“ I’ve never sat down thinking, Oh, I’m gonna write a book. Never,” David Sedaris tells me.

We’re sitting in his publisher’s office on the first real spring afternoon of the year. His legs are crossed in contemplation, draped in gray Comme des Garçons pants. “I don’t have that much to say about anything,” he adds.

And yet he has written more than a dozen of them—the latest of which, The Land and Its People, is out this week from his longtime publisher Little, Brown and Company. In it, in typical Sedaris fashion, he meanders through topics as disparate as meeting Pope Francis (Conan O’Brien’s wife was “the perfectly dressed person” for the occasion) and maximizing his Duolingo score (Junior is his favorite character, “but only in German”). One essay even tells the story of his secret marriage to his longtime partner, Hugh Hamrick.

“Usually it’s a title that can pull it all together,” he says. “So the title did that here, because all I had to do is write about any person and put them in a place.”

He is, of course, dramatically underselling the subtle thematic links pulling the collection together: legacy, mortality, what the body can and cannot do over time. Sedaris waves away this theory with an unconvinced hand. These are just the things one starts to notice with age, he suggests—and he is one of our great living noticers. “If I’m awake, I’m judging,” he has said.

But on the occasion of this new release, perhaps he’ll forgive my urge to talk a little about the bigger picture: namely, his legacy. The degree to which his writing has infiltrated the psyche of a generation of comic writers who read Me Talk Pretty One Day too young and listened to Santaland Diaries in the back of their parents’ minivan every December cannot be overstated—and even now, more than 30 years after he was first published, people are still singing his praises on TikTok. Asked in one social media video about the funniest book they’d ever read, authors Coco Mellors, Rob Franklin, and Orlando Whitfield all replied, “Anything by David Sedaris.”

“David Sedaris was a voice I carried with me all through my preteen and teenage years,” content creator and Tefi Talks host Tefi Pessoa tells me. “He made me feel like it wasn’t crazy to think the world was bigger than my hometown, and that wanting more wasn’t something to be ashamed of. I genuinely think I subconsciously moved to New York because of his books. I really do!”

Sedaris was born in New York but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, as one of six siblings. In his early works, he told the stories of his childhood—his senile Greek “YaYa”; his naughty sister Amy, who would become famous in her own right as an actor and comedian. “Even when I was a teenager,” he wrote in the introduction to his 2020 collection, The Best of Me, “I wouldn’t have traded my parents for anyone else’s, and the same goes for my brothers and sisters.”

His breakout success began on public radio, when This American Life’s Ira Glass discovered him in a Chicago club and started putting him on his programs—first The Wild Room, then Morning Edition. In 1992, Sedaris’s essay “Santaland Diaries,” a set of dispatches from his time working as a Macy’s Christmas elf, swept the nation and earned him his first two-book deal. Almost overnight, he went from subsisting on gig work to publishing bestsellers.

With Sedaris, nobody and nothing is off limits—no target is too big, no story too small, no issue too personal. Well, almost no issue. There’s one story about a trip to the United Arab Emirates that, Sedaris says, “I have to wait for Hugh to die [to write about].”

Sedaris is almost pathologically averse to sentimentality. A rave review of his second collection, 1997’s Naked, in the New York Times put it rather bluntly: “Mr. Sedaris does have a way with venom.” But the venom is what makes him so honest.

“When I die, I have all these diaries,” he tells me. “And I always say to Hugh, ‘You’re gonna find something bad about yourself, but keep reading, because on the next page, you’re gonna find something really good about yourself.’ It’s just like your mind. You have bad thoughts and you have good ones.”

To be sure, the “bad thoughts” have not been shared without controversy. In his late middle age (he turns 70 in December), Sedaris has variously taken aim at preferred pronouns, the word “queer,” and modern parenting—not even little dogs are safe from his ire. (Luckily, I didn’t bring my poodle mix or pronouns-in-bio to the interview.) “Thank God she died,” he said at the top of our conversation, describing an annoying child. And in late 2020, he was the subject of a wave of belabored think pieces and Twitter fervor over a story he told in which he suggested we should all have the right to make a “citizen’s dismissal” after incidents of egregious customer service.

Sedaris doesn’t take the hand-wringing to heart.

“If you’re writing satire, you have to swing hard,” he says. “You can’t go partway. And so many places that want me to write anything now are like, ‘Yeah, but can you go halfway?’”

Yet when his audience laughs in cruelty rather than recognition, Sedaris also sees it as his job as a satirist to fix the problem. For example, one night on a recent tour, he told a story about a micropenis that evoked big laughs—at the expense of the small penis. “I thought, Okay, the audience is laughing at the wrong place,” he says, “so I have to fix this. Because there’s plenty of stuff to laugh at, but that’s not the punch line.”

He sees this happen in comedy more and more often: The audience misreads a cue, they think the satirist is reinforcing their worldview, they take crassness for granted, and they never get challenged for it. It’s like all those studies about how both political parties would watch The Colbert Report and think he was on their side.

“ Dave Chappelle is smarter than his audience,” Sedaris says. “And he could take a chance to—because he’s smarter—educate them a little. Sometimes when they laugh, I don’t think they get stuff.… They’re laughing like people watching gladiators, and he’s letting it happen.”

Spending years of his career on the road has helped Sedaris to parse those differences; at readings, he uses his audience’s live feedback to hone the work, cutting this or that for years before publication. For all his confidence, even showmanship, Sedaris is extremely disciplined about that part. His advice for getting better is to do most of the tinkering in private.

“[The worst advice people give] would probably have to do with having people read what you are working on when you’re a young writer. When you’re a young writer, no one should read it. Don’t publish. Keep it to yourself,” he says.

We’re talking on the day that Lena Dunham has released her new memoir, Famesick. Before we wrap, I ask Sedaris if he’s read it yet. He shakes his head no, though he says he plans to. Then he looks at me and smiles.

“ I like how articulate people who are in therapy are,” he says—tactful enough to make the comment seem like a non sequitur. “I can look back on my past,” he adds, “but I don’t believe I search it for clues.”

“I guess I should press on that,” I say. “What do you mean?”

He’s quiet for a beat. “ I was raped twice in my life,” he says at last. “And it wasn’t ‘kind of rape,’ it wasn’t ‘rape in retrospect’.… I mean, it was, you know, being held down. But I didn’t know I was allowed to use that word. To be a gay guy in the 1970s, you didn’t think that was a possibility. What, are you going to go to the police? They would just laugh you out. It would be like saying, ‘Oh, I got mugged in prison.’

“And I think that that helped me in a way,” Sedaris continues, “because I didn’t…I didn’t spend all this time trying to work past it. I just thought it wasn’t mine to hold. And so I didn’t hold it.”

Sedaris is a collector of stories, a “thief by finding.” He has chosen, in other words, what to hold through his writing for the better part of 50 years. He rarely wastes time on the drivel of resolution. He’s allergic to morals, to fables. He must know, on some level, that such things beg to be revisited, amended, possibly contradicted later on.

So I guess I’ll skip that part, and just recommend you read The Land and Its People. Then you can see for yourself what’s left.