Humorist David Sedaris has spent more than three decades writing about the absurdities of modern life and sharing his work in front of live audiences.

“I love attention,” he says of going on tour. “I love going on stage and I love people applauding, love people laughing.”

But reading out loud isn’t just about adoration. Sedaris says he’s always listening for reactions from the crowd and tweaking his work in response.

“The audience is my first editor,” he says. “When they cough, they tell me that I need to cut whatever it is that I’m reading. Of course, when they laugh, that’s fantastic. But I don’t mind a groan. A collective groan is fine with me.”

Sedaris’ daily routine is oriented around getting his steps in (at least 10 miles) and learning German, Japanese, Spanish and French on Duolingo. That’s in addition to his rigorous travel and writing regimen. For Sedaris, it’s all about growing and improving.

“That’s the promise: that you can be better, that you can write better, that you understand better, that you [can] speak a language better, that you can be a better person,” he says. “But it’s not going to happen by accident. You have to work at it. And so that’s what puts me at my desk, and that’s what gets me out of bed every day.”

His latest essay collection, The Land and Its People, casts Sedaris in several roles, including devout brother, itinerant traveler, grieving friend and reluctant caretaker.

Interview highlights

Little, Brown and Company

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On whether he’d use AI for writing prompts 

A friend of mine … asked ChatGPT to write something in my voice … and she sent it to me. And it was so lame, and then I rewrote it and it was the biggest laugh in the entire book. The audience howls with laughter. I would never have thought to write about this had ChatGPT not written it first. And I thought, well, that’s fair. That’s not plagiarism or anything. If a machine comes up with it and then I rewrite it, that’s perfectly within my rights, right?
Right now I feel like it can’t be dirty in an interesting way. So much of successful comedy is just surprising people, by surprising people with a word they didn’t expect to hear, or an image they didn’t expect. And right now I feel it’s not capable of that, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be capable of it in a year or two. But me personally, if you told me that here was a short story written by ChatGPT, or a book, I do not believe I would want to read it because I want someone on the other end. I want someone who I can write to and I can say, “Wow, I loved your book. I loved your story,” and I want a human to think, “Oh, I just sold a book.”

On why he resisted getting married to his longtime boyfriend Hugh (and eventually got married in secret)

At first we were boyfriends and then people started calling him “your partner.” … Well-meaning straight people thought it was respectful to use the word “partner,” like the same way now that a lot of people think they’re supposed to use the word “queer,” and I can’t stand that word, but they’ve been told that this is the appropriate word now and the word that they should be using. Then gay marriage came along, and then everyone just assumed that Hugh and I were married. …

We got married. I don’t even know when it was. I know it was before the pandemic. It was a shotgun wedding arranged by my banker. And I never told anybody about it. And I told Hugh he couldn’t tell anybody about it, because I don’t like when a man says the word, “my husband.” It’s like “my unicycle.” I met a woman at a book signing once, and she used the phrase, “my son-in-law’s unicycle.” And I thought, “Oh, that must pain you every time you have to say, my son-in-law’s unicycle.” I wanted gay people to get the right to marry, and then I wanted not a one of us to do it. I thought that would have been perfect. To say … “We spit on your marriage. We just want the right to do it.”

On writing up a contract for two of his sisters to not get married — Sedaris is one of six siblings

I drew up contracts all the time when I was a kid. … I made [my sisters] sign a contract swearing they’d never get married. But I didn’t want to lose them. I was just afraid because I didn’t have a word for what I was at that time, but I just knew that I wasn’t like the other boys. And I just thought, “Well, I’m gonna be alone for the rest of my life, and I want my sisters to be with me.” I couldn’t bear the thought of being alone without them, so I got them to sign contracts, swearing they’d never get married. But only Amy and Gretchen. … Neither Amy nor Gretchen got married.

On why good people are often not great characters 

If you’re on the page, you’re a character. When you’re in real life, you are a person. Hugh is a good character. My sister Gretchen, I adore my sister Gretchen. She’s not a good character. She is a great person. I have friends who are great people, but not great characters. And it doesn’t have anything to do with being dynamic. Maybe it’s a degree of confidence that makes somebody a good character. …

Confident people always have my ear, even if I don’t agree with them or even if I think their confidence is unearned or that they’re fooling themselves. It doesn’t matter. It gets me to sit up straight and it gets me to listen. … I love the combination of somebody who’s just a horrible person, but just brimming with confidence and just certain that they’re right in all situations. I mean, my dad was like that. Never, never, ever showed any doubt in regard to anything. I didn’t agree with him and I didn’t wanna be him, but it made him a good character.

On whether writing is cathartic for him

I’ve never felt it to be cathartic. It helps me make sense of the world. And it helps me see myself. … I never really wrote about my feelings in my diary. Like, that’s really embarrassing if you look through an old diary and it’s all about your feelings. If it’s about a conversation you had at the barber shop, that’s not embarrassing, right? I could put out a whole book of haircuts, just haircuts I’ve had over the years and conversations with different barbers. Every one of them is recounted in my diary. I don’t recall ever getting a haircut and not writing about it afterwards.

On why he keeps up his rigorous book tour schedule 

I don’t know how much of it is about the money. … It’s earning it. Earning those laughs. I mean, it’s going to happen to everybody and then you wind up in a nursing home and you’re talking to a spatula, you know? And hopefully when I’m in that condition, I won’t remember how wonderful it was to have this career. I won’t even know my own name, hopefully, because to be there and to remember joy and know that you’ll never experience it again will be pretty ugly. I said that like somebody who has stage four cancer. There’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t foresee any end to this, as long as people come. Maybe toward the end, I’ll have to pay people to come, and the money will flow in the other direction.

Monique Nazareth and Nico Gonzalez Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

I’ve always loved mystery novels that take me inside different cultures. While lots of English language crime writers are good at evoking other lands — think of Philip Kerr’s Nazi Berlin or Cara Black’s Paris — the richest portraits come to us in translations of books by homegrown writers. These have the revelatory tang you get when novelists know their culture from the inside.

As it happens, two terrific novels of this kind have just come out from Bitter Lemon Press, a small London publisher that specializes in translated mysteries. These new books could hardly be less alike, except for one thing: Each is, in its unconventional way, quite brilliant.

The End of the Sahara is a kaleidoscopic murder mystery by the Algerian writer Saïd Khatibi, a rising star who just won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Superbly translated by Alexander E. Elinson, the book’s set in a provincial city on the edge of the Sahara in 1988 Algeria, a troubled time when the ruling socialist government has clearly failed. But you don’t need to know Algerian history to get sucked in by the plot, which centers on the murder of Zakia Zaghouani, a nightclub singer at a local hotel called The Sahara.

Burning with urgency, the story is told by a big cast of characters who all speak to us in first person. There’s Ibrahim, a college grad who’s been reduced to dealing in illegal videos. There’s the hotel owner, Maimoun, a shifty wheeler-dealer who fancied Zakia. There’s Zakia’s fiancee, Bachir, a decent guy found with blood on his shirt. He’s the top suspect of Inspector Hamid, a corrupt, womanizing cop who also fancied Zakia. Bachir’s represented by his cousin Noura, a good-hearted lawyer who’s constantly derided for reaching the age of 30 without a husband.

As we move from suspect to suspect, Khatibi not only makes us feel the textures of these characters’ everyday lives — the looks and smells, the food shortages and emerging Islamist militancy — but he deftly unveils how they are all are trapped together in a spiderweb of lies and betrayal that began in the past.

Using 1988 Algeria as a mirror for present-day Algeria, Khatibi gives us an X-ray of an entire social structure. Even as we learn who killed Zakia, we realize that no one escapes the bone-deep misogyny that underlies her murder and the repressive, post-colonial politics that leave Algerians spinning in circles. As one character thinks bitterly, “It was as if this country’s history just repeats itself rather than moving forward…”

Not surprisingly, life is far cushier along the prosperous Tuscan coast. That’s the setting for An Enigma by the Sea, a new edition of the 1991 novel by the legendary Italian team of Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini. Witty, erudite and socially astute, they play with the mystery genre as they explore the many sides of Italianness.

The place is the Gualdana, a pine-protected seaside enclave where the well-off have holiday villas. “A certain air of secrecy hangs over it,” the opening tells us enticingly.

The time is winter, when only a few residents are around. They’re an assortment of Italian types that includes a rich, disaffected Roman couple; a philandering count who’s arrived with his latest conquest, a fame-hungry model; an old woman addicted to reading Tarot cards; and a smug politician stewing in paranoia. You get a whiff of Upstairs, Downstairs in the relation between these moneyed folks and the locals who service their many needs — the security guards, the wry police commander and the village handyman, who is also, everyone knows, the village cuckold.

Deliciously translated by Gregory Dowling, An Enigma by the Sea starts off like a gently acerbic comedy of manners, as these self-absorbed characters go about killing time — chatting, flirting, bickering, having tea. Then suddenly the story shifts. Three residents inexplicably disappear. Could they have been murdered? Here? The question unleashes the sleuthing instincts of their neighbor, Signor Monforti, a pessimistic depressive who’s a born detective: He spends his life scrutinizing every single thing for clues to impending disaster.

Masters of the light fantastic, Fruttero and Lucentini roll out their mystery with the slyest of touches, weaving discussions of the Greek cynics and the nature of depression into their droll evocation of a gray, chilly off-season resort with its wind storms and dire pizzerias. If Khatibi shows us characters caught in the tragic flames of history, Fruttero and Lucentini look at human folly with a cool, almost ancient amusement at what strange, funny creatures we all are.