By all accounts, David Sedaris is a very good writer. He wrote one of my favorite pieces on This American Life a year or two ago, a lovely bit about romance and office politics, and continues to publish gems in the New Yorker. Of course, I read Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Overrated, yes. Enjoyable, certainly.
I saw Sedaris read during the British leg of his book tour in 2005. There were only about fifty of us. Mostly, I remember him talking about his bag of urine strapped to his leg, our polite giggles eventually giving way to hearty snorts.
He signed my book, too. He drew a picture of a horse and wrote “Don’t ever quit.” He meant smoking, but I told my friends he was talking about the novel I had been writing.
“Don’t ever quit,” he said aloud to me, and winked. I remember that wink. It was pure dry, cynical loathing. There he was in Nottingham at a crappy Waterstones signing a paperback for a dim-witted twenty something kid who had, for some stupid reason I will never remember, decided to tell him about her novel.
And then I coughed.
“Smoker?” he asked. I nodded.
Well. Don’t ever quit, says the cartoon horse. Don’t ever stop, I thought to myself. There was something incredibly grotesque about our exchange. If I didn’t quit smoking I would likely condemn myself to an early death. Fuck the piece of shit novel; Sedaris was full of bad advice. Instead of encouraging the fledging creativity of a bright-eyed kid, he had chosen to bitterly stab at her stupid post-adolescent posturing.
I quit smoking that month. Sedaris followed a few years later.
