David Sedaris Diaries

Since 1977 David Sedaris has kept roughly four diaries a year. One hundred fifty-three and counting. This is probably not a surprise to anyone who has read his books or listened to him read on the radio or from the stage, since his writing often makes reference to his diaries or quotes from them directly. Many of his early readers were introduced to his work when they heard him read his “SantaLand Diaries” story on National Public Radio in 1992. It was a memorable introduction to his acerbic wit and outsider’s vulnerability. It would not be wrong to imagine his working diaries as neatly packed with daily notations and humorously described encounters, but what is surprising is the visual nature of these layered and idiosyncratic volumes.

Along with his discipline of writing in them every day, he uses the 8 x 9½–inch plastic- or wire-bound volumes to accommodate an evolving and eclectic collection of artwork and ephemera. The diaries reveal that David has as sensitive an antenna for the interesting and eccentric visual artifact as for the overheard conversations and wry observations of strangers and family.

This daily routine serves as a preamble to his professional writing and is a way of warming up before working on other material or stories. In a recent exchange about his diaries and writing practices, he told me, “Writing in a diary helps you develop your voice. It also points out what you are interested in. For some people it’s art or politics or nature. For me it’s funny or fucked-up things. A guy two rows ahead of me on a crowded flight to Denver shits his pants, and that’s a good day for me.”

A quiet, observant man with a fearless curiosity, David is quick to wade into waters both dark and challenging and to emerge gleefully displaying discoveries of the profane and the profound. A lifetime of experiences and observations ends up duly inscribed in his trophy case of diaries (opposite). While many of his diary excerpts have been shared in published writings and readings, most remain sequestered in their private reserve, guarded by a grinning reminder of our mortal coil.

So it was with a bit of awe and trepidation that I first encountered this cabinet of curiosity. On a visit to London in 2013, David showed me some of the diaries, and I was captivated by their diverse range of covers. Their peculiar strangeness alone seemed worthy of documentation, and I suggested that they be compiled into a book.

I first met Sedaris in the early 1970s when we were Boy Scouts in Troop 366 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Standing at attention in our uniformed, pseudo-militaristic rows, David, bespectacled and small, appeared more like a dark-haired Grecian book elf than one of the gangly Southern log splitters making up much of our ranks. In hindsight, I can imagine he felt a little out of place. But most of us suffered from the physical and social awkwardness adolescence generously provides, so I didn’t really notice. It’s difficult to picture him in that forest-green summer uniform now, but perhaps it helps explain his current affection for culottes and the odd hat.

I was a Boy Scout because I liked to camp, and the weekend getaways gave me perfect opportunities to be obnoxious in a parentless environment. I think David’s being there was probably more his dad’s idea. He was a couple of years older than me, and so we didn’t interact much. I would see him quietly tagging along with the older boys’ clique, observing their Darwinian hierarchies and their more strident curiosities and cruelties. (Our troop’s outings were often a mash-up of Lord of the Flies meets The Andy Griffith Show meets a junior varsity Animal House.) If only he had been keeping a diary then.

The Sedarises’ Raleigh, North Carolina, living room, 2016

Several years passed, and I became romantically involved with his sister Gretchen. I was in high school then and still lived at home, but I seemed to be at the Sedarises’ house more than at my own. It was the kind of place you wanted to hang out in. Everyone who knew the family knew there was a different vibe at this house: a raucous energy and welcoming spirit with an OPEN 24 HOURS feel to it. The rock in this stream of constant motion was their mother, Sharon. She seemed always to be stationed as an abiding presence in the kitchen, and like most of the family’s visitors, I would often spend more time talking with her than with any of her six children.

In addition to the open-door policy—and the likelihood that someone would be up and about at almost any hour—the Sedaris house emanated a kind of urbane sophistication that felt exotic in our Southern suburban social landscape. The walls were covered in unfamiliar artworks often expressive of darker moods than the sunny prints and assembly-line landscape paintings many of our parents favored. Their father, Lou, had designed the house, set below the road and nestled in an unruly landscape of brambles and trees—in sharp contrast to the neighbors’ manicured lawns and shrubs. A kind of modern Addams Family eccentricity was the promise and the reward.

While there was conversation and laughter dominating the kitchen, and art and ceramics on display throughout the house, the small living room was the patriarch’s domain. Enthroned in a Barcelona chair, Lou gave audience to two of the largest stereo speakers I had ever seen and listened to jazz played nice and loud. But it was nothing compared to what would rattle the windows and the viscera when one of the kids got to the stereo. I was coming from a household of easy-listening radio and my older brother’s rock, so when I visited, my limited worldview expanded to a sound track of Lou snapping his fingers to Miles, Bird, and Coltrane—and Tiffany, David’s youngest sister, waging sonic warfare with Earth, Wind & Fire or Aretha Franklin. David and Gretchen leaned toward Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and Nina Simone, while Amy communed privately with Barbra Streisand downstairs.

As much as David is prone to dismiss his early diary writings and artwork, so too are we sometimes disposed to look with embarrassment and dismay at our early visual art preferences. The Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Hundertwasser prints are gone from David’s walls, but his knowledge and refined appreciation of art are still an important part of his life. David’s taste in artwork may have evolved since the seventies, when he yearned to move beyond North Hills, but the seeds were planted there and they continue to grow.

It’s no surprise that some of the Sedaris tribe came out of this environment hell-bent on a path of creative expression. I know I did.

Just as I was being introduced to this dynamic household, David was graduating and off to college. He appeared to mix short stays on a campus (Western Carolina University and Kent State, later graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago) with extended periods of itinerant travel. Preferring the seminomadic and anonymous lifestyle of the migrant fruit picker over college life, he would often hitchhike or take a bus to places that needed fruit harvesting, most often apple-growing regions. It seems appropriate now that he chose the hard work that symbolized seasonal transition.

The Sedarises were as attuned to the change of seasons as anyone I’ve known. Fall, particularly, held significance, with October 1 being designated an official holiday. Christmas was also especially revered. It was as if these transitions and holidays were important because they offered renewed opportunities for self-expression. In addition to their elaborately and cleverly wrapped gifts, even their tree was an opportunity to display an alternative viewpoint. One Christmas it was decorated with Crest toothpaste boxes that had been saved all year. It seemed to be a kind of yuletide homage to pop art. Another year it was tampons.

Postcard, Untitled (elbow to elbow / cheek to cheek), Ray Johnson, n.d.

Postcard, David Sedaris, 1979

Poor Lou. His hold on patriarchal supremacy was tenuous at best.

I think this attention to the seasons helps explain David’s devotion to finishing one diary and beginning another in conjunction with the year’s solstices and equinoxes. While we’re adjusting our clocks forward or backward, he’s picking out a new diary cover.

David has always had a well-developed, almost obsessive, work ethic, and it is easy to see how his pursuit of physical labor and the experiences that came out of it are integral to his writing.

Both to record his experiences and to stay in touch with family and friends during his extensive travel, he used various creative forms of correspondence (see here). It was a time in the culture when art was being made in nontraditional forms and formats, and the mail was embraced as a liberating and appropriate vehicle of expression.

In the fifties and sixties, a group of loosely linked international artists called Fluxus were making art “that subverted the inherited abstract value system—large, heroic, ambitious, and sexist—favoring an art that was intimate, ephemeral, and highly poetic” (Robert Pincus-Witten, in his introduction to Jon Hendricks’s Fluxus Codex). Mail art was a natural extension and expression of these new directions and practices—it was a form of art on a personal scale that used an easily accessible and democratic means of distribution.

It was also notably popularized by the interactive mailings of artist Ray Johnson in the sixties and seventies. Creator of the New York Correspondance [sic] School, he commonly sent mail directing a recipient to “please send to…” or “please add to and return” or “please add and send to,” fostering a chain of connections.

From 1968 to 1979, conceptual artist On Kawara created and mailed a series of postcards stamped with the day’s date and, in large capital letters, “I GOT UP AT” and the time. They were an extreme example of a nonintimate/objective diary entry. It was a simple, elegant, and factual declaration of process and presence in the world that used the postal system for dissemination and maintained connections with people around the world.

David was continuously creating his own hybrid of correspondence art, including postcards featuring journey-themed imagery and short poem-like declarations. He used these elements along with the visual lexicon of postal officialdom and verification—postage stamps, cancellation marks, baggage tags, stubs, receipts, and the ubiquitous rubber stamp. He also employed unusual materials for his mailings: overlays of acetate and window-screen mesh with some of the resulting layers attached with staples and string. It gave him the opportunity to keep making visual art, write and stay connected to friends, and remain active in an artistic community while traveling. David would sometimes make his cards prior to leaving on a trip, have some of us pick the ones we liked and address them to ourselves, and later send them to us from his far-flung outposts.