My father died and I don’t care: David Sedaris tells it straight

When I offer condolences on his father’s death, David Sedaris is startlingly frank. “I absolutely don’t care that my father died. I don’t feel anything... I’d had enough of him,” he says with a laugh.

“I know that sounds awfully cold but I mean, you can make someone care that you died. You could be, like, nice… it was awful when my mother died, I didn’t think I’d ever get over it. And I ache, all these years later, when I think of her. She was a really great person. And my dad was a dick. I felt the loss of a character - he was a good character to write about so I mourn him as a character more than as a person.”

Author David Sedaris. Credit: Adam De Tour

The American writer and essayist is speaking to me from his home outside London, ahead of a speaking tour of Australia in February. He’s fresh back from a holiday in Scandinavia and slightly scandalised the locally-designed furniture there is as expensive as in London or New York. “Here’s the thing. Did you ever go to Scotland? You know when you go to a distillery, the whisky is as expensive there as it is in a liquor store. You’re at the source …”

Sedaris, also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, travels much of the year, promoting titles that include Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls. Even so, he still gets grumpy with his partner, Hugh Hamrick, for drinking water from the hotel mini-bar, railing against the fact that it costs $9.

When he and Hugh were looking for a new apartment a few years ago, Sedaris was obsessively imagining himself living in any house they visited - including Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam. “We’re led to believe it’s a hellhole, it’s a magnificent apartment,” he says. “I just got real estate fever at Anne Frank’s house.”

His father, Lou Sedaris, features several times in his latest book, Happy-Go-Lucky. It helps explain his reaction when he examines their relationship, referring to “64 years of constant criticism and belittlement”. “As long as my father had power, he used it to hurt me... he was always trying to pit his children against one another,” he writes.

It’s surprising to hear such honesty, especially when it comes to death. “It speaks to a certain person, I’ve been hearing a lot from that person,” Sedaris says. “Someone will come up to me and say, ‘OMG my mother died and I feel only relief’.”

Straight-shooting is one of his trademarks, so much so he gets riled when asked whether everything he writes is true.

“When you write for the New Yorker, everything is fact-checked. Everything! It really infuriates me when people say, ‘How much of this is true?’ I say, you go to the New Yorker and have stuff fact-checked, you do it.”

Our 30-minute conversation ranges from how masks stoked division in the US (“Covid turned it into a campaign button”), virtue signalling at Black Lives Matter protests (“One white girl filming another white girl getting up close in a cop’s face, and saying ‘Say their names’” ) and outfits for his tour (“Have you ever seen My 600 Pound Life? The waist on these pants is like the waistline of someone on that show.“)

It’s typically Sedaris - broad-ranging, often hilarious and slightly chaotic.

An Evening with David Sedaris is at Arts Centre Melbourne on February 6 and 7, and Sydney Opera House on February 9.

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