There are two types of celebrity diaries. The first wrenches convulsive revelations from a corpse’s cold grip and upturns what we thought we knew about a deceased public figure. The second is a living artist’s selected highlights, a form of scrapbook memoir, polished until it reflects them in the best light. Humorist David Sedaris’s diaries are closer to the second, though there is plenty of the fun and some of the juiciness of the first type too, evidenced in his response to a shop assistant who asks what he’s looking for in a gift: “Well, grotesque is a plus.”
This second volume picks up where Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002 left off, except now Sedaris is no longer struggling, no longer a drinker and, following the publication of his breakthrough book of comic essays Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), is that rarest of things: a rich writer. This means that during the course of the book he can buy a sprawling apartment in Manhattan (“at 10 o’clock last night I discovered a new bathroom”), hideous designer clothes that “to an undiscerning eye” make him “look like a tramp” and any amount of overpriced tat (“I knew immediately I had to have it,” he says of an £8,000 stuffed kiwi).
And now that he’s famous, the staples of the book are his travels around the world to perform and his famously lengthy book signings, which last up to five hours. “I love how chatty Irish people are,” he writes, though it means he “didn’t leave the theatre until 1am”. Wherever he goes he spots the precisely funny detail and finds the mot juste – like “relaxing” in the sentence “mice got into the chest of drawers and ate the relaxing eye mask that Joan gave Hugh for Christmas”. Mostly A Carnival of Snackery is a compendium of the weird things picked up by Sedaris’s magpie eye (and ear): he cracks up when a French interviewer describes her meeting with Penélope Cruz: “An incredibly nice person. And beautiful too, with flawless skin and the eyes of a donkey.”
Often, he actively seeks out material by asking shocking questions to fans in signing queues (“I’m conducting a little survey and was wondering if you’ve ever shit in your hand?”). This mostly works because his personal essays make people feel they know him and they open up to him in response, though it’s less successful when he lists jokes people tell him, most of which are terrible but at least highlight how well-turned Sedaris’s own gags are.
Next to his pet peeves – rude people, over-friendly service staff and always, always litterbugs – more serious stuff is rarely dealt with: his agent’s dementia and sister Tiffany’s mental illness are presented almost as a diversion, at least until he reports their deaths. Compassion makes an occasional appearance – “how terrible their lives will be until they die,” he writes of parents whose children died in a school shooting – but you won’t find analysis here of the major events of these interesting years. The protests after the murder of George Floyd are less likely to attract reflection than sarcasm (“today, like yesterday, will be glorious, a beautiful day for setting trash cans on fire!”) or a quip: “Just because you forced your way into the Nike store doesn’t mean you can find your size in the stockroom.”
The jokes seem to thin out in the later years, as Trump takes power, as Sedaris’s father’s health declines, as Covid descends. We don’t expect consistency from diarists, nor explication, and we don’t get it, as people appear without introduction or footnote: in Sedaris’s books, other people exist mainly to provide amusement. Best, then, not to read this book cover to cover, like a novel, but to use it as suggested by the title (which is taken from an Indian restaurant menu): to keep the appetite for delight and absurdity satisfied until the next Sedaris book comes along.
• A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020 by David Sedaris is published by Little, Brown (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
