one so I shared. We took turns reading aloud to each other and shrieking with laughter the whole flight. Aunts were mortified. We arrive at my cousin’s and her daughter is reading Me Talk Pretty One Day and giggling uncontrollably. Flight back home, each elder has a Sedaris book and they take turns reading passages to each other between convulsions of laughter. Next time Sedaris appeared in Boston, the two octogenarians were front and center. They did stage door too and got their books signed
I discovered David Sedaris when I was on an airplane and the guy across the aisle from me was reading one of his books and laughing uproariously. There must be something about David Sedaris and air travel.
Aw, I have great memories of listening to Holidays on Ice on many family road trips. “Step on the magic star and you can see Cher!” 💝
“Me Talk Pretty One Day” is still Peak Sedaris to me, although “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” is a close second. I have loved everything he’s ever written, and I’m about a third of the way into “The Land and its People” right now. I debated starting it as soon as I finished my last book (George Saunders’s “Liberation Day” which is also fantastic) or “saving” it in case I needed it later (i.e., midterm time) and decided to treat myself and start it.
Thank you for featuring David, Kismet!! His writing has evoked many, many, many fits of laughter from me over the years.
just saw him live.
He screamed at someone in the foyer. He made fun if deaf and black people, impersonating how they soeak and mannerisms. As soon as you realize this man is only punching down, you’ll see him for what he is.
I had a similar disillusionment when I saw him live. He has made me laugh till I worried I was going to have a heart attack (it can happen!), but in person… Not so much. Privileged in a way I should have expected, but didn’t.
OMG, he’s such a treasure! Saw him and Berkeley earlier this year and had thought I’d pulled a muscle in my side for days. Until I realized, it was from laughing. I’m friends with him on Duolingo now 😀
I used to love him, but then I read his piece in the New Yorker about the suicide of his sister, Tiffany & it was so coldly cruel & narcissistic that I really soured on him. Tiffany was a tragic character whose mental health took a nosedive after she was sent to the torture/abusive reform school, Elan. Sedaris’ lack of empathy for what that place did to his sister is horrifying. And, much has been written about it. Documentaries made, etc… So it’s definitely a willful blindness on his part. He has a very cold, very cruel streak.