Author David Sedaris appears at Peace Center in Greenville this week -- check out our Q&A

Since he emerged on the national scene on NPR in 1992, recounting his days playing a Christmas Elf at Macy’s, David Sedaris has established himself as one of America’s preeminent humor writers.

His dozen books have sold more than 10 million copies, he has been awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor, nominated for three Grammy awards, and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

When we talked, David Sedaris was in New York, a finalist for a PEN award for essay writing for his latest book, “Happy Go Lucky.” As he predicted, he didn’t win the PEN award, but the book of essays, released in 2022, is the latest of his series of New York Times best-sellers.

For decades, Sedaris has spent several months each year touring the U.S. and the world. He says he can be his best self in front of an audience … plus he craves the attention. A touring stint this spring will bring him to Greenville, one of 42 cities in 52 days.

Sedaris is scheduled to appear at the Peace Center’s concert hall on April 13 for an evening of readings and monologues, followed by a book signing.

Raised in the Raleigh, N.C. area, Sedaris has a beach home on Emerald Isle along the southern portion of the Outer Banks. He and his longtime partner, Hugh, spend much of their time in West Sussex, England, where Sedaris is known for his long walks, gathering roadside trash, and a recurring radio program on the BBC.

Sedaris writes a lot about his family, especially about his father, Lou Sedaris, who died in 2021 at the age of 98. The two had an often-contentious relationship. “My father was not a good person, but he was a great character,” he told NPR. “I know plenty of people who are good people, but terrible characters.”

Amy Sedaris, David’s sister, is an acclaimed comic actor and has co-written several plays with him as “The Talent Family.”

Talk Greenville: Thank you for taking the time to talk with us. We’re talking in early March and your tour doesn't start for about a month, so what are you doing now?

From March TALK: Greenville's Bon Secours Wellness Arena GM Beth Paul

David Sedaris: What am I doing? Well, I'm in New York and I just finished lunch. Tonight are the PEN awards and I'm nominated. So I've been trying to figure out an outfit to wear. You’ve got to figure you're going to lose, so you don't want to be too dressed up. I want to be dressed up, but I don't want to be dressed up in a "look at me" outfit that turns into a "look at me lose" outfit.

TG: In some of your stories, it seems like the road is the character, the fact that you're on tour is the character and not necessarily the individual places.

DS: That's an interesting observation because I'm trying to work on something right now. I went to India, but for some reason, I'm making it more about this round-the-world trip that I went on, rather than just about India. I think that's right, it's the road that is the character more than the particular places. I don't know why, though.

TG: On tour, you're in a different city every day for weeks. Do you have a consistent routine? 

 DS: I try to maintain one, but it's hard. What makes it hard is I make it hard. Someone got me started on Duolingo. When I started off, I did just a couple of episodes a day. Then I realized that it was giving me assignments, so then I have to do all the assignments. That ratchets you up to like half an hour or 40 minutes a day. And then I realized I was actually in competition with other people. I don't know them, but I need to crush them. So that takes me hours a day. Then I have this Apple Watch that demands that I walk a minimum of 10 miles a day, so it's just a lot to do that and other stuff at the same time. I got rid of my Fitbit, but now I have an Apple Watch. I had both of them for a while and it was just too much. I'm too old to have that many things on my wrist.

TG: Your house in Emerald Isle, N.C., the Sea Section, is another character in a lot of your stories. How often do you try to get to the beach? Do you have plans to go there? 

 DS: I haven't been there in a while. My boyfriend, Hugh, goes a lot more than I do. But because I was on tour and I went to so many cities last year, I was only there for one night. I vote there. During the pandemic, we were there all the time. We'd stay for weeks at a time. Hugh swims, and it's never too cold for him. He's in the water all the time so that's part of the appeal to him. He didn't grow up there. I grew up there. When we bought the house, I assured him it would get knocked over by a hurricane, and he didn't believe me. All it took was a couple of years, and it happened.

TG: Do you prefer talking to folks in smaller venues or in bigger theaters? 

 DS: I remember years and years ago, I agreed to do this charity thing. Someone was raising money for something or other and she said, 'Will you come and do a reading in my apartment?' There were like, I don't know, eight people who had paid lots of money to be there. And it was death. It was the worst. Especially because you're trying to read something that's funny — in front of eight people. Afterward, they all said, 'Oh my God, my cheeks hurt from laughing!' And it's like, 'You didn't laugh. I was here. I would have noticed it.'

TG: So, is there a critical mass for laughter? 

DS: Yeah, that’s it. It's different when you're in a theater and the lights go down, right? When you're on a book tour, you're in bookstores and the lights don't go down. Then people, you can see them, and they have that look on their faces. That rictus of pleasure because they're being polite. I much prefer it when people don't have that burden, and they're in the dark, and they can yawn, and they can frown, and they can groan and not have to worry about hurting my feelings.

TG: Do you think people are born funny? 

 DS: I don't know. I think most of the funny people I know are from funny families. I don't know anybody who is the only funny person in their family. The funniest people I know are from big families. I was with my sister, Amy, the other day along with someone else and she said, 'In our family, if you had feelings, you got mocked for it. You got made fun of.' And I thought, 'Oh yeah, that really is true.'

TG: Is there a difference in the dynamic of the conversation when you and Amy are together on a talk show as opposed to when it's just you talking to the host?

DS: It's similar, but we're different. Amy doesn't really want to tell a story about something in the past, even if the past is, like, yesterday. She's more in the moment and just commenting on things around her. Nobody is better at that than her. Nobody. I just marvel at the way her mind works.

TG: So, you like to let stories marinate a while before you tell them?

DS: Yeah. Poor Hugh, he has to hear the same stories over and over and over again. Something will happen and it becomes a story and I polish it, tell it over and over and over again, and then I put it away on this little shelf and then I find something else to polish. Amy doesn't do that. She's just in the moment and in the world.

TG: When you've told Hugh a story, and you polish and polish it, how do you know when you've got it? What reaction do you get from him that tells you it's ready?

DS: Well, if Hugh says something is horrible or disgusting, then it's a pretty good sign that it's ready. If he doesn't like it, that's a pretty good sign that it's going to work, actually.

 TG: A little bit more serious question about your dad. You've said that toward the end of his life when dementia had really affected him, it changed his media diet because he had a hard time working the TV and radio controls. Talk a little bit about that.

DS: Before that, he always had Fox News on at home and Rush Limbaugh, or conservative talk radio, in the car. He was always angry; he was constantly enraged over everything. He would call me and say something like, 'Obama thinks that your money belongs to him!' and I'd be like, 'Well, I never expect not to pay taxes.' And then he'd get mad that I wasn't mad about it. There are people on the left who are like that, too. They’re constantly furious. When he went to the assisted living place, the television was really complicated, and he couldn't figure it out, and so he just stopped. He wasn't angry all the time for the first time in years."

TG: Any sense of whether he felt more at peace by not being spun up all the time? 

 DS: It made him a lot easier to be around. But there's a righteousness that comes with that too? If you're feeling that other people are wrong, you're feeling that you're right, you know? So that egotistical sense of superiority was taken away from him.

TG: What's your media diet like? 

DS: Before the election, I would listen to a lot of political podcasts that would keep me kind of wound up. I mean, I was better than my dad, but you know ... Then, after the election, I didn't have the energy for it anymore, just let it all go. Now, I listen to a podcast by a linguist or, you know, listen to audiobooks. I don't have a TV, so I don't watch the news or anything.

From Greenville News, 2017: David Sedaris embraces life's quirks

TG: How do we calm down that anger? Is there something that can be done? 

DS: I don't want to be ignorant, you know. I don't want to not know what's going on, but I do feel like I don't need the news that I receive to be so pointed. I'm a grown-up. I feel like I can make up my own mind about it. I don't need the editorial, I guess. I think it's the editorial that tends to wind me up more.

TG: Any examples? 

DS: When something happens and everyone's talking about it, right? Like, the Roald Dahl books being rewritten. I was asked to write about that, but by that time there were, like, 60 things you could read about it. I didn't have anything to say that was any different than any of those other people. There are other things that maybe I feel I do have a unique take on, but that wasn't one of them. I'm fortunate that I didn't need the money. If I needed the money, I would have said, 'Yeah, I'll come up with some anger about that.'

TG: You've been interviewed, what, thousands of times? Is there a question that you haven't heard yet? 

DS: I did an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Company, and it was a radio interview, and I don't remember this woman's name, but she's like the Terry Gross of Canada. At the end of it, I felt like I needed to pay her. Wow! I said things I probably should not have said. She just took me to this place that I hadn't been before. I hadn't been asked her questions before, and I was just surprised. It was interesting. They started off simple enough, and then she just dug deeper, maybe like what a psychiatrist would do? Then CBS' 60 Minutes did a story about me last year, and they spent a lot of time with me, and I didn't want to sound like a (jerk), but I wanted to say: 'You haven't asked me anything that I haven't been asked a hundred times before.’ I felt like if it was for 60 Minutes, maybe they would want to know more. Maybe they're assuming that the audience doesn't know who I am so they're introducing me.

TG: I would think that's a dwindling number of people these days. 

 DS: Oh, you'd be surprised. I meet people all the time at my book signings who say, 'I invited people to come with me, but none of them had ever heard of you.'

TG: You're on stage a lot, on TV and radio a lot. Has the fact that everything is recorded now, that any moment anywhere can potentially go viral, be the next TikTok, changed things for you?

DS: I was on a plane not long ago, and I saw somebody secretly filming the flight attendant. They had kind of a furtive look on their face and were hiding their phone, right? It just seems so sneaky to me and such a violation, but people do it all the time. I thought of it the other day … when was the last time I was upset with somebody and anyone could tell? That would be the worst to be caught out of control in an unguarded moment. I remember there was a woman who was drunk, and she came up at a book signing in Charleston (SC). She cut in front of the line, and she crouched down in front of me and started slurring about something political, and I just couldn't take it. I just blew her up. I was like, 'Get away! Go away!' I called for security. I couldn't take it anymore. So, fortunately nobody has that on camera. There's nothing worse than having to talk to a drunk person like that.

TG: I wanted to ask you about driving. You've written about how you don't drive. How did that happen? 

DS: I took Driver's Ed, but when I did start driving, I was just so anxious — and it never went away. I was out with my mom one day driving, and I hit a mailbox and that was it. Never drove again. Actually, I drove one time after that. I was in New Zealand about eight years ago, and Hugh and I were staying at this hotel in the middle of nowhere. I said, 'You know what, let me drive. I'm going to drive up the driveway.' And I scraped the rental car against a stone wall. No traffic, there's nothing. It was a straight line, and I couldn't handle it.

TG: The fact that you don't drive, that you're always riding with people, does it give you better stories?

 DS: I think so. Used to be, you had a radio in your car, and you listened to the radio. I remember being on tour in Kansas and listening to Christian call-in shows because that's all I could get on the radio. Well, now you have your audiobook or you have your podcast, so you control what you listen to. You're not surprised the way you used to be. I think it's a good thing that I'm in cars with people and have conversations with people who I ordinarily would not have met. A woman drove me one time and it turned out her cousin had both his arms chewed off by pigs in Mexico when he was a baby. She said that he sewed the buttons on her shirt recently. It's like, what? I would never have known that if I hadn't been in the car with this person.

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: TALK Greenville's 15 Minutes With author, humorist David Sedaris