David Sedaris is on The Spark ahead of Harrisburg appearance
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Scott LaMar
Our guest on The Spark Monday is one of the funniest and thoughtful observers of life in America and overseas.
David Sedaris has written 13 books, including best-sellers, and host radio programs and in fact got his start with Ira Glass on NPR 30 years ago.
In 2019, Sedaris was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which is an exclusive honor society dedicated to “foster[ing], assist[ing], and sustain[ing] excellence in American literature, music, and art”.
David Sedaris will appear at Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg this Wednesday where he’ll be signing his latest book – Happy Go Lucky.
One essay or chapter in the book is call The Vacuum and it described Sedaris’ time during the earlyof the COVID pandemic,”It’s not like we live in a studio apartment. You know, we had plenty of room, but it was just. I think I called it the vacuum because I was like vacuuming my apartment like three times a day. You know, I it was I mean, you could go out in New York City, but you had to have a mask on, on the street. So I started I have a Fitbit that just wants me to walk like a crazy person. So I started going out after midnight because there was nobody on the street. And I thought, Well, I can put my mask on my chin and nobody out. And so I saw a lot of nighttime during the pandemic. I mean, when I think back on it, I think of it as a nighttime thing, like being on the street at one, two, 3:00 in the morning and people with means, a lot of them left New York. So the people who were left were a lot of mentally ill people and drug addicts. I mean, it was pretty it was pretty dark there during the worst of it.”
Sedaris said it was a challenge to write anything funny during the pandemic,”One thing that happened to us as a country during COVID is I feel like people got so angry, you know? I mean, it used to be if I wrote an essay and if I wrote that I woke up this morning and washed my face, nothing would be thought of it. But suddenly it was like, Oh, how nice. You still have a face. I had to sell mine to support my family during that worldwide pandemic You obviously never heard of, you know, you pompous so and so. So everybody got so angry. And and it was funny to me, like their anger was funny to me. Like, everyone got so mad at Ellen DeGeneres, right? She did her show from home. She lives in a mansion. It’s like, yeah, with money you gave her. Like, where do you think she lived?”
