I've had an interesting couple of weeks in terms of interviews for am New York, the NYC daily to which I contribute. First, I interviewed Emily Haines, and you all know what that meant for me. Then on Friday was a great double-header: Bebel Gilberto in the morning and David Sedaris in the afternoon.
I have more to say about all of them combined, but first this: Sedaris was absolutely wonderful to talk to and incredibly insightful. The only problem was this: My stories for am New York have a word count limit of right around 350 words. Sedaris answers questions with parables or anecdotes - and most of them would take up the space of an entire story!
So, here are a couple of transcribed bits from the interview that I really liked. The story appears in the paper and online on Tuesday.
On how a diary entry can end up as a story: "It usually starts by rewriting it to read out loud. Often they're incidents, not enough to make a story out of. But I wanted to read some new diary stuff this tour. I'll get my haircut anywhere, any barbershop. Kids could set up a table on the side of the road with a blowtorch and a sign that says 'Haircuts: 25 cents' and I would do it, because you can't go wrong. There's nothing you can do to make my hair worse than it already is. So I was in Memphis, and I was at the Peabody Hotel and I asked the concierge if she could recommend a barbershop. She sent me to a black barbershop and that's the most segregated service I can think of in the United States. When I went in the guy was like, 'What are you doing here?' He didn't say that, but he might as well have said that. He said, 'Go upstairs.' Upstairs was a salon where they were giving hair extensions. She said, 'Come back tomorrow.' But then she said, 'No, I'll cut your hair.' I thought it was just an incident, and I wrote about it in my diary. But I thought about it, and then rewrote it and thought I'd give it a try on this tour. Now, I think this might be a story about race. On the surface, but I was to really think about everything that went through my mind while I was sitting there reading a copy of 'Black Hairstyles Magazine' with Lil Kim on the cover with a Chanel logo spraypainted in blue on her head...that was something I thought I could take this page-long diary and turn it into a seven-page story."
On recriminations from writing about people he knows: "I wrote about my dad recently. In the story, I'm lying in bed with my sister Amy and I'm singing. I'm in fifth grade. My dad comes in and gets really, really angry. And I read the story and realized, 'they can't see him.' And my dad pretty much lived in his underpants. He'd come home from work, take his pants off, and he would not put them back on until he went to work the next day. So I wrote that my dad was in his underpants, but I added that he looked good in them. And that was true. I thought, 'Who cares if the world knows you were in your underpants if you looked good in them?' It was just a question of adding that. 15 years ago, maybe I wouldn't have added that. There's always something good you can say."
On writing about yourself: "The most personal things you can write are things that you can relate to. Like sometimes … how old are you? ("I'm 30.") Okay. You have a couple of years before this is going to happen to you. But in about twenty...two years, you will pee and then you'll put everything back and then you'll look down and there'll be a big stain on the front of your pants. You'll leak. It's really bad when you're at the airport and you have khaki pants on. You look down and you have a big wet spot. So what you do is you stand at the counter and splash yourself with water so that it looks like you had a sink accident. Now I haven't written about that yet, but I know that when I do, there'll be so many men in that audience who will say, 'that's exactly what I did!' I can't be the only one to do it. And then I started looking at guys in the airport, and you see it all the time! And it's not that embarrassing to me. I wouldn't think, 'have you now shame?' It's not that important to me.
Recent Comments