Nikolai Mather: Well, I guess my first question for you really is… I was rereading Me Talk Pretty One Day this weekend, and the thing that really stood out to me, as someone who also grew up in the Triangle, was: Were you really doing like crazy performance art in Raleigh, North Carolina? Like that actually happened?
David Sedaris: Yeah! I mean, there was just like a little group of people, I guess, I mean, I guess we had a name and everything, you know, it was like a little art collective. And there was this guy who wrote this performance piece, and then we did it at a warehouse in downtown Raleigh. And to tell you the truth, I never knew what it meant. And I just didn't want to sound dumb by asking. I had absolutely no idea what it was about.
And then I was invited to do a performance piece of my own at the Raleigh Art Museum. I was, I don't know, 22, 23 maybe. And I had no idea what that performance piece I did meant. You know, it was just the worst sort of performance art. You slowly pour Styrofoam pellets out of a rubber boot, you know — like you just go through your prop list. I mean, I later went to art school years after, and I sat through, as penance, so many horrible art pieces where somebody would do that. You'd see all their props, you know? You'd see the rubber ball, you'd see the pitcher of water, you would see the honeycomb. And you'd think, “Oh, God, how many more props do we have to go through until we're finally free?” So, I mean, there are brilliant performance pieces. And I've seen some that are just, I don't know, they just really, they really make you feel something, and then they make you look at the world differently. But that was never me.
NM: So it wasn't like, oh, growing up, I have to be like the next Marina Abramović.
DS: Well, I mean, before I took part in that performance piece that was in Raleigh, I don't think I had ever seen anything. I went on to see Meredith Monk, right? If you were to describe her, you would say, “oh, somebody warbles.” You would think, “well, that's okay. I don't really need that in my life.” But then you hear her warble, and you're like, “wow, why haven't I never heard anybody warble before? What a beautiful sound. I didn't know that could come out of a human.”
And the fellow who wrote the performance piece, the first one that I was in, was very, very earnest, and went on to, do quite a number of performance pieces. And, you know, it wasn't his fault. I guess I could have asked him what it meant.
And so then I did like, four or five performance pieces in North Carolina. When I look back on it, I went on to write a number of plays, right? And that was very satisfying to me. And, you know, gee, they did them in New York. And it was a great, great time in my life, but I don't know — when I was younger. I don't know why I it didn't seem like an option to write dialogue and have people say actual things, like, “pass the butter.” When I look back on it now, and like especially the piece in the Raleigh Museum of Art, I think if I had that to do over again, I think it would be great to write a monologue for a docent, you know.
NM: Like a tour sort of situation for the NCMA.
DS: Yeah — where she wouldn't really be talking about the artwork, she would just be sort of talking about her life: like the first time that she saw this particular piece of art. And it could be really funny! But for some reason I thought, “Oh, it's the art museum, and it shouldn't be funny; it should be deadly serious.” I took myself so seriously back then, but what are you going to do? You know, you're 21, 22, 23 years old. I mean, it kind of comes with the territory.
NM: Sure. I think there's still some, like some juice in that idea, though. The art docent is present, something like that.
DS: Well, you know, I was invited to do this thing at the Metropolitan Museum, right? And I was in New York, and I was taken there, and I was given a private tour of a show that they had. The museum was supposed to be closed that day, and I said to the guy who was showing me around, “Gosh, there's still a lot of people here — so can the docents, can they come in on the closed day and bring people?” And he acted as if I had used, like, a racial slur. He said, “No, no, no, no, no, no, we don't… we don't use that word.”
A docent to me is like a doctor's wife, you know. She's got oversized glasses, she wears chunky beads around her neck. I mean, everybody knows that woman. And he said exactly, he said that they're called volunteer guides. Not docents.
I always loved the docent. You know, you can always tell when you met one. I mean, even if you were at a party, or you were taking the bus, you can tell — you can always spot a docent when you see one.
NM: Like, I trust you to show me where you know, the most interesting forms are on this bus ad.
DS: You could just tell them by their jewelry and by their clothing, you know. And they were all fantastic and had good senses of humor. I was just surprised. I didn't think that that was a pejorative term.
NM: Is it pejorative?
DS: Well, it could just be a New York thing too. Maybe it could be, you know, you go to North Carolina and someone's proud to be a docent.
NM: Well, actually, that kind of segues into my next question. A lot of what you write about is indeed about the South, but it's also about lots of other places in the world. I’m curious to know: having lived in so many different places, how has it changed your perspective of the South — if it’s changed at all?
DS: Well, you know, I always admired writers who were all the place, right, who were born and lived in a place all their life. Like Flannery O’Connor — people who really knew their part of the world. But I mean, I'm from Western New York State, and my family moved to North Carolina when I was in third grade, and back then everybody in Raleigh had a southern accent. So you really stuck out with the Yankee accent. And back then, you know, there'd be fights at school and you'd be beaten up because you were a Yankee. So I grew up in Raleigh, but never felt of Raleigh. I live there, but I never felt like it was my place. I just felt like I was intruding on someone else's place.
And that made it very easy to move to Chicago and New York and France and England — I never — I was always on someone else’s ground. Having a place I knew inside an out the way many writers I admired have, that was never an option for me. You can’t fake that, you know. So if you don't have it, you might as well just go with not having it. Well, that's what I've always done.
NM: There’s a real tendency, I think, for people to be like, “Oh, I only trust art from real southerners, or people who really know this place.” And I see the point, but so many people in this region — particularly North Carolina, particularly Wilmington — are now outsiders. They’re transplants. And I think it’s a little stupid to just like, write off their art simply because they aren’t from here. Their perspective is still interesting.
DS: Yeah. I mean, it helps you. Living in England, I think, gave me a different perspective on the United States. You know, living in France did the same thing; the same way living in England now gives me a different perspective on France. I was talking to someone the other day, and they said, “Oh, I hope I'm moving for the last time. I never want to move again.” And I said, Really?? I love moving.” I love throwing things away. I love packing. I love shipping, like having address cards made. I just love all of it. I would love to move to Germany.
NM: Where in Germany?
DS: Well, the problem with Germany is that everybody speaks English so well. So I might be better off in some little town, you know, I'd be better off there than in Berlin, where everybody speaks English. Sometimes if you speak German, they'll just start speaking to you in English because, you know, it's just easier on them. But so I'd like to live in a place where that wouldn't happen quite as much. You know, some little village somewhere…
You know what I'd really like is, I'd like to go to prison in Germany. I think that would be good. Can you imagine how much you'd learn in prison? Like, language wise? It would be a really great place to study, prison.
NM: Well, I lived in Norway for a brief amount of time, and Germany for a little bit. And all I heard about when I was there was the Norwegian prisons.
DS: I have read a lot about Norwegian prisons, yeah. And they're really pretty, they look like community colleges. It's hard to imagine our prisons ever getting to that level. But I think we just have too many prisoners, you know. I mean, they have so few. I mean, compared to the United States, they have so few.
NM: How long would you want to stay there?
DS: Well, I don't want to stay for longer than two years. But if you go to like, a language school, if you move to a country and go to a language school, and every day you leave class and you’re still using that language — it really doesn’t take long. I mean, I went to Japan for three months once, and I enrolled in Japanese school. And you leave class and still speaking it, and then one day, you're on the subway, and all of a sudden, you understand the announcement on the subway, or all of a sudden you can read a sign, and it just feels like a miracle. So it actually doesn't take that long if you're studying every day.
I think a couple years would be enough. Two years would be enough time. So, not a mini violent crime or anything like that, and certainly not a crime that would be useful to people in prison, that everyone would be wanting you to do it on their behalf. Not mail fraud or anything like that. Maybe just — gosh, okay — like hitting someone with your car who deserves it. And everybody hated that person so much that they were like, “don't give more than two years.” I don't know how to drive, though, so I'd have to learn how to drive, I think, before I could do that.
NM: Or maybe not.
DS: Or maybe not. Anyways. No, it really doesn’t take long. I also studied Polish for a few months before I went to Poland, and I would talk to Polish women, and they would say, “Oh, my God, your Polish is so good.” And then I would talk to Polish men, and they would say, “your Polish is awful.” And it's because men like Polish men, when they go to another country to work or whatever, all they hear is: learn English. Even if they’re already leaning English, right? But everybody is so impatient and expects their English to be good right off the boat, and usually the people will give women more of a break. I wonder if that’s why Polish men are so impatient with me.
In England, you really get to practice your Polish a lot, because there's so many Polish people working in stores. And that's what you want. You want a Polish plumber. You don't want a British plumber.
NM: That’s true. I’m Estonian, and I always got confused for Polish when I was living there.
DS: I love Estonia.
NM: You love Estonia?
DS: Yeah, I was just talking to someone about it today. She wanted to go somewhere in Europe for Christmas. And I said Estonia. It feels different than other former Soviet Union countries, because there's not a sorrow clinging to it. Like to me, Estonia is more like, “can we get back to what we were doing before? Because we were really good at it.”
The design there was so beautiful to me. Like, you know, elementary school that looks like a tree house. I mean, I saw some great stuff there.
NM: It’s very beautiful — and such a weird combination of like, the Nordic, Finnish, IKEA clean lines aesthetic along with Russian influence.
DS: It's interesting, too, to go to that part of the world right now, because, I mean, they're really watching Ukraine hard. Because it’s just right there, and they could be invaded with no trouble whatsoever. So it's really interesting to spend time in in Finland and then spend time in Estonia.
NM: Well, when I was in Tallinn back in 2023, I saw a sign in the tourist center of Tallinn by a restaurant. One side was Estonian, and the other side was English. And it said something along the lines of, “Putin, can we speed up to the part where you kill yourself in a bunker?” They do not play about it. They are adamantly pro-Ukraine.
DS: Well, more people should go to Estonia. It was such a nice surprise. And the coast… it's like the beach ends and then there's a pine forest right there at the water's edge. I don’t know. Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I just wanted to be well traveled so badly.
NM: Well, I’d say you’re there. Except the prison part.
DS: Yeah, that might cut into my traveling.
NM: It can’t hurt to be stationary for two years.
