Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Often when I read aloud from my diary,

people laugh, and then they don't remember anything

anymore.

I remember my sister Amy used to be at Second City,

and I would go to her shows, and I would

laugh and laugh and laugh.

But when I left, I couldn't remember anything.

So I feel like sorrow often gives weight to the humor

and makes it more memorable.

But you don't want to be formulaic about it,

because then it just becomes a gimmick,

and it doesn't mean anything anymore.

But I think I'm naturally drawn to kind of what's sad, or grim,

or depressing about something.

And when I find it, when I can put my hands on it,

and I can put it in an essay, those are the essays

that people remember.

And I want the essays to mean something.

It's not always going to happen.

There's nothing wrong with just laughing.

But I think the difference is when

I've started out as a writer, I just wanted people to laugh.

And then after a while, I thought, well, OK.

I know I know how to do that.

What if I try for something more?

What if I try to move people, in a way?

What if I try to engage them in that way?

And I wasn't so desperate.

Like, I look at some of my earlier writing,

and I just see someone who's so desperate for a laugh.

And I want to say to that person, gosh, just calm down.

It's OK.

My father said to me a million times, don't force it.

And he was talking about me trying to force a knob back

onto the television, or trying to--

but it is good advice.

Don't force it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I'm often asked what writers I admire,

and there are any number of writers that I admire.

But a person who really had a profound impact on me

was Whoopi Goldberg.

Whoopi Goldberg did a Broadway show in 1983 or 1984,

and I remember it aired on on HBO.

And we had a tape of it, and I must have watched that tape

40 times.

And what I liked was that she did different characters.

And then you would laugh, and you would laugh,

and you would laugh.

And then something would happen, and you

would feel like such a monster for having laughed.

And you would just think, oh my god.

What kind of person am I?

It wasn't so distracting that you

were unable to continue with what she was saying,

but I love laughter that kind of turns around and becomes

something else, like a joke that becomes

a finger that points at you.

It's a worthwhile question, what kind of person am I?

And I don't mean to be the kind of author that says to people,

what kind of person are you?

I don't want to be a scold.

I don't want to be a nag.

But often, I'm the one in the essay.

I'm the example of somebody who was laughing and laughing.

And then I realize, oh, maybe it's not such a joke after all.

So there's a sound the audience makes,

and there's a way I feel reading it out loud,

there's no greater pleasure than reading the correct ending out

loud in front of an audience for the first time, and having it

work, and you just feel like a king.

Even if you realize, OK, I still need to cut two pages out

of this, or I need to pick up the middle,

or I need to do this.

If you've got your ending, gosh, that's

just a beautiful feeling.

The danger is writing something that just stops

instead of something that ends.

I like the audience to make a little noise.

That's what I like, at the end.

I like to make a little noise that's almost

like you were kicked in the stomach,

but like not by a grown man, but more like a baby.

Like, the ending, it just hit you.

The ending hit you.

It wasn't displayed.

It came out and actually did physical damage to you.

I like that kind of an ending.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Your sister dies giving birth in the hospital.

What is the ending--

her funeral, when she's put in the ground, a year later,

four years later?

You know, one thing kids like to do--

and you see this all the time--

is teenagers will write a story that the alarm clock bolted

Frederic from a sound sleep.

They write stories that begin with a character waking up

and end with a character going to bed that night.

And I think they're just thinking

of a day as a good beginning and end point,

but it's ridiculous, really.

I mean, it would be a good little assignment

to write an essay that would begin with you waking up

and end with you going to bed.

But it's hard to imagine doing it in an unironic way

and writing that essay without sort

of making fun of the whole precept,

because there are so many endings, right?

There are so many endings to every situation.

Your sister dies giving birth, and she's buried.

And two weeks later, you have a car accident.

Your sister dies in giving birth, and is buried,

and you are arrested for drunk driving

on the anniversary of her death.

I mean, or you wake up the next morning,

and you listen to the radio, and that's your ending.

So again, because there is no prescribed ending

to your life, often your ending, it's just made of air.

It's just made of words.

And so often on my drafts, at the beginning

underlined is end, underlined, underlined, underlined.

Like, the ending just didn't feel earned to me,

or it felt rushed to me, or it felt cloying to me.

And sometimes, I will spend weeks on the ending.

And then I'll think, all right.

Obviously, I made a wrong turn somewhere,

because I can't seem to find the end.

So I'll go back three pages, throw everything after three--

let's say I'll go back to page nine,

throw everything else away, and then take a different direction

on page nine.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I wrote an essay called "The Spirit World,"

and it began with my sister Amy telling me

that she'd gone to a psychic and telling me

what the psychic had said.

And I was with my family, and we were at this beach house.

And it was one of those essays that I just

couldn't get the ending, and I just

felt like I made a wrong turn somewhere.

So Amy had gone to this psychic who told her

that she had contacted our sister Tiffany who

had committed suicide, and my sister had messages

for us, right?

And that led to me writing about how I don't really

kind of believe in that sort of thing.

But the psychic had mentioned, had asked Amy,

did I have a lot of butterflies in my house?

Which is sort of crazy, because my house

was full of butterflies.

They come in in the fall.

They fly into the house, and then

they just are living there.

And then when you turn the heat up,

they kind of come back to life, and they're looking for a way

to get out, dozens and dozens of butterflies in my house.

So again, I'm not the kind of person who believes--

I don't want to believe in psychics.

I don't want to open myself to that possibility.

I just am one of those people.

I don't-- so I wrote this essay.

And again, I was pounding on it and pounding on it.

And then I went back.

I said, OK, what happens if you go back three pages, right?

And when I went back three pages,

I found myself writing about the last time

I saw my sister Tiffany.

And I was doing a show at Symphony Hall in Boston,

and I hadn't spoken to her for like five years by that point.

We'd had a big falling out.

And I was getting ready to go into the lobby and sign books,

and I heard, David, David.

It's me, your sister, Tiffany.

And there she was.

And there was a man backstage whose job

it was to look after me.

And I said, will you close that door, please?

And he closed the door in my sister's face,

and I never saw her or spoke to her again.

And I didn't mean to write that in the essay.

It's not-- I don't think shameful is the right word.

I mean, when you have a difficult relationship

with somebody, or if you've got somebody

in your family who's difficult like that,

it's understandable in a way, but it sounds really bad.

And once I had written it, I couldn't unwrite it.

And it just felt like I was a liar

if I didn't include that in the essay,

even though I knew that a lot of people

were going to really hate me for it, or think,

well, you're not the person I thought you were.

And that is indeed what wound up happening,

but it just felt false to erase it.

But once I included it, then I immediately

had an ending to my story, my essay.

And it wasn't the ending that I had before,

and it went into a completely different place.

But that can often happen.

I often do that to myself.

And I'll take an essay, and I'll think,

what if I dug deeper here?

What if I sacrificed my laugh?

What if instead of getting a laugh here,

I say what I really felt, or I admit to how I honestly felt?

And I think that that always makes it a better essay.

And I think it makes it easier for people--

I was going to say it makes it easier

for them to relate to you, but I don't know that it does.

I mean, you're certainly showing the world that you are fallible

and that you are not always a great person.

For me to sort of explain why I did what I did

would have added another three pages to the essay.

It would have felt like me, well,

justifying what I had done.

And it just would have stood out,

and it would have distracted from the story,

so I just didn't include it.

But it's funny, you know, I heard from so many people

after that book came out.

And I heard from so many people who

have a mentally ill person in their family.

And they'll say, I read that essay,

and I felt so close to you.

They seem to understand.

It was the people without that, I think,

that just saw somebody being cruel and shutting

the door in somebody's face.

But often, it's the case when you have somebody

like that in your family, you learn over time

to kind of protect yourself, and to say, OK,

I can't do this right now.

Like, if I talk to this person, I'm

going to be paying for it for the next several months.

It's going to be the last thing on my mind

when I go to bed and the first thing

when I wake up in the morning, because it's not

going to be pretty.

And so when I had the door shut, I didn't mean,

I will never talk to you again.

I just meant, I will call you when my tour is over.

And then when the tour was over, there

was another excuse not to call, and another excuse not to call,

and then she committed suicide.

But it was not pretty, but it's not really

your job to be pretty all the time.

It seems there was a perfectly good explanation

for all the butterflies in our Sussex house

the previous winter.

From what I'd read since Amy brought it up,

they flew in through our windows in early autumn,

then passed into a kind of hibernation.

Hugh and I were away until right before Christmas.

And when we returned and cranked up the heat,

the butterflies, mainly tortoise shells, dozens and dozens

of them, awoke, wrongly believing

that spring had arrived.

They were on all the second floor

windows batting against the panes, desperate to get out.

As symbols go, they're a bit too sweet.

Right for Lisa, but all wrong for Tiffany,

who'd have been better represented

by something more dynamic--

crows, maybe.

Two big ones flew down the chimney of my office

that winter and tore the place apart, systematically

overturning and then shitting on everything I cared about.

What, I wondered, placing the cucumbers back over my eyes,

with my symbol be?

The last time I saw my sister Tiffany

was at the stage door at Symphony Hall in Boston.

I had just finished a show and was

getting ready to sign books when I heard her say, David, David.

It's me.

We hadn't spoken in four years at that point,

and I was shocked by her appearance.

Tiffany always looked like my mother when she was young.

Now, she looks like my mother when

she was old, though at the time, she couldn't

have been more than 45.

It's me, Tiffany.

She held up a paper bag with a Starbucks logo on it.

Her shoes looked like she'd found them in a trash can.

I have something for you.

There was a security guard holding the stage door open,

and I said to him, will you close that please?

I had filled the house that night.

I was in charge, Mr. Sedaris.

The door, I repeated, I'd like for you to close it now.

And so the man did.

He shut the door in my sister's face,

and I never saw her or spoke to her again.

Not when she was evicted from her apartment,

not when she was raped, not when she

was hospitalized after her first suicide attempt.

She was, I told myself, someone else's problem.

I couldn't deal with her anymore.

Well, the rest of my family said, it was Tiffany.

Don't be too hard on yourself.

We all know how she can be.

Perhaps like the psychic, they were just

telling me what I needed to hear,

something to ease my conscience, and make

me feel that underneath it all, I'm

no different from anyone else.

They've always done that for me, my family.

It's what keeps me coming back.