Frances Wilson

How does David Sedaris get away with saying the unsayable?

The bestselling American humorist continues to record his outrageous exchanges with both family and strangers in his latest volume of diaries

David Sedaris. [Getty Images] 
issue 02 October 2021

These aren’t diaries in the sense that Chips Channon kept diaries, or Samuel Pepys. They aren’t diaries at all, beyond the fact that each entry records an event and has a date and place attached. If a diary is a conversation with yourself, A Carnival of Snackery is a conversation with a crowd, because the observations it contains were written as material for David Sedaris’s shows.

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