Lunch with the FT: David Sedaris By Tom Cox

To use a term as ordinary as “travel writer” to describe America’s most celebrated living humorist, David Sedaris, would do him a disservice, but he does get around a bit. Those who’ve read his essays will be familiar with several geographically specific Sedarises, each as gratifyingly out-of-place as the other.

There’s Sedaris the lisping, obsessive-compulsive teenager, relocated with his parents and endless sisters from New York state to North Carolina, a place whose residents are known to refer to cats as “good eatin’”; Sedaris the Christmas elf working in a Manhattan department store; Sedaris the Midwestern college dropout. More recently, there’s Sedaris the expat, living in rural Normandy and mistakenly befriending the neighbourhood criminal, and Sedaris the Japanese language student, desperately trying to kick a lifelong nicotine habit in an alien Tokyo. But Sedaris the Londoner? Overlooking a couple of brief moments in his latest book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, this is not a familiar character.