Theft By Finding, Diaries 1977 – 2002 by David Sedaris

You have to be a David Sedaris fan to love this – I am and I did.  Sedaris has made a name for himself as a writer of essays about his life that are often laugh-out -loud funny.  I always “read” his work as audio books because he narrates them himself, and the pauses, the intonation and the accents all make the writing even more humorous.  I’ve used excerpts from his writing as models for teaching, although I always had to choose judiciously.  His language and his humor are, well, adult. 

This book, a departure from his usual form, contains his edited journal entries from 1977 to 2002.  Listening to these, I was struck first by what has always been so problematic for me about keeping a journal – the idea of audience.  In my unsuccessful attempts over the years, I’ve always felt like I had to explain too much – where I am, who this or that person is, how I feel about what is happening – as if I am writing for someone else - and it inevitably becomes too tedious.  Sedaris, instead, has clearly written for himself.  He jumps right in without explaining who Tom is or describing his surroundings other than, say, Paris.  He also focuses on a salient event for the day rather than attempting to capture everything that happened.  As for most of us, “salient” is relative and there are days when not much happens, but somehow recording these almost nonevents provides a better sense of his life than focusing on just, say his appearance on Letterman or a book signing where 400 people show up.  What he most often focuses on “are remarkable events I have observed (fistfights, accidents, a shopper arriving with a full cart of groceries in the express lane), bits of overheard conversation, and startling things people have told me” (p. 4). For example: 

“April 12, 1981. Friday night we went to dinner at the Villa Capri.  Mom got lost on the way there.  She took two or three incorrect turns and wound up jumping the median when she realized we were in the wrong lane and a car was heading directly toward us.  Her excuse was that she hadn’t had a drink yet.”

And that’s it for April 12.

He is masterful at capturing (or is it re-creating?) conversations, whether overheard (which seems to happen frequently) or involving himself.  He is approached more than you would think by people asking for money and cigarettes, including people who actually come to his apartment door in Paris.  Surprisingly, he receives phone calls and letters from readers sent to his home address and, manages to turn wrong numbers into a funny anecdote.

“September 18, 1995, New York.  A woman phoned at eleven o’clock last night and asked if she could speak to Rich.  I said there wasn’t a Rich.  ‘Ok,’ she said. ‘Is this the game we’re going to play?’ ‘Game?  Listen-‘I said.  ‘Rich is having his roommate cover for him, is that it?’  ‘There is no roommate.  Listen, this is David Sedaris and Hugh Hamrick-‘ ‘Rich? Is that you, you shithead?’ ‘There is no Rich,’ I repeated.  ‘You have the wrong number.  ‘You think you can f___ with me, Rich? You have no idea who you’re f_ing with.’ ‘That’s just it,’ I said.  ‘I don’t have any idea.  None whatsoever.  This is wasted on me.’”

Before Sedaris makes a name for himself as a writer, there are many lean years in which he is alternately picking fruit, waiting tables, moving furniture, painting houses and working construction projects to make enough money to get by.  Several years running, he is an elf at Christmastime for Macy’s in New York City.  During the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, he is also a big drinker and drug user. 

“March 16, 1991.  I’m down to $190 and am starting to panic.  In this situation, I have no business buying pot, but that’s what I did.  Scotch too.”

These early decades are also filled with examples of misogyny and racism that, in today’s climate stir a strong sense of outrage. Sedaris sees women who have been beaten.  Stereotypic construction workers ask him if he’s gotten any pussy.  There’s gay-bashing; Sedaris, a small homosexual man, mostly just tries to stay out of people’s way. He doesn’t often comment on how he feels about these incidents, but the fact that he includes them suggests he finds such outbursts remarkable.

In the later years, after he has become more professionally successful, Sedaris lives first in Paris and, by the end of the book, in London with his partner Hugh.  He’s cleaned up his act, given up drinking and focused on his writing and, in a hilarious section, he is learning French from a Parisian who comes across as the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld.  She throws chalk, scolds her adult students as if they were children and screams, “I hate you!” at Sedaris, a lover of language, who is never satisfied with simply doing the assignment as directed.  When the teacher asks for an essay about the future (September 13, 1998), “something along the lines of ‘One day I will be rich and successful,’ he writes, ‘One day I will be very old and reside in a nursing home.  Toothless, bald and wrinkled, I will wake myself three times a night. . .”  He quickly becomes hated by the rest of the class, people from all over the world, for typing his homework, learning 10 new vocabulary words a day and for writing complex sentences.

“September 3, 1998, Paris.  Why write, ‘I went to the store with a friend’ when, without relying on the dictionary, I can say ‘I visited the slaughterhouse with my godfather and a small monkey?’”

His observations about the French culture often focus on mundane events that strike an American as odd. 

“January 22, 1999, Paris.  In New York, you’d see signs reading NO CHANGE WITHOUT PURCHASE, but here they should read, simply, NO CHANGE.  Every time you pay for something, they shake you down for the exact amount.  If the thing costs, say, 185 francs, and you hand over a 200-franc bill, the person will frown at it and say, ‘Really? You don’t have a hundred and eighty-five?’”

The Sedaris family appears frequently in the diaries.  Sister Amy joins David in Chicago when, at 29, he decides to finish his college degree at the Chicago Institute for the Arts.  She joins Second City.  The two later collaborate on plays that are staged in New York and Amy, of course, goes on to make a name for herself as a comedic actress.  All of the siblings have a sense of humor and provide comic relief, particularly in the retelling of family Christmas gatherings.

“December 20, 1977. I bought a half dozen books this week on horrible diseases, some for me and some to give to Gretchen [a sister] for Christmas.” 

“December 27, 1987, Raleigh.  Tiffany [a sister] left this morning.  Last night we sat around in the basement with the company and she told us that she often gets gas trapped in her neck.  She pointed to a spot beneath her ear, saying, ‘It’s right here.’  I never heard of such a thing.”

“December 26, 1997, New York. Continuing our tradition of seeing movies about black people on Christmas Day, after opening presents, Dad, Lisa, Paul, Amy and I went to see Jackie Brown.  Last year I think it was The Preacher’s Wife, and the year before that Waiting to Exhale.”

“December 31, 1998, Paris. “Last night, shortly after dinner, my father’s head caught on fire. . .This morning we went to buy him a hat.”

A side effect of listening to this book for 2 weeks is that I found myself starting to narrate experiences in my head, as if writing them, as they were happening.   “I was nervous as I walked back into the senior center after 7 months away from pickleball.  How rusty would I be? Would I become one of those people whom others tried to avoid having to play with?”  Now that I have finished the book, I wonder if my brain will readjust to worrying, making lists – the stuff that’s usually going on in my head while I am doing other things.  I realize that it takes practice to be the sort of wry observer that Sedaris is and even more skill to capture the poignancy or the humor or just the sheer oddness of an experience in writing.  At this, he is a true master. I anxiously await the next installment.