When Michael Ian Black, author of My Custom Van, announced his feud with David Sedaris, I wanted to get to the bottom of things and asked him for the reasons behind it. Here’s what he had to say:
David Sedaris has spent the last decade gaming the best-seller lists, which doesn’t seem fair. There are literally NO OTHER memoirists out there who have cracked the best-seller lists because David Sedaris is hogging every single spot. (Augusten Burroughs, James Frey, Chelsea Handler, and all other best-selling memoirists excluded). I see myself as the Rocco Mediate to his Tiger Woods. I am standing up for all of the journeyman literary humorist/essayists out there just trying to claw our way onto the leader board alongside Mr. Sedaris. And to think that he’s doing all of this from FRANCE??? It’s mind-boggling. Where does he get off writing about stuff while living in France? That’s soooo early-to-mid 20th century. Why does he get to live the glamorous life of an ex-pat while the rest of us are in the greatest country in the world, the United States of America, just struggling to pay the bills? Why does he get to eat unflavored yogurt and crepes loaded with Nutella and bananas while real Americans are choking down Chicken McNuggets and microwave popcorn? It’s wrong. It’s un-American and it’s wrong. I’ll even take it a step further: it’s not just un-American. It’s anti-American. He’s happy to take American dollars from over here and spend them in cute French patisseries; in a sense, he is using the greatest currency in the world, the United States of America dollar, to subsidize a country that didn’t even want to invade Iraq! And he seems completely unapologetic about that fact. You asked why I am doing this? I can give you the answer to that question with one word: The United States of America.
I’ve reached out to Sedaris’ publicist at Little, Brown but have yet to receive an official response. Meanwhile, Black just announced a contest on his blog to Transform Sedaris into a super-villian.