I’ve been an admirer of Hugh Ryan’s mind since I read his first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer. Published in 2019, it was an attempt to organize the history of a place through the lens of gender and sexuality, tracing the sailor bars of Vinegar Hill full of slow-dancing Marines through to Loop the Loop, a transwoman sex worker in the early 1900s who named herself after the famous roller coaster in Coney Island. (That archival detail is a novel in a single sentence, if you ask me.)

His follow-up book, The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, is an account of a Greenwich Village prison that lasted from 1926 to 1974 and was a pivotal space in women’s liberation movements, Black liberation movements, and queer histories. Essentially, it’s where the state locked up the best of us for rightfully rioting under oppression. It’s also where sex workers, imprisoned for soliciting, would lean out the windows to sing and blow kisses to their lovers who were waiting for their release in the streets below. It’s a mythical place that Ryan rightfully pays homage to while connecting it to the history of prisons, surveillance, and state oppression.

These are two interesting and vastly entertaining histories, so I was excited for Ryan’s memoir, My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond. This book also does not disappoint, charting Ryan’s journey through activism, finding queer spaces on a burgeoning internet, and immersing himself in Burning Man before it was overtaken by techno venture capitalists. This book is a perfect counterpoint for the polished, manicured ’90s New York presented in FX’s American Love Story: John and Carolyn. This is the New York of free Yoga to the People classes, sweating amongst smelly NYU coeds, and room shares in Bushwick. Ryan is an excellent tour guide to the past and an astute observer of the ways identity and desire shape a person’s relationship to a place. 

The cadence of David Sedaris’s voice is sometimes more familiar to me than my own. Like many of his admirers, I first heard him on the radio. A friend in high school used to call me up on Sundays and trick me into listening to his essays. “Is this going to be NPR?” I would ask her warily. “No,” she would lie. “Just listen.” A few years later, that same friend and I moved across the country to Alaska, with less than a thousand dollars between us and knowing nobody. It was the hubris only 19-year-olds could have, and David Sedaris was the reason we survived. A man on the ferry to Juneau overheard us talking about one of Sedaris’s essays, struck up a conversation, and offered us jobs at the local public-television station when we arrived. When I tell Sedaris this story at the start of our conversation, he says only, “Oh. That’s funny.” It’s an understandable response; by his own account, Sedaris is the type of writer who people feel compelled to tell things to. He has written 13 story and essay collections in which the more absurd aspects of daily life are explored with a deadpan, cutting humor, and his latest essay collection, out this spring, The Land and Its People, explores being a stranger in a strange land (Sedaris has a home in England and has lived in France) and his relationship with his husband, Hugh, and his many siblings. Here, Sedaris talks about aging, the art of humor writing, and the pleasures of being part of a big family. 

Kaitlyn Greenidge: I’ve been thinking a lot about comedic essays and how in this current moment, they seem to have become a lost art. And what I’ve always really admired about your work, especially your earlier essays, like your essay about your time as a young performance artist, is your willingness to implicate yourself in the story and to acknowledge yourself as part of the absurdity that you’re relating. Why do you think some writers find it difficult to position themselves in that way in this current moment? 


David Sedaris: If you’re writing personal essays, it’s supposed to be about yourself. Also, I think a satirist makes fun of ... it’s a quote I can never quite get right. A satirist makes fun of blank; a humorist makes fun of himself. [The full quote is from James Thurber and goes: “The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people—that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.”] So that’s what I do: make fun of myself. I’m looking at how petty I am. I’m looking at how boastful I am. I’m looking at how irritating I am. I mean, there’s a limit—you can only go so far—but I’m looking for an acceptable amount of irritation, I suppose.

KG: Why do you think some writers in this moment seem to not be able to look at those flaws in themselves? 

DS: I just think it may seem more relatable to people because maybe they wouldn’t admit it themselves, but I think it makes you more like the reader or more like the listener [to admit a flaw].

Everybody can tell when someone’s being phony. Really, nobody’s getting away with it. People maybe won’t point it out to you, but everybody can tell—like virtue signaling, say. That just reads so clearly as virtue signaling. And to think that you’re getting away with it, I mean, you can surround yourself with other people who do it, but everyone’s still seeing it for what it is.

KG: Yeah, of course. That brings me to my next question, which is how did having siblings or specifically sisters influence your growth as a writer and an artist?

DS: I think it prepares you for the cruelty of the world. I mean, if you’re an only child, chances are the first time you’ll be bullied or intimidated is when you go to school, and then you freak out about it. But if you’re one of six kids, that’s just daily. It’s just normal to you. So I feel like coming from a big family, it left me with a much thicker skin.

I mean, I understand it’s expensive to have kids. I understand all of that. But when I meet someone and they have just one child, I always feel sorry for that child. Also, I feel sorry because that child’s going to grow up knowing that they have to take care of the parent at some point. And that’s just a lot of responsibility to be handed. Whereas with six kids, you just think, “I’m going to move as far away as possible. And when the moment comes to move them into a home, it’s going to be your responsibility because you never left the state.”

I grew up a long time ago, so the word toxic didn’t exist. No one would ever say, “Well, my sister is toxic, so I’m no longer going to have any relationship with her.” Nobody said that. You didn’t have a choice. You didn’t cut your parents out of your life. Nobody did that.

KG: Do you think our current age of really dire absurdity helps or hurts your writing?

DS: Oh, absurdity is always great. I mean, that’s what I’m always looking for. The more, the better, as far as I’m concerned. Yeah, I mean, it’s my bread and butter. Did I just say it’s my bread and butter? I’m sorry.

I mean, I’m always happy when I see something that’s absurd. My eyes are open for it all the time, and you don’t want to force something. You don’t want to try to convince people that something’s absurd. I mean, when it’s absurd and you present it to them, then they recognize it as such. But I’ve been trained; I’ve been at this for so long that I’m just always on the hunt for it.

KG: You famously have kept a daily diary. I’m wondering what that practice does for you as a writer.

DS: Well, it helps me make sense of my world. But also, I write things in my diary, and then every now and then something happens and I think, “That might make for an essay.” It’s not the diary entry that’s the beginning of the essay, but it could lead to something deeper.

Like … my sister Amy was on the subway, and she was sitting next to a man who was taking up a lot of room, and then she was sitting beside a girl who was like 22 years old, and Amy was reading. And every time she’d turn the page, she would wind up poking the girl in the ribs. So Amy stopped and put her book away, and then the girl turned to Amy and said, “Just because you’re old doesn’t mean you don’t have to follow the rules.” For some reason, that made me angrier than if someone had said it to me. There’s a moment when you realize that you’re old, but there’s a whole other moment when you realize that your siblings are. I’m thinking, “Old? Amy’s not old.” And then I thought, “Well, she’s 65. So if you’re 22, that’s old to you, a 65-year-old.” 

But I realized, too, that when you get to be a certain age, you can tell what people looked like when they were young. If I look at somebody who’s 65, I can see them as 25, and I can see how great they looked. But you can’t do that when you’re young. You just see someone who’s got wrinkles, and they’re not even really a person to you. I thought, “Well, maybe there’s a way to turn that diary entry into an essay.”

KG: Who is your first reader, and has this changed over time?

DS: Well, I read a new essay on stage last night, and so the audience was my first reader. I mean, I don’t like to ... if I read something out loud to Hugh, then it’s killing it, basically. It’s driving a stake through its heart.

KG: Why?

DS: Because it wasn’t completely finished yet to my liking, and then I’m reading a part of it. It’s a way of throwing it away, really.
The thing I read last night, no one had read any part of it. The audience was my reader. Well, a listener. They told me much more than a friend would have. Quite often, people will say to me—they’ll give me their writing and they’re saying, “My friends liked it.” And it’s like, “Your friends aren’t writers, and your friends are your friends, and they want to make you feel good.”

But the audience, because the people are in the dark and I can’t see them, is under no pressure to respond. They laugh, they cough. If they cough, they’re basically throwing skulls at me. They’re telling me … I can feel them lose interest. I can feel them check out. I can say, “Oh, they weren’t listening.” I mean, they weren’t laughing, but they were listening. I can tell because they laughed at that, and my last laugh was two pages ago, so they’re with me. It’s just a different kind of essay. And they’re a wonderful first reader. They really are. 

In the car earlier today, I started rewriting what I read last night based on what the audience told me. I just made notes while I was reading, about things that they laughed at, things that they groaned at. I mean, it was about a guy who I’d met once who had a micropenis. I’m not making fun of the guy’s micropenis. And it could happen to anybody, and there’s going to be people in the audience with a micropenis. So when the audience laughed at the micropenis, I thought, “I’m not doing my job, because I don’t want them to laugh at that. I want them to laugh at my response to it,” which is acting like this person didn’t have a micropenis. That’s funny. That’s something I think a lot of people could relate to. It would be like meeting someone with a missing arm and then saying, “Oh, I hadn’t noticed.” When they’re like, "Well, I lost my arm in action.” And you’d be, “Really? Well, I didn’t even notice you’d lost your arm.” When clearly you had noticed the missing arm.

KG: Yeah. I love that distinction that you’re making. I used to teach writing, and especially with younger writers, the assumption is that with any sort of attribute in a person, either you don’t mention it at all, because you’re afraid of offending anybody, or you do what you were talking about a little bit earlier with virtue signaling: You write around it in such a way that it’s just completely off-putting. 

DS: But the thing is, nobody’s going to come up and say, “Wait a minute, I have a micropenis and you made me feel bad.” No one’s going to say that. And also, the women’s reaction to it is different from a man’s reaction. It presents all these challenges, and I’m willing to take them on. I just thought, “Oh, this is a lot more complex than I originally thought it was going to be.” 

I met a woman the other day, and she went out with this guy. He had a micropenis and he broke up with her, and she was like, “Really?” Yeah. You’re breaking up with me because she never said a word about his micropenis, and she acted like “Oh, there’s nothing strange about this.”

KG: Which is probably why she got broken up with. 

DS: If you’re in love with somebody, then it wouldn’t ... It would be like when someone says about lesbians, like, “Well, how do they have sex?” You’d be so mistaken to think your sex life is richer than a lesbian's. You can make anything work, right?

KG: One hundred percent. And it’s also sort of like, I mean, no offense to the woman who you meant, but of course she got broken up with, because if you can’t acknowledge that your partner has a micropenis, then there’s no truth there. There’s no way to trust that other person if they’re not even willing to name a body attribute that you have.

DS: When I read it out loud, I didn’t quite realize how complicated it was going to be, but now complications excite me because I always feel like I know there’s a way I can make this work. I know there’s a way, and I’m usually right.

KG: What is your ideal day when you are not writing?

DS: Oh, I don’t think I’ve had one. I mean, I write every day. There’s not a time when I’m not doing it. 

In each edition of this newsletter, we ask writers to share a space where they wrote something beautiful. It can be their regular writing spot or an unexpected place of inspiration. This week’s writer is Morgan Day. Day is a fiction and architecture writer. Her debut novel, The Oldest Bitch Alive, told from the point of view of a French bulldog who ingests an orb of parasitic worms and begins to reevaluate her life, was published by Astra House (U.S.) and Akoya Publishing (U.K.) in May 2026.

Morgan Day: “I work in a simple room with a clear desk, my favorite books lined up behind me, and nothing on the walls. I keep one Word document open on my laptop. The desktop goes unused; I recently moved and haven’t plugged it in. For every project, I keep a companion book beside me as a reminder of what language can do: Apple in the Dark, Sula, Hopscotch, Ulysses. I write slowly, at home in the desert, near a river wash that flows with rainwater during summer monsoon months. In the late afternoons, my partner and I walk alongside the wash to a ranch where miniature horses and pregnant goats graze and buck and bleat. I return to the empty room, a blank space that absorbs the atmosphere of the animals’ peculiar ways of life.”