Theft by Finding

Theft by Finding is a memoir composed of selected diary entries spanning from 1977 to 2002, drawn from roughly eight million words David Sedaris recorded over decades. In an introduction, he explains that his entries focus not on his own feelings but on remarkable events he observes, overheard conversations, and startling things people tell him. He acknowledges that the selection is entirely his own edit; a different selection could make him appear "nothing but evil, selfish, generous, or even, dare I say, sensitive" (13). He describes the title's origin: While picking up litter in England, he found a five-pound note, and a friend informed him that in the United Kingdom, keeping found money constitutes "theft by finding."

The earliest entries date from the fall of 1977, when Sedaris was in his early twenties, hitchhiking across the western United States with a woman named Ronnie. They picked apples in Oregon, slept on golf courses, and depended on strangers for rides. One night near Knoxville, Tennessee, a drunk driver named Ray T. sexually assaulted Sedaris during a ride; Sedaris jumped from the moving vehicle and fled. He eventually settled in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his entries convey restlessness and frustration: He was broke, aimless, and at odds with his father, who during one confrontation asked him to leave the family home.

Over the next several years, Sedaris returned to Oregon for additional apple-picking seasons, moved into a cheap Raleigh apartment near an IHOP (International House of Pancakes), and began a nightly habit of sitting in the restaurant recording overheard conversations. He worked a series of low-paying jobs, including construction and maintenance on his parents' rental properties. His coworkers included a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist organization, who made relentlessly racist comments. He was repeatedly harassed on the street, called slurs, and pelted with rocks. He used methamphetamine heavily, staying awake for days, making art from found objects while high, and resolving repeatedly to quit only to relapse. His mother regularly brought him groceries and slipped him money.

Despite the chaos, Sedaris had two sculptures accepted into a show at the North Carolina Museum of Art. A brief July 1981 entry notes a new cancer striking only homosexual men, marking the emergence of AIDS in the diary's margins. In November 1983, he was accepted into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. On his twenty-seventh birthday, he reflected that he had long anticipated this age as a turning point. He bought winter clothes, said goodbye to his IHOP waitress, and prepared to leave Raleigh.

In Chicago, Sedaris moved into a cheap apartment, took core art classes, and discovered a Chicago IHOP identical to the one he had left behind. His sister Amy Sedaris moved to Chicago and was accepted into the touring company at Second City, an improvisational comedy theater. After graduating in 1987, Sedaris was offered a position teaching a writing workshop at the Art Institute, his first teaching job. He developed idiosyncratic classroom methods, including asking students to write about breakups and bringing his mother in for a session he called "Ask a Mother." He drank heavily and smoked pot nightly but rarely addressed his substance use in the diary.

In the fall of 1990, Sedaris moved to New York, subletting a room in the West Village. His mother drove him to the train station in Raleigh, her eyes welling with tears as they said goodbye. He first met Hugh Hamrick when he and a friend went to Hugh's Canal Street loft to borrow a ladder. Hugh was the son of a diplomat who had grown up in Ethiopia, Somalia, and the Congo. They began a relationship several months later; one evening after dinner in Little Italy, they parted in opposite directions, and both turned around to look at each other. Sedaris applied for a job as a Christmas elf at Macy's department store, worked through the holiday season, and documented encounters with children, Santas, and managers.

He and Amy wrote and performed plays together under the name "the Talent Family," staging productions at small downtown theaters. In September 1991, their mother called to say she had lung cancer. The tumor had not spread, and she began treatment. She died suddenly on November 13, 1991, of pneumonia brought on by chemotherapy. The family gathered in Raleigh, where Sedaris noted the strangeness of seeing her unfinished crossword puzzle and stockings.

In December 1992, radio producer Ira Glass contacted Sedaris to say that National Public Radio's (NPR) Morning Edition wanted to broadcast his "SantaLand Diaries," a piece based on his experience as an elf. It aired the morning of December 23, and Sedaris's answering machine filled with messages from strangers. His life as a writer changed fundamentally. Within months, an editorial assistant at the publisher Little, Brown contacted him, and a two-book deal followed. He signed with literary agent Don Congdon, an elderly man who told stories about wandering Greenwich Village with J. D. Salinger. He published Barrel Fever in 1994 and Naked in 1997, and began national reading tours.

Throughout the 1990s, recurring figures populate the diary. His neighbor Helen, a combative elderly Italian American woman, offered food and profane opinions on everything from Tonya Harding to the Korean grocers on the corner. His sister Tiffany surfaced periodically, calling collect and sobbing, living in increasing squalor in Somerville, Massachusetts. His father remained a source of friction and comedy, criticizing Sedaris's appearance, predicting failure, and occasionally revealing tenderness, as when he replayed old Super 8 footage of Sedaris's late mother and stomped his foot in grief.

In 1998, Sedaris and Hugh began dividing their time between a Paris apartment, a stone farmhouse in the Normandy hamlet of La Bagotière, and eventually a flat in London. Sedaris enrolled in French classes at the Alliance Française, where a volatile teacher alternately praised and humiliated him. He spent enormous amounts of time on homework, constructing absurdist sentences to practice grammar. He later published an essay about the teacher in Esquire titled "Me Talk Pretty One Day," which caused an uproar at the school; he regrets not having captured her skill and wit.

In March 1999, while on tour in Chicago, Sedaris stopped drinking. He had been drunk nearly every night for 18 years. He recorded the difficulty of sleeplessness but also the pleasure of walking through Paris at night with a clear head. In Normandy, he developed an obsessive hobby of catching flies and feeding them to spiders he had named, documenting their predatory habits until Hugh lost patience.

On September 11, 2001, Sedaris watched the World Trade Center attacks on television from his Paris kitchen. He attended a memorial service at the American Church in Paris where opera singer Jessye Norman sang "God Bless America" and the congregation stumbled over the lyrics. Back in the United States on tour, he recorded the flags, the patriotic music, and the particular grief of the aftermath. The diary's final entries, from December 2002, find Sedaris and Hugh in their London apartment, hosting Hugh's mother Joan for Christmas and planning to return to Paris. The book closes on the texture of daily life abroad: small errands, family phone calls, and the ongoing effort to learn a language and find a place in the world.