Everyone I know loves David Sedaris, but I have been a holdout. Oh, David Sedaris, I'd say dismissively, when asked. Yeah, he's funny and all, but he makes things up and says they're true.
This doesn't bother everyone, apparently, but it bothers me.
But now I have read the first volume of his diaries ("Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002") and wouldn't you know, now I love him, too. This book is flat-out mesmerizing.
The early years, before success, are the most interesting. Sedaris works as an apple picker, a handyman, a painter, a house cleaner. He moves to Chicago, goes to college, lives in a terrible neighborhood, begins to teach, rides his bike everywhere, drinks too much.
We get poignant glimpses of his sister Tiffany, who clearly felt like an outsider in the family (and who committed suicide in 2013). "She left herself out of a lot this Christmas," Sedaris writes in 1987. "Every night has ended with Amy, Gretchen, Paul and me sitting on one bed or another and laughing until four in the morning."
Sedaris writes openly of his poverty, his insecurities, his substance abuse. ("I'm pretty sure I've been drunk every night for the past eighteen years," he writes in 1999, as he decides to get sober.) But most of his entries are observations of others, often just random people he meets on the street. "I was never one to write about my feelings," he says, "in part because they weren't that interesting. … If nothing else, a diary teaches you what you are interested in."
And what Sedaris is interested in is oddballs. Everyone he meets is quirky: the other customers at the IHOP, the fighting neighbors, the panhandlers, the angry men on buses, the weird women in laundromats, the one-armed dwarf carrying a skateboard.
Sedaris does not judge. His persona is that of a man with a good heart, and mostly he just seems fascinated by all the weird things that people say and do. (The second half of the book, where he becomes famous and moves to France, is less interesting, more cranky and self-absorbed.)
