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25 great essays and short stories by david sedaris, you can't kill the rooster, us and them, go carolina, it's catching, our perfect summer, old lady down the hall, the man who mistook his hat for a meal, now we are five, laugh, kookaburra, journey into night, the santaland diaries, when you are engulfed in flames, company man, the shadow of your smile, my finances, in brief, why aren’t you laughing by david sedaris, see also..., 150 great articles and essays.

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20 Free Essays & Stories by David Sedaris: A Sampling of His Inimitable Humor

in Comedy , Literature | September 15th, 2014 6 Comments

My first expo­sure to the writ­ing of David Sedaris came fif­teen years ago, at a read­ing he gave in Seat­tle. I could­n’t remem­ber laugh­ing at any­thing before quite so hard as I laughed at the sto­ries of the author and his fel­low French-learn­ers strug­gling for a grasp on the lan­guage. I fought hard­est for oxy­gen when he got to the part about his class­mates, a ver­i­ta­ble Unit­ed Nations of a group, strain­ing in this non-native lan­guage of theirs to dis­cuss var­i­ous hol­i­days. One par­tic­u­lar line has always stuck with me, after a Moroc­can stu­dent demands an expla­na­tion of East­er:

The Poles led the charge to the best of their abil­i­ty. “It is,” said one, “a par­ty for the lit­tle boy of God who call his self Jesus and… oh, shit.” She fal­tered, and her fel­low coun­try­man came to her aid. “He call his self Jesus, and then he be die one day on two… morsels of… lum­ber.”

The scene even­tu­al­ly end­ed up in print in “Jesus Shaves,” a sto­ry in Sedaris’ third col­lec­tion,  Me Talk Pret­ty One Day . You can read it free online in a selec­tion of three of his pieces round­ed up by  Esquire . Sedaris’ obser­va­tion­al humor does tend to come out in full force on hol­i­days (see also his read­ing of the Saint Nicholas-themed sto­ry “Six to Eight Black Men” on Dutch tele­vi­sion above), and indeed the hol­i­days pro­vid­ed him the mate­r­i­al that first launched him into the main­stream.

When Ira Glass, the soon-to-be mas­ter­mind of  This Amer­i­can Life , hap­pened to hear him read­ing his diary aloud at a Chica­go club, Glass knew he sim­ply had to put this man on the radio. This led up to the big break of a Nation­al Pub­lic Radio broad­cast of “The San­ta­land Diaries,” Sedaris’ rich account of a sea­son spent as a Macy’s elf. You can still hear  This Amer­i­can Life ’s full broad­cast of it on the show’s site .

True Sedar­i­ans, of course, know him for not just his inim­itably askew per­spec­tive on the hol­i­days, but for his accounts of life in New York, Paris (the rea­son he enrolled in those French class­es in the first place), Nor­mandy, Lon­don, the Eng­lish coun­try­side, and grow­ing up amid his large Greek-Amer­i­can fam­i­ly. Many of Sedaris’ sto­ries — 20 in fact — have been col­lect­ed at the web site,  The Elec­tric Type­writer , giv­ing you an overview of Sedaris’ world: his time in the elfin trench­es, his rare moments of ease among sib­lings and par­ents, his futile father-man­dat­ed gui­tar lessons, his less futile lan­guage lessons, his relin­quish­ment of his sig­na­ture smok­ing habit (the easy indul­gence of which took him, so he’d said at that Seat­tle read­ing, to France in the first place). Among the col­lect­ed sto­ries, you will find:

• “The San­ta­land Diaries” (audio)
• “The Youth in Asia,” “Jesus Shaves,” and “Giant Dreams, Midget Abil­i­ties”
• “Our Per­fect Sum­mer”
• “Let­ting Go”
• “Now We Are Five”

For the com­plete list, vis­it:  20 Great Essays and Short Sto­ries by David Sedaris . And, just to be clear, you can read these sto­ries, for free, online.

Note: If you would like to down­load a free audio­book nar­rat­ed by David Sedaris , you might want to check out Audi­ble’s 30 Day Free Tri­al. We have details on the pro­gram here . If you click this link , you will see the books nar­rat­ed by Sedaris. If one intrigues, click on the “Learn how to get this Free” link next to each book. 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Be His Guest: David Sedaris at Home in Rur­al West Sus­sex, Eng­land

David Sedaris Reads You a Sto­ry By Miran­da July

David Sedaris and Ian Fal­con­er Intro­duce “Squir­rel Seeks Chip­munk”

David Sedaris Sings the Oscar May­er Theme Song in the Voice of Bil­lie Hol­i­day

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer . Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book .

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Comments (6) |

Related posts:

Comments (6), 6 comments so far.

When­ev­er we are down and out, there is David to lift our spir­its. I hope he knows just how muh joy he brings to the life of the aver­age read­er. David, the world loves you.

I just rec­om­mend­ed your site to my grand­son. He is 40 and I am 80 but we like the same Kinds of read­ing. Thanks

Love David Sedaris’s work. I enjoy read­ing his work aloud & can laugh myself into a fren­zy , which is very fun. He is the anti­dote to what­ev­er ails me. Much respect. Please nev­er stop writ­ing for us :-)

I had already trad­ed my Amer­i­can Life for an Ital­ian one when David rose to suc­cess and I was in the dark until, while on a vis­it back to the States, my sis­ter intro­duced me to his work. I bought sev­er­al of his books to take back with me.

The build­ing I lived in was a restored 16th Cen­tu­ry sta­ble and sound trav­eled in odd ways. One night, as I lay on my cot which could have sub­sti­tut­ed for a board in a masochis­tic clois­tered con­vent, the young cou­ple upstairs had final­ly got­ten their frac­tious, col­icky baby to sleep, I could final­ly read. Silence was of the essence.

I opened my first David Sedaris book, the one that begins with him try­ing to drown a mouse out­side his home in Nor­mandy when he is inter­rupt­ed in his mur­der­ous act by some­one seek­ing direc­tions. That was hilar­i­ous enough, but I man­aged to con­trol myself on behalf of the sleep deprived trio who slum­bered above me.

Then I got to French Lessons and par­tic­u­lar­ly to “are thems the brains of young cows?” as David attempts to order calves brains in his local butch­er shop.

I had a near death expe­ri­ence that late night, oblig­ed as I was to turn over and bury my face in my pil­low in order to muf­fle my shrieks of laugh­ter. I could­n’t stop. I was learn­ing Ital­ian at the time and had recent­ly told a room­ful a peo­ple that once, I had found my lost infant sis­ter lying beneath a squid.

The word for hedge is siepe, which is the thing she was in fact lying under fast asleep and not a squid which is sep­pia.

I can’t recall now exact­ly how much time I was com­pelled to remain face down on that pil­low, but it was long enough to begin run­ning out of oxy­gen and yet each time I thought I was safe to regain a sem­blance of san­i­ty and lift­ed my head I was again assailed by incon­trol­lable laugh­ter.

I now live in a 13th Cen­tu­ry build­ing where sound bounces around in even weird­er ways. The Labrador pup­py upstairs,left to his soli­tary devices dur­ing the day, whacks his heavy chew toy on the floor above my head while I try to write, result­ing in the explo­sive sound of a stack of heavy books being repeat­ed­ly slammed down on the floor.

And that is when I look to David, free as I am to sub­mit to venge­ful aban­doned laugh­ter. After all, the pup­py can’t call the land­lord to com­plain.

Your link to the San­ta­land audio at This Amer­i­can­Life seems to be bro­ken: looks like they’ve reor­gan­ised their site.

Here’s a new, work­ing link: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/47/christmas-and-commerce/act-two‑5

Struc­tur­ing your essay accord­ing to the log­ic of the read­er means study­ing your the­sis and antic­i­pat­ing what the read­er needs to know and in what sequence in order to under­stand and con­vince your argu­ments as they devel­op.

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Author Interviews

'let's explore': david sedaris on his public private life.

Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls

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David Sedaris writes personal stories, funny tales about his life growing up in a Greek family outside of Raleigh, N.C., about working as an elf in Santa's workshop at Christmastime, and about living abroad with his longtime partner, Hugh. The stories have appeared on This American Life and in The New Yorker , and have now filled seven essay collections, including Me Talk Pretty One Day , Naked , Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim , and now — his latest collection — Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls .

Because Sedaris' writing relies so heavily on his own life, it's not surprising that many of his essays begin as entries in his journal, which he has been keeping obsessively since Sept. 4, 1977.

"That's how I start the day — by writing about the day before," he tells Fresh Air 's Terry Gross, "but every now and then I read out loud from my diary. ... I wouldn't open it up and just read, but every now and then something happens and I think, 'Oh, this might work in front of an audience, so I'm always hoping that something interesting will happen ... but I don't try to force it."

But most of his journal isn't for public consumption. In fact, Sedaris says his public persona as a famous writer is quite different from the person he is — and has been — in private, and the journal is where those two versions of David Sedaris collide.

"There's the you that you present to the world," he says, "and then there's, you know, of course the real one and, if you're lucky, there's not a huge difference between those two people. And I guess in my diary I'm not afraid to be boring. It's not my job to entertain anyone in my diary."

While Sedaris says his partner, Hugh, sometimes wonders whether the impulse to write almost exclusively about one's own life is a sign of narcissism, Sedaris understands his compulsion to journal and compose personal essays differently.

"I mean, I think everybody thinks about themselves," he says. "This seems to me like a part of the obsession with it is just as a writing exercise, really: I write in my diary, and that kind of warms me up, and then I move onto other things."

Interview Highlights

David Sedaris' stories have appeared on This American Life and in The New Yorker , and have now filled seven essay collections -- most recently, Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls . Hugh Hamrick/Little, Brown and Co. hide caption

David Sedaris' stories have appeared on This American Life and in The New Yorker , and have now filled seven essay collections -- most recently, Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls .

On the nasty thoughts he writes down in his journals

"Thoughts pass through your head, you know, like I'm sure perhaps you would walk down the hall one day, and you would see somebody and you would think, 'God, I hope my hair never looks like that,' but then five minutes later you might have a cheerful thought about this person, right, or a complimentary thought about this person. But see, that's the thing about a diary: You're just sitting down and you think, 'God, I saw so-and-so yesterday and I hope my hair never looks like that.' And then if you died, I just think of how hurt they would be to think you spent all this time criticizing them, but you weren't — it was just the thought that passed through your mind.

"I mean, I think ... I've always understood that. You know, my mom would walk into the room, and you would hear her talking about you on the telephone and saying bad things about you, but ... that's just in the moment. It never hurt my feelings. I thought, 'Well, tonight it will be a different story.' ... I don't know that I would be hurt by something like that; I just worry that other people would [be] if they were to read negative things about themselves. I say that to Hugh. Like, 'If I die and you start reading my diaries and you see something bad about yourself, keep going because there's some really good things about you in there too, you just have to skim forward a little bit."

On the former connection between drinking and writing

"You know, when you're actively doing something like [drinking], there's a way to do it to get people to think you're cute or whatever. It wasn't cute [for me]. It was just dark and just an ugly place that I would go to every night. I started drinking and writing at the same time, so when I quit drinking it was kind of hard. [Writing] was never a problem. I never had to force myself to sit down at the typewriter because I had a drink right there, and that was my reward for sitting down. But all of a sudden the reward was taken away, and I'm thinking, 'What's in it for me now?' So it just took a little while to get over that. It was the same when I quit smoking. ... It was all together, so I had to peel those [habits] away from the writing."

Read More On David Sedaris

Book Reviews

Owls, yes, but also kookaburras and dentists in sedaris' latest.

David Sedaris, Anatomizing Us In 'Squirrel' Tales

Sedaris Bares Body and Soul in 'Engulfed'

Mortality's lighter side: sedaris' 'engulfed'.

On portraying his father negatively in Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls

"I would never want anyone to think that I would have wanted a different father. I always acted against my father, right? And ['You're a big fat zero'] was really, that was his mantra when I was growing up. You know, 'What you are is a big fat zero,' but it's what got me out of bed every morning, thinking, 'Well, I'll show him.' And I don't know if my dad knew that. I don't know if it was part of his master plan, but it really worked. You know, my mom was a cheerful, supportive person, and so I didn't really need two parents like that. One was enough."

On living in West Sussex, England

"Hugh and I got this house in West Sussex, right, and it's in an area called the South Downs. And the Downs are these massive, chalk-speckled hills that run for a hundred miles between East and West Sussex, and we're just at the base of one of them, and our house is on a one-lane winding road that's tree-lined, and it's my idea of beauty. There are forests, and it's just what beauty means to me. But English people throw everything out their car window, and the roadsides are carpeted with rubbish, so that's what I do with my life now: I pick up rubbish on the side of the road. I do it on my bike. I do it on foot. The local council has given me an outfit and a grabber."

David Sedaris Knows What You’ll Laugh at When No One Is Judging

By David Marchese Oct. 25, 2021

• Share full article

“I love an old-fashioned vulgar joke.”

By David Marchese

“When I was riding my bike or walking,” says David Sedaris, sitting on the terrace of his apartment high above Manhattan on a gentle autumn evening, looking back on his younger days, “I used to fantasize about having the life that I have now.” No wonder. The essayist’s books, the latest of which is “A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020),” are reliable best sellers, and he’s the rare author whose readings, reliably, fill theaters. Such professional constancies have afforded Sedaris, who is 64, and his longtime partner and frequent literary foil, Hugh Hamrick, personal luxuries like homes in New York, Paris, the English countryside and on the beach in his native North Carolina, as well as the means to indulge his passion for Comme des Garçons clothing. More fortunate still, his success — Sedaris was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019 — hasn’t softened the mordant snap that is so much its source. “Now when I walk around, I don’t dream about the future. Because in the future, I’m just older,” Sedaris said. “I mean, if life is like a roller coaster, right over this little hump I’m at now is terminal cancer.”

There’s always a sense in your books that you’re an empathetic guy at heart, but some of the funniest parts are when you’re expressing condescension or disdain. So I’m curious: How do you see empathy as fitting into what you do? I’m not a monster, I suppose. In the new book, I said there’s a look that you perfect in first class, like, Just do your little job . Writing it makes me laugh because it’s so snobby. But it’s thought snobby. It’s not action snobby. There’s a huge difference. I refuse to believe that everybody’s not an asshole in their brain. Who doesn’t walk through the airport and think, Oh, my God, that person looks awful; look at her legs; what made her think it was a good idea to get a tattoo there? I would never say it. If you go to Starbucks, and you’re like: “I’ll pay with cash. No, you know what? I’m going to pay with a card. No, you know what — ” If you think the people behind you aren’t imagining you in the electric chair, you’re wrong. And they should be imagining you in the electric chair.

In the last entry of the new diaries — it’s from Dec. 31, 2020 — you write that you had finally turned old, and your realization had to do with finding certain ideas hard to understand. What are some ideas where you disagree with what you see as younger people’s consensus? That has been interesting signing books: When gay men and lesbians come up, I say, “Where do you stand on the word ‘queer’?” The young people are like, “I love it.” It’s their word. I hate it. I read an interview with this woman, and she identifies as queer because she’s tall. People who identify as queer because they feel “other”? Everybody does at some point in their life. It’s just the rebranding. No one asked me about it. There was not a vote. So now I identify as a straight man. Whatever you identify as, people have to respect that, right? I identify as a straight man because the word “straight” doesn’t change. I just want some stability.

But isn’t the rebranding you mentioned more about other people wanting to be described a certain way? What’s the tension there for you ? I’d rather say I’m homosexual than queer. It’s completely strictly generational. That’s what people my age were called, you know? But that’s not the part of it that bothers me. It’s just the rebranding. That’s why now I’m a straight man. And you know what?

What? I’m going to be a really good spokesperson for straight men too. We’ve been maligned for too long, and we’ve had it. We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.

It’s about time straight men got a chance. It really is.

I don’t know. Is there really some problematic movement of people who used to identify as straight now identifying as queer? Well, it’s a lot of people who are genderqueer or metasexual.

What’s metasexual? You only have sex with someone who you feel a deep emotional commitment with. It used to be called “Christian.”

Are there ideas younger people hold that you don’t necessarily feel comfortable with but that you also suspect might be an improvement on your own? In some literary offices I’ve heard that people are no longer allowed to say, “May I have a word with you?” because it triggers people into thinking they’re going to be fired. Are they supposed to just say, “Hey, David, you’re [expletive] fired”? Or Brandeis University putting out that list of words and phrases: You can’t say you “killed” that exam or take another “stab” at it. But you can order the battered chicken?

So I guess your answer is no? If somebody treats me poorly, it’s like they handed me money. I write about it, and I’m like, I’m so glad I was there at that moment. I don’t want anybody to throw acid on me, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s shy of that. I was out a couple of weeks ago. Usually I go out after midnight, and I take a five-mile walk. I’m on Park Avenue; I take a right onto East 72nd Street. This woman says, “My name’s Andrea. I’m from Queens. I’m the queen of Queens. You need a date?” She grabs my penis, and I said, “Look, I’m gay.” But she will not get off of me. So I went to a doorman building. It wasn’t my building. Anyway, she was so annoying. I wrote about it in my diary. I made it funny, but I said, “Can a woman sexually assault a man?” Because the threat of penetration wasn’t there. I was afraid because she was so unpredictable, and she had the craziness in her eyes, but I don’t believe I was afraid the way a woman would be afraid if a man did the same thing.

That answer went in an unexpected direction. Oh, I wrote about it in my diary, and I thought, This could be an essay. But there has to be some depth to it. One of the things I realized was that if I was Black, I couldn’t have gone to a doorman building on the Upper East Side and had them let me in — probably wouldn’t. That maybe isn’t an aspect I would have considered two years ago, you know? You don’t want to make somebody feel bad. You don’t want to belittle somebody. You don’t want to heap stuff on them. But there’s something to be said about developing a thick skin. Like, I wrote an angry email recently to Audm because they were doing a New Yorker story about the making of “Midnight Cowboy.” They quoted John Wayne, who said it was a movie about a couple of bleep . So I wrote to Audm, and I said why did you bleep out the word “fag”? You’re quoting John Wayne in 1969. Of course John Wayne said that. Bleeping out the word is treating me like I’m some sensitive flower.

What was the last thing that you were offended by? I get angry about things, but I don’t know that I get “offended.” It’s not really a word that I would use. I don’t like it when someone says, “I love to read about your dysfunctional family,” because I don’t like the word “dysfunctional.” I don’t think it means anything. There’s a certain kind of person who thinks that’s a fun word to say. If I hang out with my siblings and I talk to them all the time, I don’t see how that’s dysfunctional. But I don’t think I get offended.

Unlike in the first volume of your diaries, there’s not much self-doubt or anxiety in the new one. I’m a happy person.

How much of that is an outcome of achieving success? Because often people think success will make them happy, and then it doesn’t. It’s hard to say, because I don’t know what it would be like to not have done that . I remember what it was like not to have any money, and to be sick and not have health insurance and not be able to go to the doctor. I have friends who are my age who have all those fears and anxieties, and they’re near retirement age. They can’t retire, and they all say the same thing: I’m just going to work until I drop. But my job is to take whatever [expletive] thing is in front of me and make it laughable. You have to be in a certain state to make that happen, and I’m always in that state. My boyfriend, Hugh — you can leave the room, and there’s no telling what’s going to be there when you come back five minutes later. You can’t have two people like that in a relationship. I’m the sunny one. Somebody has to be.

There’s also a degree of affluence in the new set of diaries that contrasts with the poverty that you lived in for a lot of the period covered by the earlier set. Some people feel guilt or embarrassment over having a lot of money. Do you have any ambivalence about it? I think I am pretty good at it. I was thinking about my dad, because his house just sold and Amy sent me a picture of the chaos that was his house. There was something he had on his dresser about “The Art of Giving.” My father was the cheapest person. One year I donated money to the church for him for Christmas, and he called and asked if he could have the write-off. There’s a responsibility to having money, and my dad didn’t honor that. No one taught me about that responsibility, but you look around and there’s just [expletive] you’re supposed to do if you have money. Give it away. Be generous. Find your younger self and make a difference in that person’s life. And you’re supposed to spend money if you have it. You’re not supposed to just keep it all. It’s one thing if you’re poor, but if you have it, you’re supposed to buy [expletive]. It’s different for you, because you have kids, right? So you have to think, If I buy that painting, that’s the college education for both of my kids. But I don’t have to worry about that.

How much do you spend on Comme des Garçons in a year? I wonder if I spend $50,000. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was that much. But the way I look at it — when I first started reading out loud, I would wear a tie. I always dressed up. My ideas of dressing up have just gotten different. My audience, they don’t understand it. They think I’m crazy. But if you’re going to be in front of people, you should give ’em something to look at.

Do you think much about what you can and can’t get away with? People say, “I can’t believe what you say onstage,” because you can’t say anything anymore. I mean, I love an old-fashioned vulgar joke. There is a joke that I’ve been reading onstage: A woman wakes up on her 40th birthday, and she goes to the drugstore and says: “Today’s my birthday. Can you guess how old I am?” The druggist says, “36?” She says, “I’m 40.” Next she goes to the butcher shop and goes: “Today’s my birthday. Can you guess how old I am?” The butcher says, “32.” She goes, “No, I’m 40.” She goes up and down Main Street. Nobody comes close to guessing her age. She gets in her car and goes to the gas station. Says to the guy, “Can you guess how old I am?” He says, “I can guess your age and your birthday. But first you have to let me fondle your breasts for a while.” She says, “OK.” Then after about five minutes, he says, “You are 40 years old, and your birthday’s today.” “How did you do that?” He goes, “I was in line behind you at the butcher shop.” The audience gives the biggest laugh from that line. But first the audience makes a noise when the gas station attendant says, “You have to allow me to fondle your breasts for a while,” and she says, “OK.” Whereas 20 years ago, her agreeing to it would have just been accepted as part of the joke.

Are you finding that the gap between what people will laugh at and what they would admit to finding funny is getting more pronounced? You know what was interesting? I did a bookstore event the other day, and I read the funniest bits from the diary. I got nothing. Nothing . Then people said afterward, “My face hurt from laughing.” I said: “You weren’t laughing . I was here, you know.” But you turn the lights off? In a theater, the lights are all the way down, and people will laugh.

Because people behave differently when they’re not worried about any social consequences or judgments? Yeah. Especially if you’re in America and race comes up in any way, the audience freaks out. So Andrea, the woman who assaulted me, was Black. When I shape that into an essay, I think it’s important. I was let into the foyer of a building I don’t live in; that had everything to do with me being white. If you have a character who’s Black and is not a virtuous character, the audience freaks out, because they think: If I laugh, does that make me a racist? If I don’t like this person, does that make me a racist? It’s something I’ve noticed for years. The audience freaks out, and it’s by and large a white audience freaking out, and it gets worse with every passing day.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and the columnist for Talk. Recently he interviewed Alice Waters about being uncompromising and Neil deGrasse Tyson about how science might once again reign supreme.

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5 of David Sedaris' Funniest Essays

Happy 57th birthday to David Sedaris: writer; humorist; former shopping mall elf; nudist colony visitor; smoking-quitter; frequent flyer; boyfriend to Hugh; brother to Amy, Tiffany, Paul, Lisa, Gretchen. In eight collections of essays including the most recent, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, Sedaris delivers wry observations of his family, friends, self, and the weird people with whom he finds himself.

To celebrate another year of Sedaris, let's take a look at five of his funniest essays.

"SantaLand Diaries"

This classic Sedaris essay is even better post-Christmas. He describes his experience working as an elf at Macy's in New York City. He first read the story on NPR in 1992, and it never gets old.

"Interpreters for the deaf came and taught us to sign, 'Merry Christmas! I am Santa's helper.' Thy told us to speak as we sign and use bold, clear voices and bright facial expressions. They taught us to say,'You are a very pretty boy/girl! I love you! Do you want a surprise?'

My sister Amy lives above a deaf girl and has learned quite a bit of sign language. She taught some to me and so now I am able to say, 'Santa has a tumor in his head the size of an olive. Maybe it will go away tomorrow but I don't think so.'"

"Long Way Home"

Sedaris recounts how he was burgled while vacationing in Oahu, Hawaii. The thief took his laptop and passport, which had his ever-important visa. Calamity ensues.

"There are only two places to get robbed: TV and the real world. In the real world, if you're lucky, the policeman who answers your call will wonder what kind of computer it was. Don't let this get your hopes up. Chances are he's asking only because he has a software question."

"Standing By"

As a frequent traveler, Sedaris has more than his fair share of airport horror stories. His observations are very timely, and guarantee a laugh while you're waiting for a delayed flight.

"Fly enough, and you learn to go braindead when you have to. One minute you're bending to unlace your shoes, and the next thing you know you're paying fourteen dollars for a fruit cup, wondering, How did I get here?"

"Letting Go"

Sedaris details his history as a smoker, including his cigarette selection process and how his habit allowed him to bond with his mother.

"I may have been a Boy Scout for only two years, but the motto stuck with me forever: 'Be Prepared.' This does not mean 'Be Prepared to Ask People for Shit'; it means 'Think Ahead and Plan Accordingly, Especially in Regard to Your Vices.'"

"Author, Author?"

Sedaris recalls how his book tours are bookended by humorous trips to Costco. In the first visit to Costco, he bought a pound of condoms as a gift.

"I'd later wonder what the TSA inspectors must have thought. My tour began, and every few days, upon arriving in some new city, I'd find a slip of paper in my suitcase, the kind they throw in after going through all your stuff. Five dress shirts, three pairs of pants, underwear, a cop kit full of Band-Aids and safety pins, two neckties, and several hundred rubbers — what sort of person does the mind cobble together from these ingredients?"

Bon anniversaire, David! Thank goodness for Sedaris.

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By David Sedaris

It’s July in West Sussex, and I’m at a garden party, talking with a lawyer who has two sons in their early twenties. The oldest is living in Scotland, and the other, a sullen college student, is home for the month, tearing everyone’s head off. “So, do you have children?” she asks.

“Oh, no,” I tell her. “Not yet anyway. But I am in a relationship.”

She says that she is glad to hear it.

“My boyfriend will turn twenty-one this coming Wednesday,” I continue, “and you are so right about the moodiness of young men his age. I mean, honestly, what do they have to be so angry about?”

I do this all the time—tell people misleading things about Hugh. It’s fun watching them shift gears as they reëvaluate who they think I am. Sometimes I say that he’s been blind since birth or is a big shot in the right-to-life movement, but the best is when he’s forty-plus years my junior.

“Well . . . good for you,” people say, while thinking, I’m pretty sure, That poor boy! Because it’s creepy, that sort of age difference—vampiric.

“There’s a formula for dating someone younger than you,” my friend Aaron in Seattle once told me. “The cutoff,” he explained, “is your age divided by two plus seven.” At the time, I was fifty-nine, meaning that the youngest I could go, new-boyfriend-wise, was thirty-six and a half. That’s not a jaw-dropping difference, but, although it might seem tempting, there’d be a lot that someone under forty probably wouldn’t know, like who George Raft was, or what hippies smelled like. And, little by little, wouldn’t those gaps add up, and leave you feeling even older than you actually are?

It’s true that Hugh is younger than me, but only by three years. Still, I thought he’d never reach sixty. Being there by myself—officially old, the young part of old, but old, nevertheless—was no fun at all. C’mon, I kept thinking. Hurry it along. His birthday is in late January, which makes him an Aquarian. This means nothing to me, though my sister is trying her damnedest to change that. Amy’s astrologer predicted that Biden would win the 2020 Presidential election, and when he did she offered it as proof that Rakesh has extraordinary powers and thus deserves not just my respect but my business.

“You have to make an appointment and at least talk to him,” she said.

“No, I don’t,” I told her. “I mean, my dry cleaner predicted the same thing. Lots of people did.”

I’m a Capricorn, and according to the astrologer Lisa Stardust my least compatible signs for dating are Aries and Leo. My best bets are Cancers, Scorpios, and Pisceans.

I haven’t looked at what astrological signs Hugh should avoid going out with, mainly because it’s irrelevant. Not long after he turned sixty-one, we celebrated our thirtieth anniversary. Will we make it to thirty-five years? To fifty? Either way, do I really need to hear about it from Rakesh?

My mother became interested in astrology in the nineteen-eighties. She wasn’t a kook about it; she simply started reading the horoscopes in the Raleigh News & Observer . “Things are going to improve for you financially on the seventeenth,” she’d say over the phone, early in the morning if the prediction was sunny and she thought it might brighten my day. “A good deal of money is coming your way, but with a slight hitch.”

“Oh, no!” I’d say. “Are you dying?” I thought it was hooey, but in the back of my mind a little light would always go on. I guess what I felt was hope—my life would change, and for the better! The seventeenth would come and go, and, although I’d be disappointed, I would also feel vindicated: “I told you I wouldn’t find happiness.”

She never had her chart done, my mother, but she did branch out and start reading the horoscopes in Redbook , and in Ladies’ Home Journal , a magazine that had come to our home for as long as I could remember. The only column in it that interested me, the only one I regularly read, was called “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”

You could have taken everything I knew about long-term relationships back then and fitted it into an acorn cap. I thought that, in order to last, you and your wife or boyfriend or whatever had to have a number of mutual interests. They didn’t need to be profound. Camping would qualify, or découpaging old milk cans. The surprise is that sometimes all it takes is a mutual aversion to overhead lights, or to turning the TV on before 11 P.M. You like to be on time and keep things tidy, the other person’s the same, and the next thing you know thirty years have passed and people are begging you to share your great wisdom. “First off,” I say, “never, under any circumstances, look under the hood of your relationship. It can only lead to trouble.” Counselling, I counsel, is the first step to divorce.

I’ve thought of that Ladies’ Home Journal column a lot lately, wondering if marital problems in the seventies and eighties weren’t all fairly basic: She’s an alcoholic. He’s been sleeping with his sister-in-law. She’s a spendthrift and a racist, he’s a control freak, etc.

No couple argued over which gender their child should be allowed to identify as; no one’s husband or wife got sucked into QAnon or joined a paramilitary group. Sure, there were conspiracy theories, but in those pre-Internet days it was harder to submerge yourself in them. A spouse might have been addicted to Valium, but not to video games, or online gambling. I don’t know that one can technically be addicted to pornography, but that’s bound to put a strain on marriages, especially now, when it’s at your fingertips, practically daring you not to look at it.

I’ve watched a number of movies and TV shows lately in which the characters’ marriages dissolve for no real reason. I said to Hugh during “Ted Lasso,” “Did I miss the episode where he or his wife had an affair?” The same was true of Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story”: “ Why are they getting a divorce?”

Don’t people who feel vaguely unfulfilled in their relationships just have too much time on their hands? Decide that you need to discover your true, independent self and the next thing you know you’ll be practicing Reiki or visiting an iridologist. That, I’ve learned, is someone who looks deep into your eyes and can see your internal organs. My sister Amy went to one, who told her that she had something stuck in her colon.

She took the diagnosis to her acupuncturist, who said that, actually, what the iridologist had seen in my sister’s eyes was trauma.

Amy said, “Trauma?”

He said, “Remember you told me you saw a mouse and a water bug in your kitchen one day last month?”

She said, “Yes.”

He said, “That’s trauma.”

My sister is not dating anyone—a good thing, as she’s got way too much time on her hands. And that, I think, is the No. 1 reason so many relationships fail. Too much free time, and too much time together. I’m normally away from Hugh between four and six months a year, and when the pandemic cancelled the tours I had scheduled I panicked. We were in New York at the time, so I sought out his old friend Carol. “What’s he really like?” I asked her. “I think I sort of knew once, but that was twenty-five years ago.”

Trapped together for months on end, I learned that Hugh, a painter, reads a lot. Like, every word of the Times , the Washington Post , and The New York Review of Books . Oddly, though, he doesn’t seem to retain much. Whenever guests came to dinner, and the talk turned to politics, Hugh, who might have delivered an informed opinion on, for example, Trump’s proposed withdrawal from the W.H.O., would say, “I think we should line them all up and shoot them.”

“Shoot who?” I’d ask, though I knew the answer.

“All the jerks who think we should withdraw.”

That’s his family’s most damning epithet: jerk. “Yes, well, that’s not going to happen,” I’d tell him. “It’s not a real solution to the problem.”

“Then I don’t want to talk about it.”

When not reading or cooking, Hugh goes to his studio and stares out the window, high on paint fumes, I’m guessing. I’ve never known anyone who can stand still for as long as he does, moving nothing but his eyes, which shift back and forth like a cat’s on one of those plastic wall clocks where the swinging tail is the pendulum. He doesn’t listen to music while he’s in there, or to the radio. Once, I put on a recording of Eudora Welty reading a number of her short stories, and, though he claimed to enjoy it, after “Petrified Man” he said he didn’t want to hear any more. He likes to be alone with his thoughts, but me, I can’t think of anything worse.

When not reading or cooking or staring out his window at nothing, Hugh practices piano. He started taking lessons on a rented upright when he was ten, and living in Ethiopia, but his father couldn’t bear to hear him practice. He wasn’t particularly inept, but noise, any noise, bothered his dad, a novelist with a day job as a diplomat. Then the family moved to Somalia, where pianos were hard to come by, not to mention piano teachers, and his father wrote another book.

After a fifty-year break, Hugh started taking lessons again, this time on a baby grand a friend gave him, and, though he’s really committed, it always sounds to me like he just started last week. “I can’t play when you’re in the room,” he told me. “I feel judged.”

Then he decided that he couldn’t play when I was in the apartment.

And so we bought the apartment upstairs from us.

“So that you’ll have somewhere to go when he practices piano ?” asked Amy, who bought the apartment upstairs from her just so she could get away from her rabbit.

“Exactly,” I told her.

“Makes sense,” she said.

I’m up there all the time now. We have no interior staircase connecting the two places, so Hugh e-mails me when he’s got news. “Lunch is ready.” “The super is here to fix your closet door.” That type of thing. We took ownership just as New York went into lockdown, and furniture deliveries were banned in our building. Luckily, the previous owner agreed to leave a sofa and a bed. I found a few chairs on the street, a folding table, a bucket I could overturn and use as a footstool. For months, it looked like a twelve-year-old’s clubhouse. Not that we didn’t both spend time there. Hugh can do everything upstairs that he does downstairs except practice piano. We call the second apartment Luigi’s. “Will we be having dinner on the nineteenth floor or up at Luigi’s?”

Luigi’s, we decided, is for casual dining.

Eventually we moved our bedroom to the second apartment. After thirty years together, sleeping is the new having sex. “That was amazing, wasn’t it!” one or the other of us will say upon waking in the morning.

“I held you in the night.”

“No, I held you! ”

“You kids think you invented sleep,” I can imagine my mother saying.

But didn’t we ? Hugh and I try new positions. (“You got drool on my calf!”) We engage in quickies (naps). Three times a week I change the sheets so that our bed will feel like one in a nice hotel. Pulling back the comforter, we look like a couple in a detergent commercial. “Smell the freshness!”

For a thirtieth anniversary, you’re supposed to offer pearls, but instead, for roughly the same price, I went to the Porthault shop on Park Avenue and got Hugh a set of sheets. The “Fabric Care” section on the company’s Web site reads, in part, “Do not overload the dryer, as your linens need room to dance.”

How did we become these people? I wonder.

Hugh says that if we ever get separate bedrooms that’s it—he’s finished. I know this works for a lot of couples, they’re happy being down the hall from each other, but I couldn’t bear such an arrangement. “This is what I’ll miss after you’re dead,” I tell him as I turn out the light, meaning, I guess, the sensation of being dead together.

Hugh might be a mystery to me, but it’s a one-way street. “I’m sorry,” I’ll often say to him.

“That’s all right.”

“What was I apologizing for?” I’ll ask.

“Telling the doorman that my mother looks like Hal Holbrook,” he’ll say, or “Wishing I would get COVID just so you could write about it.”

He nails it every time! I didn’t need to tell him that after we’re all vaccinated and theatres reopen he will never see me again. “I’ve asked my agent to book me solid—I’ll do three hundred and sixty-five shows in a row, take a night off, and then start all over again,” I said. “I want to make up for lost time, and then some.”

He accuses me of being money-hungry, and I wish it were that simple. Honestly, it’s the attention I’m after.

“What about me?” he asks. “Doesn’t my attention matter?”

I say that he doesn’t count, though of course he’s one of a handful of people in my life—along with my sisters, my cousins, and a couple of old friends—who actually do count. I just don’t necessarily need him by my side every moment that I’m awake. Sometimes it’s enough to press my ear against the living-room floor of the upstairs apartment, and faintly hear him practicing piano down below, frowning at the keys, I suspect, and at the music before him, a boy again. So determined to get it right. ♦

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