David Sedaris doesn't expect anyone to read his six hilarious international best-sellers, despite selling almost four million copies in the US alone.
'I'm regularly interviewed by people who don't read my work,' he says with a shrug. 'So I wrote the cover blurb for the hardcover edition of my new book with them in mind: 'It's early autumn of 1964. Two straight-A students head off to school, and when only one of them returns home, Chesney Yelverton is coaxed from retirement and assigned to what proves to be the most difficult - and deadly - case of his career. From the shining homes upon the hill to the back alleys of the notorious East Side, When You Are Engulfed in Flames confirms once again that David Sedaris is a master of mystery and suspense.'' He pauses. 'And this woman calls to interview me and says, 'So, the whole fiction-writing thing is new?''
In person, he is even funnier than he is on paper. That feathery, mischievous voice - at times barely audible and informed by a North Carolina twang (he drops his g's and exclaims 'Goll-llee!' when surprised) - delivers punchlines with inimitable stealth. His many imitators miss the point: the aggression they express towards their parents and meditations on sexuality are foreign territories to Sedaris, to whom discretion has always been the better part of valour.
He has something of Woody Allen's self-deprecating ease but is contextualised by love - the love he feels for his family, the love he feels for his partner of 18 years, artist Hugh Hamrick, his love of life in all of its excruciating smallness and, above all, the feelings for his mother, who died of cancer in 1991. That happened 13 months before Sedaris signed his first book contract.
'Little, Brown offered me US$50,000 for a two-book deal,' he incredulously remembers as he potters about making tea in the kitchen of his London home.
'I'd never seen US$50,000 in my life. So much money! When Hugh and I first moved in together I was accountable for the phone; he took care of everything else. So we didn't have a telephone for a while, because I couldn't afford it. And then I bought this really, really cheap phone. The night it was connected, my sister Amy called to tell me that my mother had died.' His voice drops suddenly. 'My mother may have tried to call me, but I didn't have enough money to have a telephone installed.'
Sedaris, 51, has spent most of his adult life without money, obsessing about its absence. 'I would get into a subway car and think: who has the most money? I'd think if everyone in the subway car had to sell everything - liquidate their stocks, sell their houses - and give me their money, how much would I have? I mean, I thought about it all the time. But I was never ruthless in my pursuit of it. When Little, Brown made their offer, I didn't tell my agent' - his voice flattens into an oil baron's roar - 'Get more, goddammit! We'll make 'em pay!' I just wanted it really badly, and it came to me.'