SEDARIS: Well, I think what changed was - you know, there's a real person, and then there's a character of that person. Did how you wrote about him change after his death and even before that, when he was too out of it to read what you'd written? GROSS: David, you've written about your father for years. He never answered questions about his youth, saying only, what do you want to know that for? But getting to the root of my father was virtually impossible. Something must have happened that made him that mean. ![]() Well, I feel sorry for him, Hugh has taken to saying. The money was a comfort, but better yet was the roar of live audiences as they laughed at how petty and arrogant he was. Then I started to write about it, to actually profit from it. (Reading) As long as my father had power, he used it to hurt me. For years, I'd felt like one of those pollarded plane trees I'll forever associate with Paris, the sort that's been brutally pruned since saplinghood and in winter resembles a towering fist. Or at least it is if your relationship with that parent is troubled. It's disfiguring to be a child for that long. The woman across the road from us in Normandy was 80 when her mother died - 80. Now, though, with people living longer and longer, you can be a grandparent and still be somebody's son or daughter. SEDARIS: (Reading) It used to be that people's parents died in their 60s and 70s, cleanly of good old-fashioned cancers and heart attacks, meaning the child was on his or her own by the age of 45 or so. So I want to start with an excerpt of one of them toward the end of the book. Several of the essays are about your father in his later years and about his death. GROSS: You have some beautiful and very conflicted writing about him in your book. So I want to talk with you about your father who died not long ago. But that said, I feel more comfortable with - you know, with a prop, if there's something I can kind of hide behind. So it's been, like, 30 years, so I feel super comfortable in front of her. But I really - I've known Anne for - I don't know. SEDARIS: Oh, gosh, I just can't think of anything worse. But anyways, for anybody who knows you, that's not, like - or reads you - that's not, like, a David Sedaris real pose. SEDARIS: But nobody smokes tobacco out of it. SEDARIS: It's just for pot now, you know. Like, what happened to the pipe (laughter)? SEDARIS: And I think some places are - you know, have a problem with it because they say, he's smoking, but it's just a fake - you know, if you look at it, it's so clearly a fake pipe, but it's just a really fun prop, a pipe. GROSS: (Laughter) Yes, that's right - or like a Hugh Hefner photo. It's like a Playboy magazine author photo. And she'd been taking photographs of authors smoking pipes - you know, fake pipes. ![]() And so she arranged to get into the LA County Library Children's Department before they opened. And so I needed an author photo, so I asked Anne if she would do it. ![]() SEDARIS: Hugh has an old friend who he went to college with, a photographer named Anne Fishbein. There's something so, like, 1950s movie about it. So you're standing in front of, like, a library of bookshelves wearing an elegant suit, holding a pipe in your hands, looking off to the side. GROSS: So I have to start with your author photo before we get into the heavy stuff. So great to talk to you again.ĭAVID SEDARIS: Oh, thank you so much, Terry. TERRY GROSS: David Sedaris, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Terry Gross spoke with David Sedaris last year. The new book is called "Happy-Go-Lucky" and is now out in paperback. In Sedaris' new book, he writes about when his father was in his 90s and his power was continually diminishing in assisted living and in the ICU. He says, quote, "as long as my father had power, he used it to hurt me," unquote. Those essays are about his father, with whom Sedaris had a lifelong combative relationship. Yet several of the essays in his latest book take a pretty serious turn. He's had bestselling collections of his personal essays, and he's received The Thurber Prize for American Humor, the Jonathan Swift prize for satire and humor and the Terry Southern Prize for humor. David Sedaris is a famous humorist who got his start by reading his personal essays on the public radio show This American Life.
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