American humorist David Sedaris on OCD, the ‘manopause’ and partner Hugh ahead of Hong Kong visit
- Sedaris, an author and long-time contributor to The New Yorker, says he is trying to avoid becoming a cranky old man who always complains
- He is in Hong Kong this week for ‘An Evening with David Sedaris’ at the Asia Society on Friday, where he plans to read some new material
David Sedaris sounds as though he’s got the post-holiday blues – or perhaps it’s just the dry, laconic tone in which he speaks. His house in the south of England has been full of friends and family over the festive season and now he’s left with piles of laundry and the gloomy British weather. Little wonder he’s looking forward to coming to Hong Kong this week.
“I always liked a cloudy day, but then I moved to Europe and realised than when you live here the sun goes away in September and you don’t see it again until April in any significant way. The mud is up to your ankles and all it does is rain and the backyard is a pit of mud,” Sedaris says over the phone from his 16th-century house that he shares with his partner, the painter Hugh Hamrick, in a rural part of the county of West Sussex.
It will be his fourth visit to Hong Kong and although he hasn’t yet decided what he will read at the Asia Society on Friday, he knows it won’t be from his 2018 book, Calypso. After an extensive book tour in the US and Europe, he says he wouldn’t mind if he never opened that book again. Instead, he plans to read some new material. It’s a strategy he applies when he’s on the road to help hone his work.
“I will read something out loud and go back to the hotel room and rewrite it and reread and rewrite it and try to get it in shape. I try to learn as much as I can before I hand it to my editor at The New Yorker, and then I start working with her on the final draft of it,” says Sedaris, who has contributed to The New Yorker since 1995.
