David Sedaris is coming directly from the östermalm saluhall. What he especially liked, he declares while he langar over the your shopping to the boyfriend Hugh, was that it was about to be renovated. You could buy some kind of barack! He loves plywood! He has tried to get the carpenter to put up plywoodskivor at his summer house back home, but no one seems to understand what he means.
– It is a beach house I have, ” he adds quickly, on an island off the North Carolina…
I know exactly. ”Oh, Emerald Isle,” I say. ”What name did you decide on the second house to the end?”
it is a strange experience. For my part, it is not only – as well admit it at once – to meet my favorite living author. It is about stepping into a world where I already think that I know all. I have been in the beach house where David spends the summers with her rambunctious siblings and gruffige dad. I have met Hugh, the stabile boyfriend acting straight man in the stories (and now, dressed in checkered fiskehatt, take care of your shopping and go up in the room). I recognize aktivitetsarmbandet Sedaris has on the wrist when he puts himself settled into the couch in the hotel lobby – it registered the 60,000 steps a day the last time I read about the matter.
It is only the second time Sedaris is in Stockholm. He, then, has been a major name in the united states – bestsellerlistor, long-term employees in the New Yorker, endless book tours – have never really gone home in Sweden. Perhaps because his genre doesn’t really exist here. The word ”kåseri” get an american to associate to Torsten Ehrenmarks pleasant thoughts, but Sedaris is a humorist with Hjalmar Söderberg science, among other subjects, with His or Thorvalls eye for the corrosive painful (and with Eddie Meduzas mind filthy humor). He has an unerring ear for the ridiculous and the absurd, the idiotic title of a porn movie, the silly reply of a bugged fight. His sister Tiffany’s suicide. The mother’s alcoholism. Everything can Sedaris tell you about without losing neither the compassion or humor. But what says the family that tvångsanslutas to the world as a total stranger can believe themselves to be a part of? The father, consistently produced as a smug patriarch who puts a point of honor to never say a laudatory words to his son?
– My dad has never had any problems with what I have written. He has such a strong ego that he just thought, yeah, I hit my children with spoons in the pan at the dinner table and it was just good for them. He and I have been at war since I was two years old. I don’t know how many times he said to me, the only reason that I don’t hit you in the face is that then I will never be able to stop. And he did it not for that I would become a better person. He’s just an asshole.
” No, I thought that I will earn money on him. I write about him. He becomes a good figure in a history. The best characters to write about are those that have blind spots. And his blind spots are so large that you could drive a truck through them. Then I also thought: the guy is so old that he must die soon, so it does nothing!
says that is difficult to reproduce: they sound hard and unforgiving when you write them down, but performed with a wide, disarming smile. As the day before, when he appeared at Hedengrens, and managed to get the audience with him on a joke about child pornography that does not go to repeat, because it only worked through their tone of voice.
” But he persist, he continues the story of the father.
– Now he is 96, and for two weeks then I got a text message that he was dying. But when I got there, then he was back at the home for the elderly. I was able to give me the fuck on, I said, this made you just so I would have to fork out for two expensive plane tickets! But he is weak now, he said to me, ”I’m a zombie”. No, I said to him, a zombie can walk and eat solid food. And so he said…
Sedaris shed until his head and walks over to imitate a sick and old person’s barely audible voice:
”You won”. So that’s pretty nice.
New great smile. This is one of the secrets of the Sedaris comedy, the ability to tell the painful and embarrassing details in a liberating way. In ”Calypso”, the book which is now to be launched in English, he tells us about the last meeting with the mentally ill and extremjobbiga sister Tiffany before she takes a life of itself: she pops up at one of his performances, he orders the guards to reject her.
” It was one of those things, I didn’t write about it, and so suddenly I had written about it! And then I realized, it’s just the worst thing you can tell about yourself that people can recognize themselves in.
Photo: Hayoung Jeon/EPA
publicity. David Sedaris is gay, grew up in the american South at a time when his orientation was unacceptable, and race burning. He has written sensitive and self-disclosure on the issues, but without ever becoming dull and self-righteous. Of course, he knows where today’s identity politics comes from.
And yes, I can interfere with me at all strejta guys who get to play gays in the movie. Then they sit in a tv-show and are asked about the love scenes and tells how they suffered for the art… And I just, oh my god, I’m making out with Matt Damon for free! So I can see it from both sides. But this thing that you do not get to write about some group you do not belong to the group yourself… I am gay. If someone hetero to write about gay – be my guest! I don’t understand how people can get that there are rules around this. There are no rules around writing, this is why we love it.
But Sedaris form of humor, this reveal the worst about himself, becomes difficult. Recently, he wrote a text on the grounds that the governor of Virginia accused of to have appeared in blackface during the school year. The New Yorker rejected directly. Paris Review sent a half page with notes: you must remove, it here you need to add.
– There is something kind of extreme anxiety for what people should say on Twitter. Now for my new tour, I have written a story about when I left my bag at the mending in New Orleans and it destroyed it. My editor does not think that I will read it: it makes me seem callous. Why? Well, the guy was black. But the point of the story is precisely the uncomfortable situation that occurs when I’m white and the guy who is doing a bad job is black. Not that I’m suggesting that all blacks are lazy. But when I come home it is always that I at the same moment I pass through the customs to get a drenched yllerock over the shoulders and it is called RACE IN the united states. Welcome home, sir!
this is The way I think when I read my stuff in front of audience sometimes. Oh, they understood me not, I must explain myself better.
Sedaris is a social writer, his stories are to be tested and honed before an audience. If something does not work he corrects it. He compares with the fracas he and Hugh have sometimes: don’t quarrel, ” he says, without any misunderstandings.
– this is The way I think when I read my stuff in front of audience sometimes. Oh, they understood me not, I must explain myself better.
But if people do not want to understand? As on the public reading in New York a year or two ago when a woman in the audience insisted on hearing what he thought of Donald Trump.
– And finally I said, ok then, I would like to build a time machine and go back and smother him in the cradle. It turned out that she worked at CNN and tweeted out what I said. When I arrived back at the hotel had threats of death have already begun to come. So my publisher told me that I need to publish some sort of apology. So finally I wrote, ”this is David Sedaris, I apologize, if I had a time machine I would go even further back in time and persuade Trumps the mother to do abortion!”
New laughter. Enough talking about him. Sedaris’s turn to take out the little green notebook he always has with him and ask me out. What is it here that he has heard about the different tilltalsord in English? And my last name, means something in particular? I try to explain the difference between ”you” and ”you” and find out what ”Högström” will be in English. He writes. We will check on the old Swedish porrfilmstitlar and how difficult it is to translate them. The social activity that is David Sedaris writing is in progress.
Read more: David Sedaris hailed on the piggish garbage truck
