This much I know

This much I know

David Sedaris, humourist, 51, London
  • The Observer,

I'm a complete Luddite. I only saw the internet for the first time last September, and I finally got email in June. To me, the computer is a typewriter that glows. I only type with one finger. And I still don't have a cellphone. People who are coming to dinner tend to call to say they're 10 minutes away. I really don't care. When they arrive, they can knock on the door.

  1. When You Are Engulfed in Flames
  2. by David Sedaris
  3. Find this on the Guardian bookshop

Never wear trousers that are any lighter than khaki when you're travelling. I swore I would never get a rolling suitcase, but I succumbed because my trousers were just getting filthy from hefting my trunk. But worse, I have to pee constantly since I turned 50. So I do that, I get up, put everything back, and I've got pee dribble all over me. So I have to splash myself and act like I had a sink accident. Dark twill or heavy denim are prerequisites now.

Feeling like an alien is interesting. In France, if you wear the right shoes and keep your mouth shut, you can pass: no one needs to know you're a dumb American. In Tokyo, that's obviously not an option. And I like what you're left with - nakedly being foreign. I can speak a few Japanese phrases, but only in the high-pitched pouty voice of my Japanese tutor, so I never leave a room without provoking fits of incredulous laughter. They're like: 'How did you do that?' much as if they'd just come across a seal riding a bicycle.

I don't have very American teeth. They're pretty discoloured and uneven. I haven't actually looked at them for about 20 years. When I'm signing books in the US, I keep my head down and try not to smile too effusively.

I've given up drink, drugs and cigarettes. I miss smoking the most. I smoked for 30 years, and I smoked a lot. This morning I thought I needed a cigarette. Now. Nothing else will do. It didn't last long - I went to mop the kitchen floor, and by the time I got downstairs the desire had gone. I went to live in Tokyo to finally kick the habit. Trying to speak Japanese, living in a high-rise, I became a different person who didn't smoke. That made it much easier.

Write about what you know. And embroider the hard facts a little if absolutely necessary. I don't exaggerate or embellish so much in my stories since I started writing for The New Yorker, because their fact checkers are as fearsome as their legend suggests. I wouldn't be able to say that I took my water off the table without them first establishing that I'd put it on the table. I wrote about a child molester in our village in France and their French-speaking fact checker called the farmer and his wife across the street from us and corroborated everything with them.

I love going on book tours. I get to signings early so I can hang out. That way people aren't intimidated. It behooves certain authors to project a kind of enigmatic air. But if you write about a huge boil on your ass, the mystical-man-of-letters avenue is really closed to you. Also, I have a bottomless need for attention. And I'm willing to spend months alone in a room, writing, if only so that then, goddamn, I can get out on the road and bask in the acclaim that's due me.

I never learnt to drive. I still have to ask my dad for a ride when I go home. And he's still late.

I tell him I'm arriving at noon; he's not there. I call - 'I'm on the way out the door.' I call back half an hour later - 'I'm coming.' I can hear the TV in the background. By the time he comes, I'm so angry that the whole trip is ruined. That seems to be the way we've set it up for ourselves.

I spent 10 days in a pathology lab at a medical examiner's office. I thought it would allow me to accept my own mortality, but it taught me was that everyone I love is going to die.

· When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris is published by Little, Brown at £11.99

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