David Sedaris has made a career out of chronicling his quirk-filled life in suburbia. Novid Parsi hears from the Greek-American about his latest comic misadventures

The journey from panty-wearing Macy’s elf to best-selling international author continues with David Sedaris’s sixth collection of comic yarns, When You Are Engulfed in Flames (Little, Brown and Company, $28.89). The outsider humorist asked that we call him in London at midnight, his time.

Hi, David, how are you?
I’m sh*tty.

Why sh*tty?
I just got one of those new MacBook Air computers, and I spilled a cup of tea onto the keyboard.

I hope you keep backups.
Uh, yeah. I’ve never done anything like that, though.

Do you usually write this late at night? I mainly write during the day, then I work at night for an hour or so. And I was sitting down and it just sloshes.

I understand from your latest book: no more drinking, drugging or smoking.
That makes it sound so dull. I quit drinking nine years ago and then it made sense to quit taking drugs or else I would just be getting high more. Plus, I’d just moved to France so I didn’t know where to find drugs. It makes you realise in America you can find anything, drug-wise. All you have to do is ask a teenager. In France, kids don’t get f***ed up as much.

Have you lapsed at all? Had a cigarette?
Oh, no. But it’s funny when you quit smoking and then people say, ‘Yeah, well, you quit smoking, but you smoke now, don’t you?’ It’s like, ‘No, I quit.’ ‘But every now and then you have a cigarette, right?’ ‘No, I quit.’ If I were to have a cigarette right now, especially since I just poured tea on my computer, there’d be no stopping me.

What’s it like to experience every moment knowing you might write about it?
I don’t do that many things thinking, ‘Oh, if I can do that, maybe I can write about it.’ I prefer just to stumble onto stories. Like, my boyfriend likes owls, so I thought I’d get him a stuffed owl for Valentine’s Day. So in this [taxidermy] store in London, the guy showed me a skeleton and it was, like, four feet tall. And he said, ‘It’s a pygmy. We English went to Africa and hunted pygmies like game 150 years ago.’ I think that’s when I started writing the story in my head.

See, things like that never happen to me.
Well, maybe – another thing too is sometimes I’ll think, I know there’s something here. I mean, unbelievable things happened after I saw that pygmy. He showed me a teenager’s head he had in the back. It was 600 years old. I didn’t want to say anything to end it.

Have you read The New Republic article that claimed things you wrote hadn’t happened?
Yeah, I did read it about ten days ago.

What’d you think?
He [the journalist] called the nudist colony I went to and said, ‘David Sedaris writes as if a lot of the nudists are kooks and oddballs. Are you?’ And this woman said, ‘No, and anybody who says different is a big fat liar.’ But she was, like, in her seventies, naked in her trailer with her full-grown son. I’m sorry, but that’s not like everybody else. Everybody else has clothes on and they’re not nude with their grown children. He didn’t have anything on me.

Your writing is absolutely non-fiction?
I’ve never made up events, but I’ve always been a big exaggerator. It’s written on my humorist licence that I’m allowed to do that.

Have you still not been on the internet?
I started going on it last September. I didn’t really go nuts. I know people who, when their books come out, are obsessively looking at their rating on Amazon. I would never do that. No, no, no, no. Uh-uh.

Why not?
Well, a couple of years ago, Amazon gave me a big stack of [reviews]. And I didn’t know that civilians would review books. But I said, ‘Oh, thank you so much.’ And I threw them directly into the trash can. Never. I don’t read the legitimate ones, so I’m not gonna read – you know, you get letters: ‘Dear Mr Sedaris, I got that book of yours and it was awful. You probably only hear from people who liked it. Well, I didn’t!’ Sounds eloquent. Uh-huh. But I don’t have email because that – my God, can you imagine? At least this woman had to put a stamp on this. But with emails, it doesn’t cost people anything to complain.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames (pictured above) is now available at Books Kinokuniya.