Don’t humor me
Well, well. It appears our friend David Sedaris (anyone who visits
His crime? Exaggeration.
It appears that some readers of Sedaris’ humorous, semi-autobiographical essays don’t quite get the joke. In particular, Alex Heard, whose recent article in The New Republic (“This American Lie”) challenges many of the situations depicted in Sedaris’ breakthrough 1997 book, Naked, claiming they never happened.
Now, who ever heard of a humor writer making things up? That would be, like, untrue, wouldn’t it?
If that were the case, we would never be able to read and enjoy Woody Allen, Dave Barry, Mark Twain, James Thurber, Stephen Fry or Larry David again.
After all, if you can’t trust a comedian to tell the truth, then who can you trust?
To be fair to Heard, an editor for Outside magazine, he still enjoys reading Sedaris, but has some bones to pick with several characters in his work that he says were “invented,” like the midget guitar teacher, and some nudists, and a couple hicks on a bus. But really, he is most perturbed that Sedaris’ work is placed in the “nonfiction” section of bookstores.
In this era of James Frey, when the author of A Million Little Pieces must repent on Oprah’s couch and tearfully admit that he “made up” chunks of his memoir, it’s not so surprising that other purveyors of “the truth” should be lined up for the pillory. Heard even suggests that Sedaris “issue Oprah Moment apologies to a few people” he blew up out of proportion (or conjured up out of thin air) in Naked.
It’s curious that Naked is the object of Heard’s truth-seeking missives. When I read this sprawling book, I had no idea it was meant to be autobiographical (I didn’t find it in “nonfiction” but in “literature,” so Sedaris cleverly straddled that literary line). The stories were so diverse and obviously exaggerated, that I didn’t trouble myself over which parts were true or invented. (The book is also howlingly funny, a quality which has diminished somewhat in Sedaris’ recent work, starting with Dress Your Family in Corduroy and now his recent volume, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, which got a thumbs-down from New York Times writer Michiko Kakutani for being too slapdash. As opposed to slapstick, I suppose.)
Naked, interestingly, is Sedaris’ least favorite work. When he was in
I asked Sedaris at the time which parts of his books were real and which were fictional, and he gave a slightly exasperated sigh. “I guess I always thought of things as, like, the truth run through a story mill? You know, like the truth is one thing, but the entertaining thing is another.
“You know, when Hugh (Hamrick, his boyfriend) reads something I wrote, he might say, ‘That’s not how it happened, There were six people at dinner, and you said there were only two.’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, but if I list six names, the reader’s trying to keep six names in his head, four of ‘em aren’t important. Let’s just get rid of them.’ So there’s nothing that would hold up in court.”
So this tendency to fudge facts appears deep-seated in Mr. Sedaris. Yet somehow, for a humorist, I don’t think it’s a hanging offense.
After all, we read David Halberstam if we want a good depiction of the truth; we read P.J. O’Rourke if we want a good laugh. We read Jim Sheeler if we want hard-hitting reports about US soldiers returning from
Sure, there are real issues about journalistic integrity these days, what with New York Times reporters and even
There is the question of whether personal essays sprinkled with untruths deserve to be stocked in “nonfiction.” I would say if the larger proportion of a work is factual, then we can overlook the leg-pulling, just as we would that of a uncle prone to embellishing his fishing stories. It’s still basically in the realm of nonfiction.
Admittedly, there is a mean-spiritedness in Sedaris’ earlier work — a tendency to draw grotesque caricatures from American life, not unlike those found in Borat, and hold them up for ridicule (this may be another reason Sedaris is less fond of Naked). But grotesquerie is arguably a Southern Gothic tendency (Sedaris grew up in
In the end, it’s the desire for attention that probably drives Sedaris to stretch the truth. “I think large families are like that,” he told his
“So you’d learn to say, ‘Jerome raised his hand in class, and the teacher slapped him across the face!’ And it’s not true, but at least it’s quick.”
Brevity really is the soul of wit. Fact checkers be damned.