Welcome to the New York Times Book Review Podcast. I'm Gilbert Cruz, the new editor of

the bookstask, and for the next many months we'll be highlighting great author interviews

from our decade plus archive. Why are we doing this? Well, the two previous hosts of this

podcast, Pamela Paul and John Williams, both moved on to new adventures this year. As

a result, we are using the next few months to kick the tires on the sustained audio product

and figure out what it should sound like going forward. To do that right takes time and

we plan to do it right. So we ask your patients and look forward to bringing you a new book

review podcast sometime next year. This week, we're featuring a lengthy conversation with

David Sideris, who spoke to editor Pamela Paul in 2017 about his book, Theft By Finding,

Diaries 1977 to 2002. As you can imagine, he was a delight. David, thanks so much for

being here. Thank you so much for having me. So this diary starts in 1977. Is that

where you actually began writing the diary or did you sort of arbitrarily pick a date?

No, I believe my first diary entry is in there. I just started one day. I was hitchhiking

around the country with my friend, Ronnie, and I was writing letters to my friends and

people in my family, but I didn't have an address where they could write me back. So

I started writing to myself. Did you write every day? Every single day. So you obviously

have edited this down somewhat. Oh, I mean, I have 100 and I believe 64 volumes of my

diary and each one is thicker than this book. And a lot of it is crazy person, tiny letters,

a front and back page. So this is just a tiny fraction of my diary. So how did you go about

editing it for this book? I mean, did that take forever? It took forever and I tried to

attach myself and think, would this be of interest to anyone? I mean, a lot of it wasn't

even interesting to me. It was just interesting for, you know, nostalgic reasons. So I was

...