Confessions of Superfan: On David Sedaris and My Own Selfish Desires for Connection
David Sedaris has a house on the coast of North Carolina called “the Sea Section.” On a Tuesday night in the Charlottesville High School Auditorium, he shared with roughly 500 people that he’d also like to get a boat, and name it “Roe v. Wave.” He went on to read four essays, which touched on topics ranging from a backyard fox named Carol, to whom he feeds left overs, child abuse and murder around the holidays, and his inability to reconcile with his sister before her 2013 suicide. This material may seem a bit macabre for a man usually considered a humor writer, but I assure you there were plenty of laughs.
The first book I bought by book by David Sedaris, the collection of essays, Me Talk Pretty One Day, was from a middle school Scholastic book fair. You know those events, preceded by the flimsy red catalogs, where your entire school gym was temporarily turned into a YA lit expo. The main attractions are usually the newest issues of Guinness Book of World Records or Ripley’s Believe It or Not. I can’t remember what led me to Sedaris’s book initially; maybe a teacher recommended it or maybe I just liked the chalkboard style cover (perhaps it reminded me of Jerry Spinelli’s Loser, ha). What I do remember is from then on, I was a super fan.
The stories covered everything from dwarf guitar teachers, to tapeworms, to how annoying it is when your boyfriend is Mensa and you aren’t. I laughed and I cried often. “Youth in Asia,” a brief meditation on grief, growing up, and Great Danes, is one of the most simultaneously hilarious and touching pieces of writing I have ever encountered. I’ve never had a dog, but the way Sedaris describes his father, a new widow with four grown children, caring for their ailing family pet still informs my conception of unconditional love. The passage on how Lou “massaged her arthritic legs, carried her up the stairs, and lifted her in and out of bed…treated her the way that men in movies treat their ailing wives, the way he might have treated my mother had she allowed such naked displays of helplessness and affection,” moves me without fail and I revisit it often.
Since then I’ve dutifully purchased every Sedaris product introduced to market. When his stories run in The New Yorker, they make my day. The recordings of his spots on This American Life, are as nostalgic and lovely as my favorite songs. Sedaris writes (and reads) with an irresistible distinctiveness of voice that makes me feel as though he is my friend, recounting the mundane, absurd, devious, touching, and hilarious marginalia of his own life. Perhaps over dinner, two glasses of Pinot deep or whispered during a platonic sleep-over while we both struggle to keep our eyes open.
This experience makes me in no way unique. The wild popularity of Sedaris’s work in no doubt inextricable from its delicious intimacy. His style is so universally appealing that The New York Times once referred to him as “publishing’s Dave Matthews.” He deftly pivots between the existential and the irreverent, in such a way that has deeply impacted my sense of humor as well as my preferable mode of confronting the shitty parts of my own life. In a recent New Yorker piece, his twisted methods of catharsis show as he contemplates his family’s role in his sister’s suicide. Sedaris is both genuine and self-deprecating, wondering, “how could it have not had anything to with us? Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?” He is a figure who looms large in my artistic education. On the rare occasion that I sit down to pen a personal essay, his influence is palpable.
This fun house one-way mirror intimacy maybe more intense when the person is famous for writing personal essays, but connections like mine are projected on to all kinds of celebrities. As fans, we devour any and all information that provides fodder for the details of our imaginary relationships. As Mr. Sedaris walked onto the stage in a pair of brocaded culottes, I found myself jumping to say “Oh did you get those in Japan? At Dover Street Market?” When he relays a funny anecdote about his sister Amy running a pretend spa over thanksgiving, my dorky inner monologue rambles, “ugh that is so classic Amy” *insert playful shoulder punch* “Remember the time she got her makeup done to look like she got beat up? I love her Instagram account!” This makes me sound both creepy and insane, but isn’t that what fandom does to all of us?
People say “don’t meet your heroes,” usually implying that they will inevitably disappoint you in some way. I think I agree with the sentiment, but maybe for a different reason. They might not disappoint you, but the extreme awkwardness born out of your asymmetrical and largely fictitious relationship that ultimately forbids you from sharing a meaningful and hilarious anecdote that would bond the two of you forever might disappoint you. But, then again, what does it say about me that I was expecting a connection like that? From a person I’ve never met, who literally interacts with hundreds of fans every night.
No one likes it when famous people complain about being famous. Yet, when my mere regular-non-famous-person-mind considers the pressure exerted by millions of strangers desiring your validation, I can understand how it could feel exhausting and even threatening. Amy Schumer touched on the experience in the third season of her show with a popular sketch that depicted the female comedian being approached by fans in a coffee shop. Their requests begin innocuously, autographs and selfies etc. But by the end of the sketch the coffee shop has devolved into violent chaos and one fan actually takes a bite out of the flesh of Amy’s leg. This is obviously meant to be a humorous exercise in hyperbole, but as with much Schumer’s work, the sketch is soaked in social commentary and stands to ask some pretty tough questions. The sharing of one’s art is already an intensely personal act. So what are we asking for when we desire more than that? Where did we, the collective fans of the universe, get the idea that we were entitled to anything more than that?
In our social media saturated landscape, we have more access to our idols than ever before. Only in 2016 can I bear witness to Chrissy Teigen and John Legend’s baby eat her first green bean or spend thirty minutes perusing January Jones’s truly-bizarre-yet-oddly-mesmerizing affinity for bathtub selfies and snapchat filters.
Yet like No Face, or that cookie-eating mouse of children’s lit, we fans are insatiable. Unless the objects of our affection are stalking us on Tumblr, buying us personalized gifts, and hand delivering them to our homes unannounced (behavior that will 100% get you arrested unless you are Taylor Swift), they are not doing enough.
We fill their DM’s with “professional opportunities” and desperate pleas to just “give my work a quick look.” Their comment sections alternate between emoji-laden odes to their perfection, and typo-riddled crusades on how their work is abhorrent and bad for humanity or maybe that they are just a “dumb and/or fat slut.” Perhaps this is what drove Dave Chappelle to flea for South Africa, or Shia LeBeouf to put a bag on his head.
Both my parents work in entertainment, so I grew up exposed to a certain amount of celebrity. Because of the mere happenstance of birth, I like to consider myself capable of “having chill” around those I admire more than your average bear. As it turns out, this is not only pretentious, but also untrue. Here I am, in the lobby of Charlottesville High School, more flustered than ever, racking my brain for the perfect anecdote to lead with as I wait for my face-to-face encounter with David Sedaris.
When I reach the front of the book signing line I’m paralyzed. I don’t say anything to Sedaris about how old I was when I read his first book, or how I grew up hearing his voice on the radio. I don’t even mention how much I love his sister’s new show or that I emailed his Tokyo piece in the New Yorker to my entire family. Sedaris on the other hand is the paragon of graciousness. He asks my friend and me what we study, he even asks me whether I like Game of Thrones (anyone who knows me knows that ‘like’ would be an understatement bordering on blasphemy). He then proceeds to draw a sketch of me “nude at 90 years old” on the title page of Me Talk Pretty One Day, á la Melisandre sans magic-youth-providing choker (this sounds weird and creepy but I promise it wasn’t).
I initially left that night feeling disappointed in what I believed was a missed opportunity for a meaningful connection with someone I admire. Now, I realize how self-interested those desires were. Have these artists not already done enough? Providing us with the words, movies, and songs that shaped us into the insufferable “artsy” college kids we are. They make us laugh when we are down and make us feel something for people we have never met, momentarily allowing us to believe that, perhaps, we are not alone after all in this vast unfeeling universe. I guess, what I’m really trying to say with all this rambling is “Thank you, David.” You have done more than enough.
The elderly nude portrait is just icing on the cake, and I’ll treasure it forever.
