Under the radar

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.'

His phenomenal success has been translated into graceful properties around the world, an eccentric art collection and four-hour working days. When You Are Engulfed in Flames marks the first time Sedaris has written about the shift in his financial circumstances. 'Does money make it harder to be funny?' he asks, perturbed. 'Is comfort a kind of anaesthetic? I don't know, I'll see. My question with this book is: what can I get away with? Are people gonna say, 'What the f***'s he complaining about? I'd give anything to be in business class?' Or 'Boo-f***in'-hoo! They won't let him smoke at the Four Seasons'? But the thing is ... if I'm at the Four Seasons, I'm cutting my cake with a credit card because I'm too timid to call for a knife and fork, so ... I don't know.' He sighs. 'I'll just have to see if that will work.'

The New Yorker has also had a significant impact on his style. There have been complaints that the essays he writes for the magazine are not that funny, as if a kind of muzzling or over-zealous editing has taken place. And to an extent it is true: Sedaris now carefully qualifies his statements as exaggerations or imperfectly remembered vignettes, which detracts from the borderless comic impact of his earlier work.

'A lot of the qualifiers in those pieces are just New Yorker rules,' he says. 'In The New Yorker, you have to say right there if you change a name. I think a lot of people don't understand how rigorous their fact-checking is. They had a guy jumping in front of an ivy wall to catch the ball for the opening of the baseball season and the New Yorker's fact checkers said, 'Ivy wouldn't be in bloom in time for the opening game. And there's only one place in the country that has ivy on the inner wall, and that's in Chicago. But the uniform isn't a Chicago uniform!' They are serious about it.'

Sedaris prefers to use his lecture tours to refine his work: audience response shapes his stories.

'That changed my writing a lot because I'd start the tour with six stories, read one, go back to the hotel and rewrite it,' he says. 'I like proving to editors I can get a laugh in certain places. But what happens if I say what I really think and get rid of the glibness? Because jokes can be cheap. A radio colleague noted that audiences will laugh at anything we say and that doesn't mean it's funny. And I realised I can get up there and say, 'Is this microphone working?' and people will laugh!'

He was lauded as a genius in the vein of Mark Twain until 2007, when investigative journalist Alex Heard proved in The New Republic that Sedaris exaggerates for comic effect. The response was incredulity, not at the exaggeration, but at the fact that his spin was taken to be reportage.

'What bothered me was that he went to the house I grew up in,' Sedaris exclaims, 'and that he found my girlfriend from high school. Most people haven't been interviewed and they don't know you're actually allowed to say no. They feel like it's the government or something. Libby didn't know any better. She gave him all the letters I'd written to her at 19 ... and, you know, just the thought of anybody reading those letters - just the fact that they exist is bad enough! And he read them. So that bothers me.'

Asked what he thinks could have motivated such skewed hostility, Sedaris sighs. 'I know that he had submitted a lot of humour to my old editor when he worked at The Washington Post. And that none of it was funny. And that none of it was published.'

However dispiriting the episode may have been, Sedaris refused to take refuge again in drugs, alcohol or cigarettes.

'The most dangerous drug for me was crystal meth,' he recalls, 'which is really popular now, but back when I was doing it, no one had heard of it. I wasn't a complete maniac, but I took it and when I started coming down I got really, really depressed, so I just didn't come down. I was taking it four times a day, every day. My hair was falling out, my gums were bleeding. But there's always that turn-around moment when you realise that you don't have to be this person.' He pauses. 'What really saved me was that my drug dealer moved out of town. When she moved, I was like Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues - rolling around on the floor, my eyes popping out ...'

Sedaris, who now wakes at 10.30am to work, once made a practice of writing at night, drunk. 'I started drinking maybe a year after I started writing,' he says.

'It wasn't enough to dent the likes of Hemingway, but I was drunk and by the end of an episode it was just a mess typed on the paper. Alcohol loosened me up and made me more willing to take a chance. I started smoking cigarettes around then too. I could never write when I was high - I would get high after I finished writing. And then I would read what I wrote and ... hate it all. I don't think of myself as a real writer. I'm not sure if I'm crippled or enhanced by it, but there's a part of me that's an entertainer. And that part says: love me-e-e-e-e-e! Nakedly. I beg to be loved. And I don't think real writers have that.'

Writer's notes

Name: David Sedaris

Genres: humour, memoir

Latest book: When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Next project: another essay anthology

Age: 51

Born: Johnson City, New York

Partner: Hugh Hamrick

Lives: Paris, London, New York

Other jobs: babysitter, apple picker, house painter, cleaner

Other works: Barrel Fever (1994), Naked (1997), Holidays on Ice (1997), The Santaland Diaries and Season's Greetings (two plays, 1998), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004)

What the papers say about When You Are Engulfed in Flames: 'He seems perfectly content, strolling the lanes in Normandy ... Who wouldn't be? But contentment has rarely bred art of any universal interest.' - Chicago Sun Times

'The Sedaris genius is to be incredibly particular, not to mention peculiar, and yet take fantastic and rapid leaps to the universal.' - The New York Observer

'His humour seems to be mellowing. He is focusing less on the crazy family of his childhood and more on his current life with the not-crazy Mr Hamrick.' - The New York Times

Author's bookshelf

Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor 'I think Flannery O'Connor is one of the most important 20th-century writers, but in order to survive in America you have to be in schools and she used the word 'nigger' in almost every story because she lived in rural Georgia in the 1950s.'

Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade by Richard Yates 'I read one or the other every year.' Anything by Tobias Wolff 'Probably his first collection, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs. He's the best American short-story writer alive.' Anything by Alison Roe 'I don't know if I could choose one over the other.'

The Complete Talking Heads by Alan Bennett 'I listen to the CD over and over and over again.'