Sedaris, a small, nervous man of forty, can afford to look back. With a three-book contract with Little, Brown and a month-long publicity tour underway, plus a steady income from NPR, he says he won't write again "until I'm completely broke."
He is also not worried about getting pigeonholed for his style and outlook. "'Dark' is a good word, it seems to me." But he modestly disavows the book jacket's comparison of him to Mark Twain and Nathanael West, saying, "these are nice people, but they needed to say something."
His sense of humor is always on the prowl, even in person, but he is an equal-opportunity lambaster. He moves from a hilarious sendup of an anonymous schmooze at the New Yorker Christmas party ("David daaahling you must meet Calvin!") to a gleefully cruel assault on an innocent Au Bon Pain patron. Nor does he spare himself.
Sedaris is an odd egg. He wrote all of Naked last year, mostly at night, hunting-and-pecking on a typewriter, which is the main reason he "can't stand the painful shit, like editing." Though smiling wide when amusing someone, Sedaris claims he only laughs at his material "one time, and that's when I'm writing."
He is sensitive about the media's fixation on his former career as a house cleaner, which he describes as "my job and their hook." In a Rod Roddy voice he relates one uncomfortable appearance on a talk show whose host cackled, "Our guest is an author and...get this...he cleans houses!"
Sedaris speaks of all the figures in Naked with great enthusiasm, particularly his family members. Describing the genesis of the book, he claims that "for my mom, it was a gesture of affection. These are stories the way she told stories." His childhood in rural North Carolina apparently offered him plenty of time to hear about and observe people being crazy and stupid.
His commentary career began when a bigwig heard him in New York reading from his diaries like a standup comedian. Though he is frequently on "Morning Edition," he never listens to his own voice and is sure that no reader suffers from its absence. He plans to continue in radio.
When asked about his excursion to the nudist colony this past July, Sedaris lowers his voice and gets serious. "The reason I went was contrary to everything else in the book," he says, meaning that he actively sought a satire-ripe situation, rather than noticing the absurdity of daily life. He adds that there is some possibility of a lawsuit, since no one there knew he was a writer and a humorist.
Sedaris' publisher begged him to exclude "naked" from the book. If that had happened, the volume would have been called "something for everyone," because, he says, "there's something to offend everyone." The people who can tolerate his offensiveness are laughing too hard to object, anyway.