Frances Wilson

How does David Sedaris get away with saying the unsayable?

The bestselling American humorist continues to record his outrageous exchanges with both family and strangers in his latest volume of diaries

David Sedaris. [Getty Images]

These aren’t diaries in the sense that Chips Channon kept diaries, or Samuel Pepys. They aren’t diaries at all, beyond the fact that each entry records an event and has a date and place attached. If a diary is a conversation with yourself, A Carnival of Snackery is a conversation with a crowd, because the observations it contains were written as material for David Sedaris’s shows.

The entries, which begin in 2003 and continue to Christmas 2020, are therefore, as Sedaris admits, over-polished, and what we hear on the page is a spoken rather than a written voice. There are many other voices besides, because the book is a record of what we say to one another when we can’t, as Sedaris says of himself, ‘figure out what to say to people’ — which describes most of us much of the time and Sedaris all of the time.

The theme is communication and miscommunication, and the material comes from exchanges overheard on public transport and exchanges between Sedaris and his drivers, readers, friends and family. Here is a conversation with Lou, his homophobic father:

Dad called last night saying, like always, ‘David? David, is that you?’ We started talking about Christmas and when I asked him what he wanted, he answered: ‘I want for you to get a goddamned colonoscopy.’ ‘So for Christmas you want for someone to shove a pipe up my ass?’ ‘You’re damn right I do.’

The entries are largely gathered as the author goes about his work, and the most striking aspect of the book is what that work involves. Who else has a life like Sedaris? He tours the world like a rock star, flitting between Bulgaria, Arizona, Dublin, Dubai and Tokyo, reading aloud from his books to audiences who then queue deep into the night for him to sign their copy, because it is now that the show really begins.

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