His wry and insightful observations about daily life, tales of growing up and the alienated angst of feeling different have won radio audiences and book readers alike. He talks of his foul-mouthed younger brother, of family foibles and foils, and of his own misguided attempts to adapt to his adopted home in Paris. As Bob Hoover noted in an article in the online Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette, Sedaris is an "elfin figure" with a "faintly nasal deadpan delivery." Hoover also noted that Sedaris is "one of life's true outsiders, a Northerner transplanted to the South, a gay man in a society of male role models, a sensitive soul in a dumb culture." Sedaris uses painful bits from his family history as well as the flotsam he finds all around him. "I'm just the friendly junk man," Sedaris told Hoover. "I take pieces of junk and make my stories out of them."
Born in New York, the second of six children in a Greek-American family, Sedaris grew up in North Carolina. Neva Chonin, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, described him as an "obsessive-compulsive child [who] spent his days licking light switches and hitting himself over the head with his shoe." He dropped out of Kent State University in 1977 to travel around the country, working for a time as a field laborer in California.
