David Sedaris Talks About Surviving the Suicide of a Sibling
I first met David Sedaris about ten years ago, after he mentioned my Richard Yates biography on the Harvard Book Store website. I wouldn’t have been more flattered if I’d discovered that Mark Twain had read and enjoyed my work, and I made a point of attending David’s next reading in Gainesville, Florida, where I lived at the time. Later I moved to Norfolk, Virginia, and met David for a drink one night when his tour was in town—or, rather, I had a martini and David, as I recall, had seltzer. He sat across from me, alertly smiling, and sometimes he’d unobtrusively flip open a little steno pad and make a note. Which is to say, he’s almost always working, even when he’s picking up litter along the side of the road near his home in West Sussex, England (his diligence has been commended by the Queen).
On May 24, 2013, David’s youngest sister, Tiffany, killed herself in Somerville, Massachusetts, and David wrote a poignant piece about this and other matters, “Now We Are Five,” that appeared in theNew Yorker. Tiffany had stipulated in her will that the family “could not have her body or attend her memorial service,” and among her effects were a number of family photos that had been ripped to pieces. “Now We Are Five” recounts a family trip that summer to a beach house in Emerald Isle, North Carolina, where the surviving children and their 90-year-old father wonder who Tiffany really was and how things had gone so wrong. “Ours is the only club I’ve ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting,” David writes of his family. “Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you’d take your own life?”
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