Everyone has a favourite David Sedaris piece. Mine, I don’t mind saying, is the essay Me Talk Pretty One Day, in the collection of the same name.
Just like everyone else who claims to love Sedaris (we were unable to procure a single disgruntled reader for this piece), my reasons are personal. Something about trying to learn French, which, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk about just now.
Sedaris is 51. He’s flown to L.A. from Paris — where he lives with Hugh Hamrick, a painter and Sedaris’ partner since 1990 — for a party given by The New Yorker in Salman Rushdie’s honour and to begin the book tour for his new collection, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. I have thought of all kinds of gimmicky things to do with him in L.A., but after hearing his recent travel schedule — Greece, Paris, London (where Sedaris and Hamrick live for part of the year), New York and Normandy (another haunt of theirs) — moving past the doorman of the Four Seasons seems an anticlimax.
Sedaris has told me he will not have his picture taken. As a kind of revenge, I bring several pictures from the web to wave at him: Sedaris in his pot-and-alcohol days, Sedaris in his hip-square-glasses period, Sedaris looking alarmingly French. Today he is soberly dressed in a pink-and-white-striped button-down shirt, khakis and stylishly plain, flat, brown leather shoes (not the ones the writer refers to frequently as his “clown shoes”). He has a gap the size of Lauren Hutton’s in his front teeth and eyes that go off in separate directions. A deep vertical line in the middle of his forehead is the only evidence of age or worldly wear. He looks very relaxed, very happy, like someone who, at least when travelling, consigns himself graciously to the care of others. His manner is formal, but the kind of formal that puts you at ease. He orders apple pie a la mode. When the pie comes with the ice cream on the side, the writer can’t help but notice that it’s not, ahem, actually, a la mode now, is it?

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