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Honestly with Bari Weiss

A Holiday Treat with David Sedaris!

Honestly with Bari Weiss

The Free Press

News, Society & Culture

4.67.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2022

⏱️ 75 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

David Sedaris is a humorist and author of many best selling books: Calypso, Theft By Finding, Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked, Holidays On Ice, Barrel Fever… just to name a few. He’s also one of my favorite writers of all time. What makes Sedaris – who got his start on NPR back in 1992 with his, now famous, Santaland Diaries essay about the time he worked as a Christmas Elf at Macy’s – so mesmerizing and funny, is his ability to find something meaningful and true in the utterly mundane, the way he finds humor in the most horrific moments in life, and his commitment to the lost art of making fun of ourselves. Nowhere is that more clear than in his newest book, Happy-Go-Lucky. Like most of his writing, it’s a book about his beloved and crazy family. But it’s also a book about some of the most contentious societal issues of the last few years. For the writer who so many think of as a public radio darling, the pages of Sedaris’ new book are not like what you find on today’s member stations. He writes about observing Black Lives Matter protests and COVID lockdowns with such candor – and without agenda or moral ideology – which results in something not only hilarious and relatable, as usual, but also extraordinarily refreshing. So for today, if you find yourself tuning in from an overcrowded plane, a car full of bickering cousins, or maybe you miraculously get a quiet moment to yourself on a long and snowy walk, this is the perfect episode for you… and, hopefully, the perfect holiday escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey there. It's Candice, the producer of this show.

0:03.0

Before we jump into today's episode,

0:05.0

which is one of my favorite interviews we've ever recorded,

0:08.0

I just wanted to say real quick that as a mom of two small children,

0:11.0

one of whom is old enough to be dangerously curious.

0:14.4

This is not one of those episodes you want to listen to with small ears around.

0:18.3

So if you're on hour six of that car ride to Florida for the holidays and you want to pull your

0:21.6

hair out or throw your body at the

0:23.0

moving window. I get it and great instincts to put honestly on. Just maybe

0:28.0

switch it from the car speakers to your headphones. Okay, here's the show.

0:36.0

I push that button and everything was Chinese. What?

0:37.0

Yeah.

0:38.0

You might have like a hacker in your phone.

0:40.0

I'm not a big, terribly attached person to my phone but a hacker. Why would your phone be in Chinese and locking you out?

0:51.0

I don't know. What else could that that be that's a very odd thing I thought maybe

0:55.3

it had happened everybody so I was trying to get up here but the elevator

0:58.0

wouldn't come to this floor and I couldn't call anybody so you're stuck on the

1:00.9

elevator and your phones in Chinese and you're locked out.

1:03.0

And I was asking them and if I were them I would have said,

1:06.0

yeah let me make a call for you but neither of them did it. A few days before Christmas I met David Sedaris at a studio in New York City.

1:20.0

This was after he got stuck in the elevator on his way to the studio, but couldn't call me because he'd gotten locked out of his iPhone, which he says he barely uses anyway.

1:29.0

Oh, and somehow the phone's language had suddenly turned into Chinese.

...

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