by Corey Andrew
In Germany, my books do very well. ‘Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim’ was the first book to come out in Italy, and it was on the bestseller list in Italy for a while. It’s not doing gangbusters here in France. And other countries, I figure if it was doing really well, they’d tell me. In Australia, the books do very well, better than in England.
Corey: Have there been talks of doing a European tour and sending you on the road with a translator for different countries?
David: I’ve gone to Germany about…golly, I’ve taken 12 separate trips. I’ll go to Germany and go to seven, eight towns. The Germans go to book readings. It’s not a thing in France. It’s not a thing in England either. Even Martin Amos doesn’t go on a book tour in England. He’ll do publicity, but he won’t do a reading. In Italy, people show up for readings. I’ve gone to Spain and done readings. I’ve gone to the Netherlands and done readings, Austria, Germany, like I said. Uh, Australia, Ireland, some countries invite you, and others don’t. Like the Israelis didn’t invite me. Or the Koreans or the Chinese. I’d be happy to go to any of those places.
Corey: I’ve had friends say they enjoy your stories, but they like them even better when they hear you read them aloud. How would you describe your reading voice?
David: A challenge, I think. My voice isn’t pleasant to listen to. It always ceases to amaze me that I’m on the radio. I was always a big radio listener. Not music so much but talk radio, and there was a station in Raleigh, (N.C.), where I grew up that would play old radio programs. I guess I always thought how wonderful it would be to be on the radio, but it’s sort of like not having legs and thinking about how great it would be to be a quarterback. You think I can’t possibly—like with the voice I have—I could not possibly be on the radio.
So it never ceases to amaze me that I am. That makes sense to me, because there’s an English guy named Alan Bennett who does a lot on the BBC, and I’m crazy about him. I don’t want to read his books; I want him to read them to me. The same with Garrison Keillor; I want him to read to me. I don’t want to read it myself. I understand that perfectly. A lot of people, they’ll feel like that’s insulting, but I understand it perfectly.
Corey: How did you think you sounded the first time you heard yourself on the radio?
David: I’ll tell you (laughs), whenever I hear myself on the radio, I can’t listen to my voice. I caught myself on the answering machine about 15 years ago, and that was it for me.
Corey: Are you going to do anything special for the Princeton speaking engagement?
David: The graduation speech? I am so Ivy League. I really am. If someone tells me they went to Harvard or Princeton or Stanford or Yale, I feel like I do if I’m in the presence of a star. Whenever I go to schools like that to give a talk, I say, ‘You must be so proud of yourself.’
If it wasn’t hard to get into, I would have gone here. It’s really hard to get in here, and it’s OK for you to say, yeah, and you’re really smart. It’s fun being smart. I did a graduation speech at the Art Institute, which is where I went to college, and that was easy because I went to school there so I knew how to speak to those students. I know why I agreed. It’s the kind of thing my dad would really appreciate. I called my dad and said, ‘If you’ll go with me, then I’ll do this.’ And he said, ‘Do you think you could get them to give you an honorary degree?’
I was too embarrassed to admit I’d already asked. I asked my agent to ask, and they said it has to kind of be their idea.
I already have a little speech. It only has to be 15 minutes long. It’s me begging for an honorary degree. That might not be the approach to take after people were just working hard for four years.
Corey: Has anyone ever pitched you ideas of adding illustrations to your stories?
David: There’s a book I’m kind of working on now, and they’re stories about animals. They’re not fables really because fables have a moral. There’s a tradition of illustration for books like this so that’s the kind of thing I wouldn’t mind having a couple illustrations, just because it could be funny.
Corey: Are you under a lot of deadline pressure?
David: I make my own deadline pressure. I enjoy it. I usually go on these tours every fall and spring, but I took the fall off. I had big plans. I was gonna do so much. I didn’t do shit. I worked every day, I did. But I didn’t have a tour coming up, so I sort of indulged myself working on things that don’t work—which can be helpful. You give yourself some time, and you think, ‘I really need like a month to work on something that’s a complete waste of time.’ Get it out of my system. If I had a tour in the fall, I think I would have been under more pressure.
From July until December, I worked every day, and nothing worked out. Since then, I’ve written four New Yorker stories, three for the radio and four other things I haven’t done anything with. It’s all because I had this tour coming up, and I think I’m going to be in front of an audience three months from now, and I really, really better have something.
I think it’s so boring when people talk about dreams. But last night I dreamt that I got up onstage, and I started off with question and answer, which you never do. It’s always a mistake. I’ve never done it in the past, but in this dream I did. That was a stupid thing to do, and then I opened up my folder and it was all letters I had written to people and haven’t sent—tax forms—and my papers weren’t there. It was so bad, I woke up.
I get onstage, and I say, ‘Thank you very much for coming,’ and then I start reading. Then you can run your mouth later, but it’s always a mistake to get out there and start running your mouth.
Corey: Did the dream inspire you to write anything today?
David: The dream inspired me to get up this morning and get all my papers, all the things I would be reading, and not put that off for another second—get all that stuff together.
Corey: You don’t typically keep your tax forms and the letters you’ve written to people in the same folder, do you?
David: No, I always have my tax appointment when I go to America for my spring tour. My tax appointment is on Saturday. I need to make extra sure to keep those folders separate. I guess that’s an equally bad dream is to go to my tax accountant and open my folder and have a story about a leech who lives in hippo’s asshole instead of all the receipts I’ve spent forever going through and tabulating.
Corey: You’ve lived in different places over the years. Are there certain places you feel you write better?
David: One thing I think—and I need to find something to break this—London doesn’t work. I love going there. I can only think of one story I’ve ever written there. Paris is OK. Part of it is I’ve just got it in my mind that London is bad luck that way. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Corey: You’re turning 50 later this year.
David: Yes, the day after Christmas.
Corey: Any special plans?
David: I plan to be old. I had my mid-life crisis. I had it in January. When I turned 40, I said ‘I’m old now. I can’t wear jeans anymore.’ And I thought I needed to do something else, so I decided I would never again eat dip. I don’t care about jeans and dip one way or the other, but I thought I needed to do something.
At 50, you see people like humiliate themselves and ruin their marriages by getting a girlfriend or something. And I bought a painting of a monkey eating a peach. It was crazy how much this painting cost. That was my mid-life crisis.
Corey: Have you thought about what you’re going to give up at 50?
David: Um, I don’t know. I’ll probably give up something like seedless grapes.
Corey: What about giving up smoking?
David: I’ll put that on the 60 or 70 list.
Corey: One thing I’ve been thinking about as I get older is the term boyfriend. You still refer to Hugh as your boyfriend.
David: Well, there are these people I used to clean for in New York, and I bet the woman is 70 now. And her boyfriend is younger than she is. The guy said, ‘
This is Gene, Marion’s partner.’ I hate the word partner, And I hate it when gay people use it and now straight people are using it. It’s always funny to me how they take the worst of gay things.
No, I still say boyfriend, because I hate partner. I hate lover, because it makes it sounds like all you do is have sex. I’m still using boyfriend. I see what you mean. When he’s like 70. If you say gentleman friend, it doesn’t sound right. Or companion. It sounds like he hooks you up to an IV every night.
I had something on Morning Edition and the introduction was something like, ‘Last summer and the summer before, David Sedaris and his boyfriend went to France.’ Bob Edwards refused to say boyfriend. They offered to change it to partner and I said, ‘No, that’s really queer. That’s my boyfriend.’ I did not see what the big deal was. It sort of sat there until he went on vacation, and Neil Conan or someone took over and said the word ‘boyfriend.’ Then I heard from all these people, ‘I can’t believe they said the word boyfriend on the radio,’ as if they had said, ‘cocksucker.’ To me it was so nothing. I didn’t understand what the big deal was.
That is one thing I will correct people on. If I’m doing a live radio interview and they say, ‘You live with your partner.’ I say, ‘boyfriend.’ Just because I don’t want anyone thinking that I use the word partner.
Corey: Do they ever say husband?
David: No, because I wouldn’t use that either because I wouldn’t get married. I mean, I know people who do, you know. ‘Brad and I are having our commitment ceremony,’ and that’s like a partner thing. Here you can get PAX-ed. There are civil unions in England, too. And I’m up for anything that will save me money. You just go to city hall and you sign a piece of paper. But I wouldn’t wear anything special and I wouldn’t tell people about it. I wouldn’t exchange jewelry or anything like that.
Corey: What kind of parent do you think you would be?
David: I tell myself that I would be so patient and all that stuff. I do enjoy children. I like them. Then I think of the reality. We went to Italy recently to visit this friend of my boyfriend, and she had two white sofas and two children under the age of 5.
If you have white sofas—spotless—and children under the age of 5, you are a horrible mother.
And then I thought, ‘Gosh, that’s the way I would be.’ Order means so much to me. Cleanliness and order mean so much to me. I think it would be so hard to let go of that, and I tell myself I would be so patient, but I would be patient between the hours of like 3 to 3:15 and then after 11 o’clock at night.
Corey: Do you have nieces and nephews that you get to spend time with?
David: I have one niece. No, she lives in North Carolina. Maybe when she’s older. If she’s not too afraid of me, she could come visit us here. If I were like 16 and had an uncle who lived in London and Paris and stuff, I’d be all over it. You never know. Sometimes kids get that age, and they just want to hang out with their friends in front of the Quick Pick.
Corey: When you do these tours, do they offer chances to get together with the whole family?
David: it’s not too often that we all get together at the same time. On this trip, one of my cousins is getting married so I’ll see some of my family then. I’ll see my sister in New York. I think she’s the only one I’ll see on this trip. I saw everyone on my last book tour. They come here and see me sometimes.
Corey: Living in Europe, does it make it tough to collaborate with Amy on plays?
David: When I lived in New York, nothing seemed more important to me than a New York audience. And now because I don’t live there anymore and travel a lot it’s all the same to me. We did a play like five years ago, and it involved going to New York for like two months or something. I guess the way it is now, since I’m in the United States for two months out of the year for these tours, and think about adding another two months two it, I think, ‘Oh no, that’s enough time.’ Maybe later on.
For me, you don’t have to have anything to say when you write a story, but I kind of feel you do when you write a play. And I don’t really have anything to say.
Corey: You have a lot of stories about childhood. Is there a memory that sparks a story?
David: That’s why it helps sometimes. Like sometimes the scene will be provided by somebody else, like the New Yorker asked me to write something about winter and that led to something. Ira did a show called ‘The Super,’ about somebody who’s in charge of a building, and that led me to write about this woman who took care of us when I was young.
Like when I bought my monkey paintings—my midlife crisis—I’ve got to write something about it to earn some of that money back, so I wrote about art collecting. I probably wouldn’t have thought to write about that if I hadn’t bought that painting and panicked about earning some of that money back.
Corey: Do you ever ask your fans for ideas?
David: I’m gonna ask about the graduate thing. Sometimes things will come up. Like for my tour, the theme was defecating in stores, which happens all the time. I mean, I’ve never done it. Anyone who works in a store, customers will come in and go into the dressing room and defecate on the floor. I got some really good stories about that. The problem is—like with those monkey stories I got a few years ago—what you wind up with is a list, which doesn’t make for a story.
It’s still good to know.
Corey: When you’re signing, will people ask for certain things to be written in a book?
David: Sometimes, and I never write what people ask me to write, because I’m the professional and I always imagine the book winding up in a thrift shop and when someone says, ‘Can you write “I want to be the father of your love child?”’, I don’t want that in the Goodwill.
Corey: Do you keep a list of things you do write?
David: I do. I’m always on the lookout for a good thing to write in books, because one thing that’s a problem is you’ll sign somebody’s book and they’ll say, ‘That’s what you wrote last time.’ And I always think, ‘Fuck, why didn’t you tell me we met before?’
This one time I was signing books in Minneapolis, and this woman left her 8-year-old son next to me while she went and got in line. There was a long line. This kid was next to me at the signing table and at one point he said, ‘You just wrote that five books ago,’ and I said, ‘Keep it down. We don’t want people to know that.’
Corey: Do the fans ever get flirty?
David: Nobody does that to me.
Corey: I figured you had some dedicated fans who really get obsessed with the stories.
David: I’ve never really felt that. I’ve never felt that anybody has ever been creepy in that way. The only thing that ever gets uncomfortable—and it happens quite often—people will go to a reading and somebody will say, ‘I can’t afford your book, but here’s a book I’m trying to get published. It would be great if you could read it over and give me some feedback.’
And then I just can’t relate because I never would have done that. I know what it’s like to be an unpublished writer, and I was for many years. But it didn’t occur to me to approach somebody that way. This one woman gave me this book when I was on a book tour and it was like 250 pages. I said, ‘I’m gonna be gone for a month and I have a suitcase that’s already full.’ She said, ‘Well, what are you doing tonight?’
And often people write and say, ‘Can you give me feedback on this?’ All they want is your approval and so you’re tied into this thing. And I’m not a teacher for a good reason. I don’t know how to fix things. You have to be really careful with people. You don’t know them and know if they can take criticism or how they can take criticism. So it’s not anything to be treated lightly. Yesterday I got this sample chapter from this guy who wants to get his book published. I’ll write him back and say, ‘Thank you for your story, which I read with pleasure,’ on a postcard, so it won’t have my return address on it.
Corey: It’s odd that people would assume that just because you’re a writer, you’re an editor.
David: I think that’s what separates a writer from a writing student is that you still have to do it every day and you still have to work at it and that’s how you grow. A lot of people who write me say, ‘I want to get this published as soon as possible.’ When I was 22, I didn’t expect anything I wrote to be published. I might have had a dream that one day I’d have a book. I thought, ‘Well, like I’m still on the stairs in the basement. I haven’t even gotten to the first floor yet.’ I guess that’s my only problem, when I can’t relate to people. Like when people say something stupid, I do that all the time. I can relate to that. When they want me to read stuff for them and I don’t know them then I can’t relate.