Whose Voice Is It Anyway?

I remember the day the clouds parted and the blue skies appeared. Trumpets sounded, and fireworks went off in my brain. After years of searching to discover my voice in this universe, I thought I’d finally found it. Unfortunately, the voice I found wasn’t mine.

It was the early to mid-1990s, and for me, it was a time of great confusion. I’d spent many years trying to become a successful actor, but that wasn’t working. I transitioned into directing, and although I had greater success, it still wasn’t organically flowing from the artistic soul. 

It was particularly frustrating because it seemed that everyone around me was finding themselves by just reading a book. It was the days of The Artist’s Way, Deepak Chopra, Do What You Love, and the Money Will Follow. I, too, dove into that movement, but I hit my head on the cement. I couldn’t figure out what it was that I loved.    

I was living in Los Angeles and spending many of my waking hours listening to my car radio while stuck in traffic. This was before the iPhone and podcasts, and you needed a suitcase full of cassettes to listen to a book on tape. 

On my morning commute, I listened to Rush Limbaugh (it was an innocent time. I thought of him as an angry comic and not a huge contributor to the decline of our society).  After Limbaugh, I turned to Howard Stern, who, despite his self-righteousness, opened my world to a myriad of things that I had thought were taboo. 

In the 1990’s I was living in Los Angeles during a tumultuous era, between the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the Northridge Earthquake, and the Rodney King beating and trial, which subsequently led to riots. Listening to the news on their car radio increased dramatically for most Angelinos. I went from low-brow shows (Limbaugh/Stern) to a radio station that I thought was for old people and classical music lovers, KCRW, public radio, and NPR News. Instead of hearing Rush, Howard, Robin, and Bababoee, as background noise, I was listening to Morning Report and All Things Considered. 

I remember one morning on NPR, there was an interview with an author who was promoting a new book of short stories. During the interview, the author, David Sedaris, read one of his stories, The Santaland Dairies, and I was mesmerized.

“Who is this guy, and why didn’t I know anything about him?”

I was laughing so hard I was afraid to continue driving. Sedaris brought me inside his world, and while living there, my world changed. I believed every word he spoke was coming from me or being explicitly directed to me. I wished I could listen to this interview again so that I knew I wasn’t dreaming. 

I loved his style, form, delivery, and word choice. I was now thinking that reading those self-improvement books had worked. I must have visualized and manifested this moment of finding myself, and now it happened. The answer to my life’s desire was to do what I heard this guy do on the radio. I thought I’d found the Do What You Love part of my self-help book. This is what I want to do with my life.  

I could not get enough of this man and his humor. I was listening to a human behavioral scientist, sociologist, comedian, and storyteller wrapped up in one. I suppose many people have reacted similarly to writers and humorists, from Charles Dickens to Will Rogers, but this was my personal discovery. 

I drove to Barnes and Noble and asked the salesperson if they carried any of David Sedaris’ books. Without hesitation, I was directed to the proper aisle. I bought a copy of all his books, savored every short story, and hoped each book would never end… starting with Barrel Fever and then on to Naked and so on. Although I was hooked on every word Sedaris wrote, something was missing from the first time I heard him read his material. 

I later purchased one of his books on tape and rediscovered the magic of hearing his voice combined with his writing. Now I get it. I had to write and then read my stories to an audience. At the time, I realized I had some problems with this life choice since I had never written anything and I was slightly dyslexic, so writing and then reading what I wrote in person was going to be an issue. Nevertheless, for hour after hour, I listened to his nasally, slightly effeminate, mildly sarcastic, and uniquely flat speech pattern play in my head like listening to an aria sung by a world-class opera singer. 

He shared family stories about his mother, father, sisters—Amy, Lisa, Gretchen, and Tiffany—and brother Paul with mountains of humor and so much brutal honesty that I worried his family would ban him from Thanksgiving dinner. He talked about his partner, Hugh, in the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, with uncensored openness and lack of shame. I felt like a voyeur eavesdropping into his personal life.

His relationship with life pleasantly hit every nerve, and the more I read and listened to him, the more he burrowed his way further into my soul. His bravery in speaking about how he viewed life brought me joy, excitement, and inspiration. I, too, could bring this much integrity to my writing—at least, I thought I could. 

I started to identify with Sedaris. He spent his early years living near Endicott, New York. I spent my early years there as well. His family moved him to Raleigh, North Carolina, my family moved me to New Jersey. He worked in Macy’s as an elf, and I worked there as an Easter Bunny. He studied French, and I studied Italian. He spent many years getting through college. I spent at least the same number of years doing the same. He lived in many places and had worked many soul-sucking jobs to stay ahead of impoverishment, and so had I. 

Because of David (by this point, he’d spent so much time inside of my head that I was now referring to him by his first name), I finally felt I had found my passion. I wanted to write my stories. 

The reality, though, became that I tried to see my life the same way as he saw his life. I wanted my experiences and reactions to them to be exactly like his. I had a family. I had a past, but I wanted his life, and I had yet to realize I could never see the world through the same lens as he did. 

I took class after class and wrote story after story. I studied his sentences, story structure, and use of self-deprecating words. I loved writing each story. I thought I had something terrific to say about each one, but when I had my friends or teachers read them, their responses were very similar.  

“You sound like that, David Sedaris.” 

“Did you mean this to sound like David Sedaris?”

“You should read that guy’s books. The one that writes about being an elf. He sounds like you but funnier.” 

Or, after reading my story, the reader never mentioned it. They just told me about a David Sedaris story they’d read or heard on a radio show.

At first, I took these comments as compliments. I thought, “I’m another David Sedaris!”

David and I could co-exist on book tours, and my books could sit next to his on bookstore shelves. I continued to write, but the reactions never changed. 

Eventually, I started to realize that I was enjoying his writings more than my own. Although I was searching for a voice of my own, I found that I was implanting Sedaris’ voice into my head. It quickly became evident that I was trying very hard to be a successful pale imitator. 

I was no David Sedaris. There already was a David Sedaris, and the world didn’t need another. 

Although I never became a world-famous published writer, studying his writing ignited a spark in me to live and write with honest fearlessness. He inspired me to live in a zone of my own creativity. I’d experienced enthusiasm and a desire to explore myself, and out of that, I discovered the meaning of passion. 

As life does, it presents you with gifts that could be your passion, and you can choose what you want to do with choices. I decided to follow the road to my passion and leave David Sedaris to his own. 

This doesn’t mean I turned my back on my colleague David. I still hunger for his next book and audio. I also scan the Internet for dates of when he’ll be reading his material live on a concert tour near me. 

I remember the day I heard David Sedaris reading The Santaland Diaries three decades ago, with the clarity of a magnifying glass looking at a diamond. From that moment, my life has traveled in as many different directions as that diamond’s prisms of light dart into space.