Book Review: Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris

Back in April of 2011, we won tickets to see David Sedaris at the Lucas Theater, courtesy of The Book Lady Bookshop here in Savannah.  At the signing table in the lobby, he sat beside a sign prohibiting photographs, which I assumed was for proprietary reasons - after all, public figures own their words and images the way Walmart owns their BlueRay players and Hello Kitty purses.  But in an essay titled "Author, Author," from his latest collection, Sedaris comes clean about the sign:

     Unlike a lot of authors I know, I enjoy my book tours - love them, as a matter of fact.  That said, I'm in a fortunate position, and have been able to eliminate the parts that don't agree with me - the picture-taking, for instance.  People all have cameras on their cell phones now, and, figuring, I guess, that they might as well aim them at something, they'd ask me to stand and pose a good thirty times a night.  This wasn't an inconvenience so much as an embarrassment.  'You can do better than me,' I'd tell them.  And when they insisted they really couldn't, I'd feel even worse.  Thus, at readings, there's now a notice propped atop my book-signing table.  'Sorry,' it announces, 'but we don't allow photos.'  This makes it sound like it's the store's idea, a standard policy, like no eating fudge in the fine-arts section.

Whether or not you accept Sedaris's self-effacing justification is up to you, but I'd tend to doubt that a man whose every book has hit the NYT best seller list and who can pack a house at fifty bucks a head just to hear him talk really struggles with an inferiority complex.  I'd bet he just finds it annoying, as he indicates by calling it an "inconvenience."

However that may be, that ambiguity between the real David Sedaris and the rampantly autobiographical essayist permeates this collection.  In one piece, "Mind the Gap," he takes the issue head on.  Actually, he doesn't.  What he does is parody his own Europhile snobbery, but in a way that seems to validate it.  The running joke Sedaris sets up is his use of British slang while conversing with Americans:

     I said to my father yesterday afternoon, 'Do you fancy my new jumper?'
     When he answered, 'Huh?'  I was like, '"Jumper?" It means "sweater" in England.'
     'Right,' he said, adding that it was ninety-two degrees out and that if I didn't take it off I was guaranteed to get heatstroke or at least a rash, and wasn't that the last thing either of us needed at a time like this?
     'Ninety-two degrees or not, I still think it's the most brilliant jumper I've ever seen,' I told him.

The crux of the joke is Sedaris's wearing of the sweater just for the sake of employing its British name, which left me wondering, at least, Did he really do that? And, if so, did he realize his pretension at the time?  The world will never know, just as we never bridge the gap between the writer's voice and the person behind the pen.  In the meantime, though, as with Twain and Dave Barry and Sarah Vowell, we can enjoy the writing, if not the person.  And no piccys, please, indeed.