Dear diary David Sedaris is back to tell more

The second instalment from the diaries of David Sedaris are grumpy, bitchy, sympathetic and sad – but above all, funny

Incuriosity is not one of David Sedaris’s flaws and, in this second tranche of his diaries, his appetite for observing the absurdities and idiosyncrasies of his fellow humans is deliciously rampant. Take the drivers who ferry him from airport to hotel to performance venue and finally back home – one confides in him that he had an affair with Whitney Houston in Nevada when riding with the Hells Angels, while another describes an uncle whose baby son had his arms chewed off by pigs (“Oh, how I hated getting out of that car”). There is nothing too macabre, too gross or, indeed, too mundane to capture his attention. There is no sense that he is becoming jaded.

To read these entries is to become complicit in a high-wire act: appreciating his appreciation of weirdness and recognising it for the voyeurism it sometimes is, balancing his enthralment to observation with active poking of the hornet’s nest, his amused indulgence with something a little less benign. Therein, of course, lies Sedaris’s edge; a flâneur in Comme des Garçons who doesn’t so much cross the line as vault it in search of another one.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in his interactions with the audiences who pack out theatres and then queue for hours to chat with him. In Pennsylvania, a 19-year-old asks him to inscribe a copy of his book When You Are Engulfed in Flames to his mother with “something shocking and offensive”. After a moment’s consideration, Sedaris picks up his pen: “Dear Mary Lou, I wrote. Your son Jesse left teeth marks on my dick. I handed it back and realised by the look on his face that by shocking and offensive he’d meant ‘lightly disturbing’.”

Unsurprisingly, Sedaris is most moving when he is writing about his family, in particular the death of his sister Tiffany, who took her own life in 2013. He gets the news while boarding a plane to Baton Rouge, and decides on the flight that it must be a practical joke that will lead to a reconciliation, “a mean joke, but forgivable”.

That evening, he signs books for hours at a Barnes & Noble, concealing what has just happened from a legion of fans but unable to stop his mind from whirring. “‘You look fantastic in that tunic,’ I said, and ‘What’s your take on sausage?,’ remembering the time Tiffany joined me at the Brookline Booksmith and told everyone who came through the line that they had beautiful eyes or the world’s most perfect hands. She was wild that night and had her friends distribute cards that read TIFFANY SEDARIS, DAVID’S LOSER SISTER. MOSAIC ARTIST. I saw her only once after that.”

The presence of the family is always felt. His attritional war with his father, Lou, who died at the age of 98 a few months after the final entry, captures all the contradictory emotions of difficult family relationships, with Sedaris variously angered, resigned, relenting and, ultimately, compassionate. We hear not only of Lou’s persistent jibes, but also of his badgering his local paper with anonymous phone calls telling them to interview his son. And with the disinhibition of age – both father and son’s – comes recognition. Meeting a friend of Sedaris’s brother, a woman who has recently lost a huge amount of weight, “Dad said, not ‘Congratulations’ or ‘That must have been tough’, but rather ‘I’ll bet you’re a real sight to see in the shower.’ And people accuse me of having no filter.”

For all that, Sedaris has no filter when it comes to his love of conspicuous consumption – houses bought on what seems like a whim, high-end shopping, fossicking around antique shops – he is also impressively civicminded. His devotion to litter-picking is well documented, and neither does he stint on the gruesome details of what he gathers on his epic hedgerow walks, nor on his run-ins with high-handed neighbours, whom he generally swears at before going home to be gently reprimanded by Hugh, his more diplomatic partner, the curb to his excesses, the reliable provider of delicious dinners and, frequently, the foil of his jokes.

By the book’s conclusion, Sedaris and Hugh are holed up in their New York apartment for lockdown, emerging only to join Black Lives Matter protests and to celebrate the ousting of Donald Trump – and for Sedaris to go and clean his sister’s oven, a service he describes as the perfect gift when you can’t think what to get someone. These diaries – grumpy, bitchy, sympathetic, sad and welcoming – might be another.