An Evening with David Sedaris

I was introduced to the David Sedaris book, Me Talk Pretty One Day by my daughter, who read me his account of trying to learn French as an adult...


















The language teacher in me (who spent years teaching English to immigrants) could identify - and I went on to read the entire book. My personal favorite story tells of his attempts to teach writing to college students - another experience I can identify with!

She also showed us to this YouTube reading from the David Letterman show.

Knowing we enjoyed his humor, my youngest son gave Terry and me tickets to see him in person as a birthday present this year.














I expected a handful of people (Do people attend readings by authors?)... But was surprised to discover the largest National Arts Centre auditorium full of mostly younger people - hundreds of well-mannered fans. David read several still-unpublished stories (hastily making notes if our response wasn't quite what he wanted!) He then read some short diary entries - and a few jokes told to him by fans...

Then he opened the auditorium up for questions... Do his siblings and his father still talk to him after he writes about them? (Yes, he shows them all stories before he publishes them. And he doesn't reveal any family secrets...) Does he plan to write about England, the country he now calls home? (When he lived in France, nobody knew he was a writer and no one read his work... But in Britain it would be harder to write about his neighbors without possibly offending them.)

The evening was enjoyable - perhaps a little too short. (Terry was hoping for a reading of the "Stadium Pal" story shown on the Letterman show...)

I found a few things he said about writing very interesting. When asked about his journals (the source of much of his writing material) he said he started a new one every season - and added a colorful cover to each volume.














I thought of my own journals... I am not that organized. In fact, I revel in randomly writing in a variety of notebooks, started at different times, perhaps on different holidays or in different moods, years before. I find it interesting to look back and see what I concerns I had at different times, juxtaposing my current stories with those... No chronological writing here! Just a mish-mash of memories.

But I could identify with his love of travel, of spending time in different countries. That had been my childhood dream - one I wrote about not long ago.