RE AOG: Stop Feeling Unloved & Discover GOD's Love Today 2026-01-26
Maureen Callahan: David Sedaris Boasts Elitist Lifestyle in NYT Profile || via jr222art
I've never heard of DS until this past week, it seems two ppl I follow are interested in what he has to say; though, I think Maureen's had a longer time to pit the man she esteemed up against the man he actually is. I'm sure if he could he'd want to actually be a better person; we tend to deny/distract ourselves from how upsetting life is and how deeply unfulfilling it has all been until it's almost too late. The heart is deceptive beyond measure, I like that he is such an open book, a true artist who embraces anything that comes at him. We all struggle with disappointment, especially when it hinders us from achieving our life purpose, it's impressive he isn't a total recluse.
David Raymond Sedaris is an American humorist, comedian, author, radio contributor. He was publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "Santaland Diaries". He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994.
Lou Sedaris is David Sedaris's father, a quirky man who has worked as an engineer at IBM for the majority of his life. A curious soul, Lou tries to get his children interested in the things he thinks are fascinating—things like jazz, math, science, and the future of the internet.
Born December 26, 1956 (age 69 years), Johnson City, New York, US
Siblings Amy Sedaris, Tiffany Sedaris, Paul Sedaris, Gretchen Sedaris, Lisa Sedaris
Parents Sharon Sedaris, Lou Sedaris
Spouse Hugh Hamrick (m. 2016)
Height 1.65 m
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter and sculptor who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement.. Pablo Picasso is famous because he fundamentally revolutionized how we perceive & create art. As a master of traditional technique, he consciously broke the rules to co-invent Cubism, co-invent collage, pioneer constructed sculpture. His relentless reinvention across a 91-year life cemented his status as the 20th century's most influential artist. Picasso's fame rests on several core achievements:
Mastery Before Rebellion: Picasso could paint with photographic realism as a teenager. Because he had completely mastered traditional academic rules, his later radical deconstructions were viewed as bold intellectual choices, not a lack of skill.
The Invention of Cubism: Alongside Georges Braque, he created Cubism. By breaking objects apart and painting them from multiple angles simultaneously, Picasso rejected the Renaissance rules of perspective and changed how artists thought about spatial representation.
Continuous Reinvention: Rather than sticking to a single successful style, Picasso constantly shifted through distinct eras, including his melancholic Blue Period, the warmer Rose Period, and later ventures into Surrealism.
Iconic Masterpieces: He created monumental cultural touchstones that transcended the traditional art world. For example, his 1937 anti-war mural Guernica—a powerful, anguished response to the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War—remains one of the most famous and fiercely political paintings in history.
Online discussions on Reddit's ArtHistory & Quora highlight Picasso's charisma & sheer volume of work (tens of thousands of pieces) helped him dominate European art scene & build the mythology of the "tempestuous artistic genius" during his own lifetime.
David Sedaris on His Sister’s Suicide
NewsCut | Bob Collins | 2015-06-04
What a hard situation to cope with, when he describes his dad as deeply frustrated, it sounds similar to the resentment Macaulay Culkin's dad harboured toward his young child even as his success was uplifting the family out of poverty. The progressive fraying of relationship his sister Tiffany had with her landlady, whom she started off praising then refusing to pay rent to, as she destroyed the suite—it reminds me of the ending scene of The Conversation (1974) where Gene Hackman's character spirals into a dark corner, terrified that the couple he was paid to spy on were somehow now watching & recording his every move. He didn't mind when he was listening on others, but he loses his mind when the tables were turned on him, riddled with a lifetime of guilt over the untimely death of a young lady he couldn't help prevent. Our virtue doesn't last.
David Sedaris Reflects on the Driving Force of His Life: His War with His Dad
Sedaris describes his dad as a mean man who was buried in "layers of rage and disappointment." He stiffed contractors, made sexual remarks to his daughters and, when Sedaris was young, would often shove and hit him. Sedaris always felt like Lou disliked him and wanted him out of his life. 2022-05-31
Is it possible to love a hateful person? That's the question humorist David Sedaris grapples with when he considers his combative relationship with his late father, Lou."It's been the driving force in my life: the animosity, the war that my father & I started when I was young & fought every day of our lives," he says. Sedaris describes his dad as a mean man who was buried in "layers of rage & disappointment." He stiffed contractors, made sexual remarks to his daughters and, when Sedaris was young, would often shove & hit him. Sedaris always felt like Lou disliked him and wanted him out of his life.
In his later years, Lou moved into an assisted living facility & developed dementia. At that point, Sedaris says, his dad seemed to forget that he was a difficult person. Instead, Sedaris likens his elderly father to a "little cheerful gnome." Nothing bothered him; he no longer criticized everyone & everything. "I don't know if … that was his little core finally shining through," Sedaris says. "But I felt so fortunate that I was able to be in the presence of that lovely person."
Lou died in 2021 at the age of 98. Meanwhile, Sedaris is still working to resolve the anger and pain he feels towards his father. He writes about Lou in his new collection of essays, Happy-Go-Lucky.
"It's tricky because you don't want to be a 65 year old man whining that your dad was mean to you. So here I am, 65, and hopefully it's not whining," he says. "I figured there's a lot of people in the same situation that I was in. I hear from them all the time, people who had a difficult parent."
On how writing about his father has changed since his death in May 2021:
I think what changed was there's a real person and then there's the character of that person. And when you're in a story or an essay, you're the character of who you are. My father was not a good person, but he was a great character. I know plenty of people who are good people, but terrible characters. They just don't work in an essay. They just don't advance anything. When I wrote about my father in the past, he was like, "Oh, that nut!, Gee, he can be tough sometimes, but it's lovable Lou!" But that's not really who he was. Now that he is dead, I just feel like I can kind of let that aspect of it go.
On the nuance of loving a person who was mean
The way I've always made sense of things is to write about it. When my mother died ... I wrote something about my mother and I read it out loud. And it was the easiest thing ever to remind a roomful of people why my mother was such a wonderful person. And my father said, "I want you to do that when I die." ... He'd asked me to do it and so I read a little something and there was not a single good thing in what I read. It was just about how he used to ram other cars at the supermarket when somebody took his parking space and the comments that he made to people and how nobody understood his jokes. But I said at the end, "People say, oh, I know you're going to miss him terribly." And the fact is, we will. As for why, we'll have to get back to you on that, because it's complicated and it's allowed to be complicated. I think now people are more inclined to say, "Well, that's a bad person. We all hate that person now because they're bad." But it's more nuanced than that. You can still love a mean person. You can still love a difficult person. Your mind as an adult should be big enough to hold all of these things.I just could easily just spend the rest of my life trying to sort through the feelings that I had for my dad.
On likening his father to Donald Trump
My father was a perfect preparation for having Donald Trump as president. Just outrageous lies. … Talking about his daughters in a sexual way was something that was Trump-like. Not paying people for the work that they did. When I was getting ready to move to New York City, he had a rental property and he said, "Paint the rental property, it'll give you some money to move to New York with." And so we agreed on a price. I painted the rental property. He offered me half what he had promised and then offered to fill it in with S&H Green Stamps that he had brought from New York State when we moved south in 1964 and I said, "Green Stamps? They're worthless!" "No, I heard you can redeem them in Florida!"
On his late sister Tiffany's claim that their father sexually abused her, and the difficulty of not knowing what to believe
My understanding from Tiffany was that she went to a therapist in the 1980s who said, "If you don't remember being sexually abused, that's a pretty good sign that you were sexually abused." And then she said, "I remember Dad coming into my room in the middle of the night," and then it became "Dad sexually abused me." And we'd say, "How? What did he do?" And there was never an answer. "I never said that he had intercourse with me. I never said that. I never said that he held me down and raped me! I never said that. I never said he raped me." Well, then what are you saying? then she told s/o later that I had sexually abused her. Kids do things, but I don't remember ever doing anything that could be construed as sexually assault towards her. ...
At the same time, our dad did and said a lot of things that were like, definitely beyond the pale. When my older sister was 17, he tried to get her to go into the woods and pose topless for him. He'd just gotten this Nikon camera, and he said he was gonna take some art photos. "I've got magazines I can show you. It's art. It's not smut." … The way that he would talk about his daughters, talk about their bodies and stuff like that, it again, it was a different time. But he didn't help his case any, by being creepy in that way.
On the difficult decision to cut off communication with his late sister Tiffany before she died by suicide
It's been interesting, after she died, I've gotten so many letters from people who have had a sibling take their own life. The pl who don't understand it are like, "I can't believe you wouldn't talk to s/b who was vulnerable, that you wouldn't reach out a hand to s/b who was vulnerable." And the ppl who have s/o like that in their family are like, "I know just what you're going through. s/x you just can't do it anymore. s/x you just have to." I mean, it sounds very selfish to say, I have to protect myself, but s/x you do. s/x it can just be so brutal that you just have to take some time out. And I never meant for the time out to last so long. I always thought Tiffany & I would find our way back to each other and, you know, and then she killed herself.
Sam Briger and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Natalie Escobar adapted it for web.
Author David Sedaris has been relatively quiet about the suicide of his sister, Tiffany, since penning a New Yorker essay about it in 2013 that elicited a rebuke from his sister's friend, and revealed the difficulty that families have trying to reach loved ones with mental illness. Died May 24, 2013, Somerville, Massachusetts, United States
But this week Sedaris opened up again in an interview in Vice magazine.
Anyone with a loved one with mental illness—I had an older brother, who died several years ago, who struggled—will recognize the pain that Sedaris tenderly describes. Loved ones reach out to help but are rebuffed and they're left struggling with their own feelings of anger, continually trying to focus their anger on the illness, not the person with the illness. Sometimes you succeed; sometimes you don't.
"Even as a child I looked at my sister and wondered what that would be like, not to feel the warmth of my mother's love. Tiffany didn't. There was always a nervous quality about her, a tentativeness, a desperate urge to be in your good graces.
While the rest of us had eyes in the front of our heads, she had eyes on the sides, like a rabbit or a deer, like prey, always on the lookout for danger. Even when there wasn't any danger. You'd see her trembling and think, You want danger? I'll give you some danger..."
"We never knew what was going on with Tiffany and thought, at one point, of hiring a private detective to find out what her life was like," he says. They found out later she had been diagnosed as bipolar, though she described it as PTSD, and the trauma was her childhood. He touches—too briefly—on the way his ill sister was treated.
There never seemed to be an innocent period with her, a period of dating or having a crush. She was sent away to a kind of reform school, a place called Élan [in Maine], when she was 14. Maybe she was innocent there & bc we weren't allowed to visit we missed it. It's like she went in as a child & came out a hardened vamp.
Sedaris & Tiffany hadn't talked for more than eight years up to her death. He acknowledges he could try to learn more about who his sister was, but he can't.
I would love to find out who she was. But I don't have your skill, the skill to go out & talk to her friends, to hunt down people she went to Élan with & construct a concise portrait of her. We all wonder, my family and I. We talk about it all the time.
We'd like to know how she survived. For close to 20 years Tiffany had a good deal on an apartment in Somerville. Her landlady was from China, Mrs. Yip, and for years my sister sang her praises. "Mrs. Yip, she's the greatest. She's teaching me tai chi!" Little by little Tiffany destroyed the apartment: pulled up the linoleum in the kitchen, overturned buckets of paint on the living-room floor, wrote on the walls.
The tub was black, and the spare room was crowded floor to ceiling with junk. It became a complete wreck. This rental unit was Mrs. Yip's retirement account. Somerville is full of students, and instead of renting to Tiffany for $1,000 a month, she could have been getting at least twice that, and having tenants who didn't destroy the place.
I don't know what happened between my sister and Mrs. Yip, but at some point she stopped paying rent & claimed she'd put $25,000 worth of work into the apartment. There was an eviction notice. Tiffany took out a restraining order. It got ugly, and eventually she moved into a single room in a much worse part of town, and then into another single room.
After the New Yorker essay, it was easy to criticize Sedaris, as if there's s/t he or the family could have done to help s/o who didn't want their help; as if they hadn't constantly wondered if there's s/t they hadn't thought of. s/x the answer is "no."
In order for things to be different, Tiffany would have had to be a completely different person. I mean, why not say, "Well, if she were four inches tall, and her name were Thumbelina, everything would have been fine."
I could not have saved Tiffany. If you don't want to take your medication, there's nothing anyone can do. There's not a single day that I don't think about her, though. She was a remarkable person.
There's no indication in the piece that time has presented the Sedaris family with any new perspective on Tiffany's life and death.
