Philadelphia Weekly

David Sedaris is a funny guy. Interpret that however you like and its accuracy remains intact. He writes and speaks about his life, his family, his craft and his foibles with such an endearing and easy wit that, in the mid-'90s, he emerged as a literary phenomenon and never did get around to submerging once again from his increasingly large fan base.

He's a regular contributor to The New Yorker and This American Life, and his first five collections of essays and stories have collectively sold more than 2.5 million copies. His sixth collection When You Are Engulfed in Flames was released earlier this week.

Sedaris took time out of his book tour to speak to PW about his writing process, the diminutive stature of his global celebrity, and the amount of bodily harm he's prepared to inflict upon a helpless child in the rare moments of weakness in his newly nicotine-free life.

How does an essay germinate inside your head? When something happens do you think, "This is an essay happening right now"?
"Yesterday something happened and I thought, 'Oh, I bet that would make for a good story.' So I wrote about it in my diary this morning. And then I'll put it aside, and when the time is right to turn that into a story, I'll rewrite it.

"A lot of times things happen that just are more like incidents, and they don't really make for a story. Like years ago, I went with my brother to a trailer and we bought some marijuana. And that was something I wrote about in my diary, and I really liked it--that's my brother Paul [the Rooster]--but it didn't seem driven enough to make for a story.

"Often what happens is I'll connect it to something else. So then I was in Normandy, and I made coffee out of water that was in a flower vase, and I wrote about that in my diary and I thought, 'Oh, I bet I can connect that to buying drugs in the trailer and turn the whole thing into a story.' So sometimes it's waiting for the right time for it to be written."

"I'm aware of that when I'm writing it. And I'm aware that I need to add dialogue every so often or it's going to be boring for somebody sitting in an audience. I'm aware that if I introduce five characters in the first paragraph, somebody listening to the story will have a hard time keeping those people straight. Now I think of a listener as much as I think of a reader.

"When I think of a listener's head, I think of a stage. And I think I need to put characters on that stage. But I can't overcrowd it, or a listener will have a hard time following me.

"When you're reading a story, you can always flip back to the first page and think, 'Oh, that's who that person is. Right. Got it. I can move ahead now.' But you don't have that luxury when you're listening."

The fact that you've recently given up smoking seems to be a big topic of conversation these days. How's that going?
"Actually, quitting smoking wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it was going to be. I think the thing is that I sort of made up my mind. I never tried to quit smoking before. I never even thought about quitting smoking before. I hate it when people quit smoking. I do not recommend quitting for anybody. I'm not that kind of a quitter. It embarrasses me that I quit smoking. I think smoking is a good thing, and I think more people should do it.

"I had to quit because all the decent hotels went nonsmoking. It's easy to go to 30 cities in 30 days when you're staying at the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons. But if you're staying at the AmeriSuites out on the highway, it's hard. That's the only reason I quit.

"And because I made my mind up, I thought, 'Okay, Jan. 3 I'm going to quit smoking.' And Jan. 3 I quit smoking. That was a year and four months ago. And a couple days ago if you said to me, 'You can have a cigarette if you rip that child's arm off. There's a lit cigarette waiting for you right inside the socket. All you have to do is rip off the child's arm,' I would've done it. But that's really the first time in months I've had that strong of a craving. Generally I get a craving and it lasts 10 seconds and I just wait it out.

"I always told myself if I quit smoking I wouldn't know what to do with my hands. Well, I don't know, there's plenty to do with your hands. It's really not an issue."

You mentioned in Naked that smoking helped cure you of your plague of tics.
"None of my old nervous habits returned, but I developed a couple of new ones that are pretty insidious."

Such as?
"Well, there's a way that I can really concentrate on a muscle. Like, say, a muscle in my ankle. Really lean on it and concentrate on it. And in no time at all, I can be hobbling. I can give myself crippling pain. That's what I do now."

Only since you stopped smoking?
"Yeah. The beauty of it is that no one sees it happening. So my new habits, they're more painful than the old ones, but they're invisible to the naked eye. Somebody will see me hobbling, and they'll think, 'That man is somehow crippled.' But they don't see me leaning on that nerve. They don't see me causing myself pain as a result."

How has your family responded to their celebrity through your writing? Do you find them holding things back from you? Or pitching ideas?
"They don't really do either. I've never sprung anything on my family. That always is so surprising to me when people think I would, for instance, say to my family, 'Oh, there's something about you in The New Yorker coming out next week. You should buy it.' I always run something by them.

"If my sister Lisa's going to be in a story, I give it to her to read first, and I ask if there's anything she wants me to change or get rid of. I do that with everyone in my family so they're never blindsided like that. Sometimes they'll say to me, 'I'm going to tell you something, and I really don't want you to write about it.' But usually that's not necessary. I generally know what they don't want written about by this point.

"People have often said to me, 'How can your family stand you, after everything you've written about them?' and I'll say, 'Well, what have I written about them exactly?' And then they can't think of anything. My brother's dog eats shit. Well, yeah, but that's not my brother eating shit. That's my brother's dog.