An Evening With David Sedaris

"I EXIST" is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing-& all good writing. -David Foster Wallace

Nov 04, 2025

C.S. Lewis described the beginnings of a friendship as the moment “when one man says to another, what you too? I thought I was the only one.” For every Nebraskan, that moment occurs when one man says to another, “you hate Iowa too? I thought I was the only... no never mind. Of course you hate Iowa. Iowa is terrible.”

Rivalries between border states are not unique to just our two competing corn-producing economies. Kansas and Missouri literally fought a war against one another. When my brother moved to Wisconsin, he taught me the acronym FIB, which Wisconsinites define as Fucking Illinois Bastards. Us Nebraskans created our own acronym for our hated neighbors by declaring that they were all a bunch of “Idiots Out Wandering Around.” They like to retaliate by claiming that the “N” on the side of Nebraska football helmets stands for “knowledge.” It doesn’t. It stands for Nebraska. Fucking dumbasses.

It was a tough pill to swallow when my literary hero went on a book tour and the closest stop to my Omaha home was in Des Moines, Iowa. The drive was only two-hours and twelve-minutes, but... through... Iowa. And once I got to Des Moines I would have to watch David Sedaris in a room full of... people from... Iowa. Ingesting this dilemma would require the technique reserved for my dog’s Giardia parasite medication to get down. I opened the jar of peanut butter and purchased my ticket.

•••

I rediscovered Sedaris later in life when I started to take my own writing seriously. I first heard of him when my high school English teacher would read him out loud during my senior year. Around that time, I took a trip to the Lincoln, Nebraska Barnes and Noble to visit my brother. I convinced my mom to buy me a copy of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and a hip The Message translation of the Bible. Knowing I was on a roll, I snuck a copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day on the bottom of the book stack. Of those purchases, I started the Sedaris essay collection first, but once I realized he was gay I abruptly ceased in fear of its corrupting influence on my Midwestern youth-group-boy values. I couldn’t admit the joy I received from his honest and occasionally vulgar writing. I was ashamed by my pleasure from the words of someone so utterly unashamed of who he was. So, I stuffed the copy away—along with most of my feelings about morality and theology—until I was old enough to be honest about what I thought. And once I returned to Sedaris’s body of work, I learned that despite the stark contrast in upbringing, Sedaris and I thought a lot of the same things were funny. I thought I was the only one.

I am embarrassed to admit that I have not read all Sedaris’s books, but I do own them all. Many more than one copy. There’s this character in the TV show Lost whose favorite author is Charles Dickens. He carries around the only Dickens novel he has yet to finish, but because he loves Dickens so much, he can’t bear the thought of having read all that ol’ Charlie has written. He wants this book to be the last thing he reads before he dies. Sort of impractical really—especially during the scene where he thinks his secret fort is about to explode and he desperately opens the novel and tries to cram in several hundred pages of Dickensensian prose before a time bomb hit zero. But I kind of get it. I suppose Sedaris is sort of like that for me. I bought all of Sedaris’s books on eBay, searching for autographed doodles and clever inscriptions he made during public signings that apparently mean more to me than they do to Rich, Debbie, Kit, or whoever else was gifted a book from some relative. One would think I would have worked through each volume promptly, but instead I prefer to savor them. I love the idea that when my reading gets stale or I’m in a particularly depressed state, I can simply grab one of my copies of Calypso and start a fresh experience with the author who seems to get me.

After I started reading Sedaris again, I wrote an essay about the copy of Theft by Finding I acquired from a little free library. I liked the essay, but it wasn’t anything terribly impressive. It was the kind of fun writing that you just sort of fart out. But I was desperate for attention nonetheless, so I found the address of Sedaris’s publisher and mailed a photocopy of my typewritten draft to him. I was hopeful I may hear something back, but not optimistic. A few months later, I received a postcard in the mail. On the front was a sketch of a Russian prison tattoo depicting a man-goat playing an acoustic guitar sitting atop a hammer and sickle. The lyrics, once translated from Cyrillic, read “but in the graveyard everything is peaceful, everything is proper, absolute bliss.”

On the opposite side was a handwritten note.

“Dear Chris,

I wouldn’t use so many parentheses if I were you. They’re the mark of an insecure writer. An exception is George Saunders. He can get away with it for some reason.

Sincerely,

David Sedaris”

•••

I am easily starstruck and often disappointed by my nervous awkwardness after meeting someone I admire. I stopped trying to be funny in front of famous funny people, but I still have this hope of coming off as not-a-total-weirdo. I’m usually disappointed with my performance. I had a typewritten letter and an advance copy of my own memoir in my backpack as I anxiously inched closer to a folding table. Sedaris was holding court signing the title pages of his own books. He had a pile of Sharpies next to him—not whatever size pile of markers you are imagining, take that mental image and quadruple it—and a silicone fetus. It wasn’t the first time I had seen a fetus of that sort. Sedaris was clearly enamored by it. He practiced drawing it on the back of a paper leaflet that was intended for you to write down who you want him to inscribe your book to. He transferred the image onto the book of a fan in front of me before selecting a flesh-colored Sharpie to fill in the outline. He seemed pleased with the result and handed the book back to its owner. She seemed pleased as well.

There was only one more person before my turn. Her name was Kenna. I knew her name was Kenna, because Sedaris cheerfully declared, “fuck you Kenna, fuck you,” after she handed him four worn volumes to be inscribed. It wasn’t the first time I had waited behind Kenna that evening. She was the same woman who frustratingly told a gate attendant “I was the first one here, I’ve been here since 6:00 PM,” when the other security line was moving faster than ours to gain entrance to the pre-show book signing.

“Seriously, fuck you Kenna.”

Kenna walked away laughing. It was my turn.

My anxiety was high, somehow even more so since it seemed inevitable that my idol would actually be interacting with me and not just silently signing my book with a half-smile until I said, “thank you,” and walked away. It was as if he had been waiting for me.

“Who are you?”

Usually this is an easy question, but I was struggling with the answer. He asked my kids’ ages. No idea. He asked me where they went to school, so I gave them the name of their future high school, even though my oldest child has yet to enter middle school. I seriously couldn’t remember the name of their elementary, even though Sedaris would have never known if I was telling the truth. I couldn’t come up with it. Sensing my struggle, he bailed me out.

“It wasn’t long since they used to be this size.”

He picked up the life-size replica fetus from its resting place atop a nylon drawstring bag and cradled it in his palm.

“Someone gave me this last night. I think it’s a right-to-life thing, but I’m fascinated by it. I looked up buying more, but they go for like two for $35.”

Finally, a topic I knew how to engage with.

“Ohh I know all about those fetuses. They used to hand them out for free at the Nebraska State Fair. My high school friends and I would try to collect a bunch because one of my buddies wanted to make a necklace out of them.”

Sedaris laughed. He wasn’t exactly sure what to make of the comment but seemed to be amused. He drew a picture of a praying mantis on the inside title page of my copy of his first collection of diary entries. It was the same book I had found in a little free library that kick started my rediscovered fandom.

“Can I give you this?”

“What is it?”

“It’s a copy of the book I wrote. And a letter I wrote to you.”

Sedaris graciously accepted the gifts and slid the contents into some container underneath the table. The fetus he left in plain sight.

•••

My heart rate was elevated, but I felt triumphant as I found my seat in the auditorium. I was in the third seat from the aisle, a single buffer between myself and the next closest occupant. It was a half-hour before the scheduled start time, and the residents of central Iowa were gradually making their way into the concert hall. This mundane task of entering and sitting down seemed a way bigger deal here than it was in the great state of Nebraska.

“I am SO SORRY. But I’m going to have to ask you to get up. You see, my seat is down the row from where you are seated and I need to get by in order to reach my own seat. I am so sorry. If I could just scoot by and step around...”

I had already pulled in tighter since the moment she approached, but this old woman insisted on delivering her entire monologue justifying her actions before setting off on her journey. Once she had successfully transitioned from my right-hand side to my left-hand side, she started the speech all over again to my closest neighbor. But this time she had an engaged audience.

“No problem at all, that’s alright. I completely understand. You know these rows are really narrow…”

“They are, aren’t they?”

“They sure are.”

“I think these old theaters just tried to cram as many seats in as they could. People were a lot smaller back in those days too.”

“They sure were, not like today.”

“Ohh no, not like today.

It was a good thing she had arrived early. This was going to take her a while.

•••

I was aware that David Sedaris is 33 years older than me, but it didn’t occur to me that this meant the rest of the audience would be as well. I thought he was like this hip, underground thing us left-leaning moderate kids liked. I knew he wrote for The New Yorker, but I guess I never pictured the kind of person who actually read The New Yorker attending his public readings. I was easily in the 99th percentile of audience members when it came to years left prior to retirement. With the woman properly seated in her velvet cushion in the center of the row, I turned my eavesdropping to the conversations behind me.

“Do you have your furnace inspected?”

“Ohh yes. Every year. My air conditioner too.”

“Hmm. I should probably do that.”

“Yes, I do my furnace in the fall and my AC in the spring. It’s amazing what can go wrong with them. They always find something.”

We were inching closer to start time but the seats at either side of me were still vacant. A wrinkly woman and her wooden-cane-supported husband took the two empty cushions to my right. Thank God they showed up after the last woman, otherwise we’d still be listening to her profuse apologies. I saw how laborious standing up to allow someone to enter the row was for this geriatric couple when my left-handed seatmate made her triumphal entry. She had short silver hair and a hooded sweatshirt resembling a quilt. A Christian cross pattern fashioned out of four nails was embroidered where the left breast pocket would normally be located. She said goodbye to her daughter, a young brunette with a cleavage tattoo, and traveled across the elderly couple on the end and past my lap. Her offspring found her seat next to a man in a jean jacket three rows in front of where we were seated.

“We really should have bought our tickets at the same time so we could all sit together,” the quilt sweatshirt lady said to no one in particular. While I was wondering if she understood how ticket purchases worked, she yelled at her daughter, who ignored her. So she yelled again, a bit louder this time. Still nothing. After the third attempt, the young lady with the cleavage tattoo froze for a moment—the kind of pause you make while slowly inhaling through your nose in order to calm your nerves—and turned around to address her mother.

“Yes mom?”

“Photo! Photo!”

Cleavage Tattoo hit Jean Jacket on the shoulder. He tried to ignore it. So she hit him again. He visibly sighed, turned his head past his shoulder, and gave a forced half-smile while his mother-in-law snapped a cell phone photo using both hands. The young couple turned back around as quickly as they could to avoid further requests. My neighbor fumbled with the photo a bit more on her phone. She typed “David” into a search engine, presumably in an attempt to send the photo to a man named David, but instead the results yielded a variety of Star of David icons she could select from to superimpose on top of the photo. Frustrated, she closed the window, put the phone on her lap, and started asking personal questions to the man she had never met seated to her left. She had a lot she wanted to ask him.

The event was scheduled to begin at 7:30 PM, but Sedaris had agreed to sign books for a full hour ahead of time, and then again afterward indefinitely into the evening until all requests were filled. It was amazing to see his lack of hurry earlier in the line. He had little need for efficiency, rather he wanted to ensure every person he interacted with felt like they were being seen and cared for. But when 7:33 PM rolled around, Quilt Hoodie had about had it.

“Come on let’s gooooooooooooooooo... this was supposed to start 3 minutes ago.........”

Sedaris walked onto the stage four minutes later, wearing a muu muu and clown shoe combat boots. One would think that his arrival would satisfy my seatmates impatience, but she was mostly distracted by her cell phone going off at the exact moment Sedaris began to address the crowd. I’m always amazed at the number of clicks and the amount of confusion that accompanies an old person whose cell phone rings unexpectedly. A swift, single push of the side button would cure the awkwardness, but when the bullets start flying it’s hard to know how someone will react. Quilt Hoodie was about to be shot. When she finally managed to silence her ringtone, I settled in for a full evening of uninterrupted frivolity courtesy of my favorite humorist. But at the first punch line, I learned we had a much bigger problem than an unexpected phone call.

This woman had a really fucking annoying laugh.

And David Sedaris is really funny.

•••

We often have no idea how annoying we are to others. I had no clue that I bounced up and down from walking on the balls of my feet until I watched a video of myself in an eighth-grade multimedia class. It made more sense why classmates would trot next to me in the hallway and start skipping up and down to match my gait. As the woman next to me reacted to every Sedaris joke, I had a feeling she had no idea either. It wasn’t so much that she sounded weird, it was more so the way that every chuckle seemed to be calculated and forced based off what she felt the appropriate noise should be for the given humor. For the first half of Sedaris’s opening essay, I fumed, but eventually I decided to diagram her laughter in my pocket notebook.

The dimmed house lights made taking notes difficult, so I initially developed a laughter morse code. Each dot represented a punchy “ha!” and for the first few readings she alternated between:

. . . . . ………

and

………………… .

As she warmed up, her lung capacity increased and the staccato breaths of laughter became elongated. Such as:

____________________________

_ _ _ _ ____________ _ _ _ _

But then she started alternating her pitch, necessitating the addition of a y-axis to my diagram. The prolonged single breath laughs remained, but the octaves fluctuated.

Eventually my code started to fail me. I didn’t know how to transcribe “yah! ha! hee ha ha” into a system of dots and dashes. And my methodology completely missed the contextual usage of each form of forced laughter. Like when she agreed with some observation made by Sedaris and delivered a knowing “ah! ha ha” in affirmation of his assessment of human behavior.

And then she just started talking back to him while she laughed.

Sedaris: “I learned that a woman after the age of 25 is known as a thornback.”
Quilt Hoodie: “Ha! The heck?”

Sedaris: “Could a person make a living jerking off into a gym sock?”
Quilt Hoodie: “Ah ha ha… gee…”

Sedaris: “Go back to whore island.”
Quilt Hoodie: “Ha AAAAA. Oh my God.”

Sedaris: “... a dog named Becky.”
Quilt Hoodie: “Ha, yeah. Becky.”

Sedaris: “Which is anal sex.”
Quilt Hoodie: “Ah!”

Sedaris “And in Mormon culture that’s called the poop hole loophole.”
Quilt Hoodie: “ooooooooo”

When Sedaris mentioned putting “the fucked-up genie back in its bottle,” she made sure to finish his sentence by proclaiming “bottle!” in unison with him. She knew where this joke was going. And she was proud of herself for it. When he rhetorically asked, “if you would suck another man’s cock if it would cure cancer?” she just started coughing. She reacted to Sedaris’s lament of the going-ons in urban Oregon with a hearty “Portland is just a mess,” but was mysteriously silent after a joke about a MAGA hat wearing truck owner who named his disobedient dog “Trumper.” The only natural laugh that felt unforced occurred after Sedaris compared the fact checking process at The New Yorker to “being fucked up the access by a hot Thermos.”

•••

The night was coming to an end, and judging from the number of times the woman’s Apple Watch lit up between fake laughs, she wasn’t planning on being out this late. As Sedaris started taking Q&A at 9:22 PM, she turned to me.

“Excuse me I need to go.”

Even without my partner next to me, I was now so self-conscious about the sounds of my own laughter that it was hard to fully participate. When Sedaris mentioned a fondness for Iowa-based grocery chain Hy-Vee, the Des Moines crowd erupted. They yelled at him about trying the “Hy-Chi” Chinese food, and then demanded he go to Casey’s for pizza. He had never heard of Casey’s, and when they told him it was a gas station, he was appropriately confused. But at this point the crowd was in a frenzy with regional pride.

Fuck. Chill out Iowa. It’s not like he said he ate a Runza.

With no longer needing to collect laughter data, I could now go back to paying attention to the ladies behind me who had earlier compared notes on furnace inspections. They had begun their own one-way conversation with Sedaris as he described the premise of the Amazon Prime documentary titled A Very British Brothel. They insisted they would not be watching it despite his hearty endorsement.

•••

After the show, I purchased a copy of Sedaris’s children’s book Pretty Ugly and went back into the autograph line to get it signed for my kids. Even after meeting him and successfully delivering a copy of my own book to him, I was still nervous. The line was moving slower than before. With no start time to hit, Sedaris’s pace was even less urgent. He ate a steak and baked potato between asking autograph seekers about their jobs at Hy-Vee’s rival grocery stores. When a high schooler agreed to his offer of eating a bread roll, Sedaris took his time slathering the secondhand appetizer with ample whipped butter. Eventually it was my turn.

“Didn’t I meet you once already?”

“Yeah, but I picked up another book for my kids.”

“Ohh, well I feel bad for you having to wait in line twice.”

“It’s ok, I didn’t think about it until just now.”

“Who are your kids?”

“Their names are Manuela, Karol, and Kener. They were adopted from Colombia.”

“Wow. I once thought about adopting a kid with Down syndrome. I even looked into it. It was strange seeing how many kids are out there waiting to be adopted.”