Open Knowledge - This American Lie: Is David Sedaris telling the truth?

07:32 pm - This American Lie: Is David Sedaris telling the truth?

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070319&s=heard031907

A midget guitar teacher, a Macy's elf, and the truth about David Sedaris.
This American Lie

by Alex Heard
Post date 03.14.07 | Issue date 03.19.07

Illustration by Alex Gross

qThe events described in these stories are real," humorist David Sedaris wrote in the introductory note to Naked, his 1997 collection of nonfiction essays. The New York Times was convinced: When Naked hit the best-seller list, it categorized the book as nonfiction. The Library of Congress called it biography, and Sedaris assured several interviewers over the years that the book was essentially factual. "Everything in Naked was true," he told the webzine GettingIt in 1999. "I mean, I exaggerate. But all the situations were true."

Great. Except that some things in Naked aren't true, even if you allow for an extra-wiggly definition of "exaggerate." Start with the story called "Dix Hill," in which David is a 13-year-old on summer vacation in 1970. His acerbic (and now deceased) mom, Sharon Sedaris, decrees that he has to volunteer for a job somewhere. Since David is an eerie little guy, he casts his gaze toward the state mental hospital on the south side of his hometown, Raleigh, North Carolina. "Dorothea Dix Sanitarium," Sedaris informs us, was a bizarre madhouse marked by "a bleak colony of Gothic buildings" and trees whose limbs "resembled the palsied fingers of mad scientists tapping against the windows in search of fresh brains."



That's funny, but what comes next isn't meant as a joke; you're supposed to think it really happened. David toddles into the mental hospital and tells a receptionist he's reporting for duty. She answers in screwball-comedy dialogue--"Tell me, son, are you by any chance a current resident?"--but allows him in anyway. With no training at all, he's sent off to work with a "plum-colored" African American orderly fake-named Clarence Poole. Shortly, they're in action, yanking an insane old lady off her bed and strapping her to a gurney:

"I'll take her up top and you get the feet," [Clarence] said. "Come on, granny, you're going for a ride." When the sheet was lifted, I was shocked to discover that this woman was naked. I had never before seen a naked woman and hesitated just long enough for her to lurch forward and sink her remaining three teeth into my forearm.

Wow. Call me a skeptic, but that didn't sound likely. So I made some calls, working through a few baffled state employees until I found Margaret Raynor, a 62-year-old registered nurse who has worked at Dix since 1969. Raynor had never read "Dix Hill" before. I faxed her a copy and then phoned. What did she think?

"He's lying through his teeth!" she said--loudly--before schooling me on the more obvious factual errors. There's no Gothic anything on Dix Hill. The main building, McBryde, is a huge, wide Tuscan Revival structure slathered with stucco. The facility is called Dorothea Dix Hospital, not "sanitarium." There are big trees on the grounds, and there was a volunteer program back in the early '70s. But it was carefully organized, a fact I absorbed when I visited Dix recently, met Raynor, and leafed through a scrapbook kept in the hospital library.

Judging by old newspaper clips, Dix was no paradise: In 1972, all of North Carolina's mental hospitals were officially rebuked because of substandard conditions. And there was, evidently, an organized role for young volunteers, including a 16-year-old named Bonnie Brunson who was featured in a 1973 story in the Raleigh News and Observer. But her duties--"being with the patients, escorting them to special events, writing letters for them"--sounded awfully light compared with Sedaris's battlefront tales.

Even so, in the end, I decided Kid Sedaris probably did volunteer at Dix. Why? Because I called him and asked. He says he did, and I believe him. During a long conversation from his temporary roost in Tokyo--where he has been holed up trying to quit smoking, poor guy--Sedaris was admirably open to fielding my most obnoxious questions about the hard-to-believe things I had found in some of his stories. He admitted that he had pumped up the Dix episode to tell a funnier yarn and that the juicy details with Clarence didn't take place.

That seems beyond the boundaries of comic exaggeration. It's fine to use absurdly embellished descriptions for laughs--this is an essential tool for any humorist. If I write, "I was so hungover, I threw up my own skeleton," you know I'm kidding. It's not fine to pretend--in a long and detailed scene--that you performed outlandish, dangerous tasks at a mental hospital when you didn't.

And Sedaris definitely didn't. When I asked him about his duties at Dix, he said, in that gentle voice so many people know and love, "It would have been more like helping set up parties." That cleared it up. Everything in Naked was true, except for the parts that weren't.



At this point, I can almost hear throngs of NPR listeners saying, Uh oh, is this guy about to give my man Sedaris the James Frey treatment?

No. I do think Sedaris exaggerates too much for a writer using the nonfiction label. And after spending several weeks fact-checking four of his books--Barrel Fever (1994), Naked (1997), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004)--I'd recommend that he issue Oprah Moment apologies to a few people, including all the unclothed frolickers at the Empire Haven nudist camp in the summer of 1996; platoons of women who are stereotyped as harpies, hicks, or sluts; and the ghost of his mom, who usually was one-dimensionalized into a sarcasm-dispensing cliché.

On the plus side, I was a fan when I started my odd little project, and I still am--mostly. One benefit of studying Sedaris's work is that I learned more about him, and there's plenty to like. He's an outstanding comic stylist who is consistently entertaining (his 2006 Princeton graduation speech, published in The New Yorker last year, is one of the funniest things I've ever read), and he seems to be getting better with age.

As a magazine editor and writer, I also admire his work ethic. I edited him once at The New York Times Magazine--a short piece about why he loved the TV show "COPS"--and he was a real pro. That's when I first became aware of Sedaris's improbable (but true) backstory, which involves an amazing mid-thirties turn-around that only could have happened through discipline. Between the time he dropped out of college in 1977 and became a big name some 15 years later, Sedaris paid serious dues--performing manual labor as a housecleaner and mover, battling drug addiction, diligently filling up journals that became the basis for his later work, and giving college another try, when, starting in the mid-'80s, he studied creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The hallelujah moment came during the 1992 holiday season, when Sedaris read a nonfiction piece on NPR called "SantaLand Diaries," which recounted his experiences working as an elf at Macy's Santaland. (Yes, he really was employed at Santaland. Bob Rutan, a Macy's executive who worked there when Sedaris was around, remembers him as "an outstanding elf.") Book publishers came calling, and Sedaris started churning out the pieces for Public Radio International's "This American Life," Esquire, GQ, and The New Yorker that eventually made him famous.

As fans know, the stories are largely autobiographical and often concern funny occurrences from his years as an odd-jobs desperado. His other great subject is his family--the daily doings of Sharon, his dad Lou, and the sibling Brat Pack of Lisa, Gretchen, Amy (now a prominent comedian and author in her own right), Tiffany, and Paul. David's persona is Weird Little Gay Guy who grows up into a catty-but-caring adult. Though he's mellowed over time--Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is a gentler book than Naked--he's not shy about letting everybody in his family have it, including himself.

It's all pretty funny, but, like many readers, I've often wondered if, as advertised, it's all true. The family stories, for the most part, never struck me as that hard to believe--the Sedaris kids seem a little tame, frankly--but every now and then, especially in Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day, you come across something that sounds like a whopper flopping on the deck.

Over the years, as I watched other nonfiction writers go down in flames--Frey, Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, the "monkeyfishing" guy at Slate--I wondered why no one had checked on America's favorite nonfiction imp. So I decided to do it myself. The trail was long and fascinating, and it led me to a larger question: whether "nonfiction" means anything when you're talking about humor writers who admit to flubberizing the truth for comic effect.

Sedaris doesn't appear to think so, and he certainly doesn't see himself as a journalist. In interviews, he's groaned about the time Esquire sent him to cover life at a morgue in Phoenix. The problem: He had to restrict himself to what actually happened. "I couldn't exaggerate at all," he told an interviewer. "It gave me a whole new appreciation for people who can honestly tell the truth, because people just didn't always say what I wanted them to." For Sedaris, it's all about telling "good stories." During our conversation, he told me he wouldn't care a bit if he found out that Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes was written by "some guy in Montana who made the whole thing up," because the tale he spins is so beautiful.

OK, but last time I checked, you're supposed to call that fiction. Sedaris honestly doesn't see the difference, and his audience isn't complaining. Should that be good enough for the rest of us?