David Sedaris - A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020)

Occasionally in this book I have changed peoples names or altered their physical descriptions. Ive rewritten things slightly when they were unclear, but most everything was left intact.

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In reading the eighteen years worth of material that went into this second volume of my diaries, I noticed a few things. For starters, I have a lot of mice in my life. There must have been at least three hundred mentions of them, maybe more. I came across them in my home and in my yard. In restaurants and banks. I even ran into mice on vacation! (Mine, not theirs.) Then there are the ones described secondhand by friends or thrown to snakes and snapping turtles in YouTube videos. If combined, these entries would make for a whole separate bookan edge-of-your-seat thriller for cats. The only place I dont have a mouse problem is New York, where I have rats insteadnot in my apartment, thank God, but surrounding it, trying to get in. One of the mentions I had to cut involved one I saw near Times Square at two a.m. with a Cheeto in its mouth. A few weeks later, while walking in West Sussex, I found a wounded rat in a paper bag. I swear, I could move to the moon and still find rodent droppings on my countertops.

There were also an inordinate number of entries that concerned travel of one sort or another. Why so many airport stories? I used to wonder as I watched comedians on TV back in the 1980s. Cant you talk about something else for a change? Then I started touring and realized just how much time those people spent getting from one place to another. Where there are cars and trains and buses and planes, theres going to be tension and ugliness. Theres nothing I find more compelling, so of course my diary is filled with travel stories, many of which involve hired drivers. That makes me sound very grand, but Im only ferried around when Im on tour. Sometimes Im taken from one city to the next, but more often Im picked up from some airport or other and carried to my hotel. If I had a license I suppose I could rent a car and make the trips myself, but oh, the lovely encounters I would have missed, the hundreds of men and women Ive fallen into conversation with and who have surprised and delighted me.

There are also a great many entries about litter. From 2010 on, I mentioned it every day, at least when I was in the UKexhaustive reports on how many cans and bottles Id picked up that afternoon, the bags of household trash Id found dumped by the roadside, the toaster ovens and construction waste. Then Id travel to another country and write about the litter I wasnt seeing. Theres only so much of that a reader can take, I suppose.

Left out altogether are the countless quotes taken from books and magazine articles Ive read, lines and paragraphs that struck me as beautiful or precise. Ive transcribed great chunks of Mavis Gallants diaries, for example, but none of them made this collection, as reprinting them would involve getting permission. The quotes made me look smart, so I hated to lose them. Likewise, Ive left out reviews of the many books that have disappointed me over the years. Ive always been excited by authors who disparage their contemporaries, the sort who forever have their dukes up, spoiling for a fight, but I dont want to be one of those people.

If a number of these entries seem overproduced, its because they are. When something especially interesting happensa monkey is spotted at the Cracker Barrel, a woman tells me that her cousin had his arms chewed off by pigs in MexicoI take extra care when writing it up in my diary, knowing Ill likely be reading it onstage. These entries, by and large, have taglines. They wave little flagsHey, look at me! Many of the ones that work well in front of an audience I wound up cutting just because they seemed too self-conscious, too eager to please. Others I kept because, come on, his arms chewed off by pigs?

As with the first volume, Ive included a great many jokes in this book, ones I heard at parties and book signings. I wanted to put them all inthe good and the badbut times being what they are, I dont know that my publisher could withstand the vast amounts of hate mail they would engender. Oh, offensive jokeswhen, if ever, will your time come around again?

As in my first volume of diaries, Theft by Finding, Ill remind the reader that this is my edit, a tiny fraction of what Ive written to myself over the past eighteen years. I havent gone out of my way to appear thoughtful and virtuous but could easily look much, much worse than I do in these pages. Again, I chose entries that I thought were funny or startling in some way. Theft by Finding, which covered 1997 to 2002, had a narrative arc. David Copperfield Sedaris, Hugh called it. If theres an arc to this book, I dont know what it is. The me that I was when the first volume ended has certainly grown older, though no wiser. Its a safe bet that Ive become more spoiled and impatient. Often while rereading my source material, Ive thought of Dorothy Parkers From the Diary of a New York Lady During Days of Horror, Despair, and World Change. Here is war and calamitynatural disaster, mass migration, racial strifeand Im complaining that the sale at Comme des Garons starts the day after I leave Paris for Zurich, where I am to receive an award. Of all the rotten luck! In fairness to myself, I do mention politics and current events. I follow the news quite closely, as a matter of fact, though you wouldnt know it from reading this book. If I didnt include many of those entries, I guess its because other people cover that sort of thing much better and with a lot more authority than I do. Plus, if Im honest, given a choice between writing about the Arab Spring uprisings and a beggar calling outas one recently did to a woman walking ahead of meHey, you got a hole in your ass, Ill go with the latter.

Though I suspect you already knew that.