A Carnival Of Snackery

If you’re thinking that the world has gone barking mad, then David Sedaris’s diaries don’t just provide an abundance of comic relief – they’re oddly comforting, too. Dip in and you’ll realise that crazy as things may seem today, they were pretty bonkers back in 2003, when this latest volume opens.

Writers are legendarily sedentary folk but humourist Sedaris, by dint of fame (he’s forever on tour) and fortune (together with long-term partner Hugh, he owns multiple properties in the US, the UK and France), spends a great deal of time on the road. At every stop he becomes a magnet for wackiness.

He finds it in language differences (Penélope Cruz has ‘the eyes of a donkey’, a French journalist confides); out shopping (oolong tea hand-picked by monkeys, anyone?); and on the plane (‘My seatmate feasted on himself,’ he notes of an earwax-nibbling – and worse – fellow traveller). Even wildlife goes bananas when Sedaris is nearby: in Newcastle he watches a gull kill a pigeon. Whether he’s having his head vacuumed in a barber shop or signing a book for a fan whose father ate her placenta, each incident is logged in his inimitable deadpan prose.

Sedaris’s first volume of diaries, Theft By Finding, opened in

1977, when he was 20, and ended in 2002, its entries charting his discovery of his voice and vocation. This second volume spans a further 17 years, ending with the pandemic and, while it lacks that ready narrative arc of its predecessor, its varied entries soon become addictive.

Has he changed much besides becoming sober and successful? ‘It’s a safe bet that I’ve become more spoiled and impatient,’ he admits in the introduction. He certainly doesn’t go out of his way to present himself in the best light. Eavesdropping on a woman savagely berating her teenage granddaughter on the Eurostar, he can think only what a fabulous source of material the woman would be. ‘Her grandmother was a gold mine dressed like a gold miner, and looking at the girl, instead of feeling pity, I felt jealousy,’ he admits.

Though global events occasionally shoulder their way in (the invasion of Iraq, terrorist attacks in London, mass shootings in the US) along with more personal calamities (his sister Tiffany dies of an overdose; his homophobic father takes a tumble), Sedaris’s diary functions less as a confessional than a treasure trove of material.

A Carnival Of Snackery may not be quite as satisfying – or as revealing – as his personal essays but it’s a feast all the same: drolly absurd, irreverently scabrous and, every so often, touching.

Hephzibah Anderson