The Guardian profiles the essayist, here.
From the piece...
Yet his delight in eccentricities is often undercut by a sharpness and a darkness that at times can be startling in a writer who enjoys such mainstream success. In "The Smoking Section", his essay about his eventual, reluctant, abandonment of smoking, he writes about how he was introduced to his favourite brand of cigarettes: "Just after she started chemotherapy, my mom sent me three cartons of Kool Milds. 'They were on sale,' she croaked. Dying or not, she should have known that I smoked Filter Kings, but then I looked at them and thought, Well, they ARE free."
That his stories are telling most of all in their detail is also shown in the saga of his pilfered dinner – the simple fact that he was eating it at a book event: "I just found that if I do an evening book signing I don't get back to my room until 2am, and then room service takes another 45 minutes," he explains blithely over cupcakes in a New York coffee shop. "So now I just bring my dinner with me." It is a rare author whose readers regularly queue until after midnight to get his autograph.
In America at least, Sedaris is in the tiny golden circle of writers – along with Stephen King and Woody Allen – who commands rock concert-sized audiences in venues such as Carnegie Hall, and whose fans shout their love for him when he walks down the street in New York. "And," adds fellow humorist and American-abroad writer, Bill Bryson, "he really ought to be as famous here in Britain as he is there. He is the funniest and most original American writer since SJ Perleman."
Photo by: Marc Deurloo
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