I've already decided that I don't like him especially.
I had a similar experience years ago with Anais Nin. But I had to read three volumes of her diaries before I got sick of her. The honeymoon ended quickly, but it did last three volumes.
I went through all the usual stages of an affair with La Nin by reading her diaries, which I only learned later had been heavily-edited, hence some of the mendacity and what used to be called "glaring omissions" of which I ultimately suspected her. It was this mendacity of hers which ended our romantic relationship. That, and how wildly self-absorbed she was. How, I wondered, could a married woman write page after page in her diaries, describing pregnancy and childbirth, without once mentioning her husband? (Subsequent reading revealed the dark reason: Anais aborted that baby, whose real father was Henry Miller, author of Tropic of Cancer.)
But poor old Hugh Guiler, Anais' long-suffering banker husband, probably wouldn't have gotten a mention even if the baby had been his. He was "edited out" of Anais' diaries generally, in much the same way Stalin had photographs in Soviet history books edited to erase the people he'd killed.
But I went through all the stages with Anais: awareness, infatuation, fantasies (she was, after all, dead by the time I read her diaries) and then finally disillusionment and the desire for a breakup, in this case the return of her books to the public library. But the relationship ran an ordinary and not-entirely unexpected course. I understood, after sending her back to the shelves, both how Henry Miller could have become so infatuated with her himself, and also why Gore Vidal, who had a much more jaundiced eye than Miller, dissed her so thoroughly in his own memoirs. Vidal described himself and Nin as two "chicken hawks," and I don't think anyone could have said it better.
On the other hand, I didn't need three volumes, but only a couple of hundred pages to become acquainted with Sedaris and his jokes, especially the ones he keeps repeating, like "my childhood was awkward and unpleasant because I grew up gay." Yeah? Well, my childhood was awkward and unpleasant because I had a weird first name, and between the ages of 13 and 18, bad acne. I don't browbeat the world with it. In any case, by the end of the second book of his that I read, I was already sick of listening to him.
Still, I can hear the screeching already.
"You...you...you...HOMOPHOBE!!!"
Admit to not caring for any member of any federally-protected grievance group, for whatever reason, and you're going to be immediately labeled a "Fill-In-The-The-Blank-O-Phobe" by its PR wing. Meaning, of course, a "phobe" of whatever grievance group your victim belongs to. In this case, the grievance group just happens to be gays, and if there's any doubt in your mind, just read anything Sedaris has ever written. This guy has been dining out on "gay" for years. Someone should tell him that it really isn't avant-garde anymore to whine about how no one understood you when you were a child because you preferred baking banana-nut muffins to playing football. (Hey, as a teen I preferred muffin-baking, or for that matter almost any other activity, to football, and I'm straight. I just don't like football. Never did, particularly.)
Unfortunately for all of the "homophobe" screechers out there, Sedaris' sexual orientation has nothing to do with my dislike of him. It's his narcissism that rubs me the wrong way. That, and the fact that I find him as funny as hell maybe 15 percent of the time, but as funny as a root canal the other 85 percent. Especially when he's talking about dying animals and floating turds. Yuk-yuk-yuk.
By the way, is there a correlation between gayness and narcissism? Ask W.H. Auden. He was gay, and he thought there was. But don't ask me. Ask him. He's dead, but ask him anyway. (I tend to think Auden was a little too enamoured ((note spelling)) of Freud, but that was common among intellectuals of his generation.)
Sorry, friends of my ex-wife:* hurling the epithet "homophobe" at anyone who fails to approve of one of your group for any reason whatever sounds just a LITTLE bit too much to me like my late father's old, tried-and-true method of winning arguments. Any time someone began to get the best of him in an exchange of opinions, or merely to question the reasonableness of his latest ill-informed rant, (usually punctuated with an index finger stabbing into the air or into his interlocutor's chest) my dad would begin jumping up and down screaming "You hate me! You hate me! You've AWAYS hated me!"
I called this technique of my father's, and still call it this even though my father, like Auden, is dead, the "Beaver Cleaver Bluff." In one episode of Leave It To Beaver, Beaver ran from the room shouting "Everyone in this house is against me!" Boy, did that sound like my father! Anyone who dared to disagree with my father about anything was immediately branded his personal enemy. Oh, I tell you, it was great having a nine year-old for a father.
My father, by the way, was a homophobe, and such a screechy one himself that we often found ourselves repeating Hamlet's old saw about the lady who doth protest too much. He also hated Jews, blacks, women, the French, (clear self-loathing, that last; my father, who hated "the Frogs," actually spoke Canadian French very well) the pope, (ditto; he came from a Catholic family) men who wore their hair long, Mexicans, (although he spoke Spanish as well as he did French) Jane Fonda and cilantro. I think my father considered it an unconscionable outrage that anyone should feel sorry for anybody in the world except him.
But at least my father didn't write books. I'll give him credit for that. David Sedaris does, and I just finished reading two of them: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and Me Talk Pretty One Day. Read two of a guy's books, particularly if they're written in the first person and are basically all about him, and I think you can be excused for deciding you don't like him even if you've never actually met the guy face-to-face.
For, in these two books anyway, himself is just about all Sedaris writes about. Himself, his family and his boyfriends.
Okay, jealousy is in the mix. This guy gets buckets of money, literary awards and God-knows what all else for telling tawdry, insipid anecdotes about himself and his family. Hey, I've been doing that on my blog for years, and nobody has showered me with money, awards and appearances on National Public Radio. What's so special about David Sedaris? He's funny sometimes. So what? My younger sister was funny. She didn't get to be famous and lionized for it.
And another okay: I hear Sedaris is also a playwright, and I admit that I have not seen any of his plays. Maybe he's another Noel Coward. I don't know. But these two books I read are basically blogs-between-covers, and I don't see why he should get showered with ticker-tape and fame for doing something thousands upon thousands of us have been doing since technology caught up with our rampant egos and allowed us a forum in which to pop off about ourselves and our own not so much differently than he does.
So how come he gets all the attention? Maybe he is funnier and cleverer than I am. Plenty of people are, but most of them haven't been richly rewarded for it. In fact most of the clever, funny people I know are as obscure and unknown as I am. This guy must have a good agent. I don't suppose he, she or it would be interested in talking to me.
But if they see this and surprise me, I'll let you know.
* My ex-wife Valerie, a Washington, D.C. real-estate hawker the last time I spoke with her, is the only Gay Rights advocate I have ever met who is, technically, not gay. Valerie generally prefers men, although she does tend to prefer them in a "Sugar Mama" sort of scenario (she being the sugar mama.) Like Lawrence Welk, whose genius it was to find a previously-untapped "niche audience" among the Geritol crowd, Valerie has made the LGBT community her own niche market. And since the gay community is mostly where she makes her money, Valerie tends to sound off on gay rights like the aging Christopher Isherwood (although, generally speaking, more as a cheerleader, who knows on which side her pom-poms are glued, than as a player.)
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