David Sedaris Talks Pretty

The last time Sedaris jetted in from one of his residences in Paris, Normandy, and London to do a U.S. book tour was in 2005, for Corduroy and Denim. In the years since, the American extreme-memoir scene has grown cluttered with the bodies of authors pilloried as partial or wholesale fabulists: James Frey, Augusten Burroughs, and, most recently, the author who called herself Margaret B. Jones. The kerfuffles over their books have created a charged atmosphere for anyone trading on their life for raw material. If you ask Sedaris, the Frey backlash, culminating in a public shaming by Oprah Winfrey, was overblown. ''His punishment outweighed his crime,'' says Sedaris. ''I don't recall Oprah Winfrey calling George Bush a liar when he was on her show. And those lies cost thousands of people their lives.''

So to get back to that question he always gets from the crowd: As he's strip-mined his own North Carolina upbringing and subsequent adulthood, how much has Sedaris himself made up? Plenty, he has frequently and cheerfully confessed. But it doesn't matter because he's a humorist, right? The New Republic begged to differ last spring. In an article titled ''This American Lie'' by Alex Heard, TNR accused Sedaris of doing more than just stretching the truth. ''With some of his stories, especially the early ones, like in Naked,'' says Heard, ''he's taken every liberty a fiction writer [does]. It makes the story very funny, but also makes it something you shouldn't call nonfiction.'' Responds Sedaris: ''I've said a thousand times I exaggerate. Why is it news when somebody else says it?''

Some of the sleuthing Heard did seems solid, including, for example, getting Sedaris to confirm that he invented details of encounters with mental patients in 1970. But many a bizarre situation checked out true, and Heard's contention that Sedaris' work amounts to a mean-spirited exploitation of his family and others seems, well, grossly exaggerated. Sedaris' Little, Brown publisher, Michael Pietsch, shrugs off Heard's piece as ''a ludicrous exercise'' that ''ignores a great American literary vein of essays in which great writers take liberties with their personal experiences.''

Whew! Hey, did it just get serious in here, folks? Let's remember these are funny essays we're talking about — and beautifully crafted ones, too. Some blogarazzi have applauded Heard, but just as many have given him a Bronx cheer, including super-cynical Gawker. Says one Sedaris associate, ''When Gawker's on your side? You're home free.'' The author is resigned to the fact that any nonfiction writer these days is a target — even one who writes about boils and concrete toadstools. ''On the American humorist license, it reads, 'Can exaggerate your head off,''' Sedaris says. ''They haven't changed the wording on it in hundreds of years.'' Still, Sedaris' latest stories include more specific qualifiers, like ''in my memory,'' ''as I remember it,'' ''a man I'll call...,'' and ''I'll say her name was...'' He's also placed the designation ''realish'' on the copyright page of his new book. He says the lawyers at Little, Brown, who usually meet with him before each book is published, had nothing to confer about once they saw realish. ''You say –ish, you don't have to meet with anyone,'' Sedaris says drily. ''If I'd known that, God! I'd have done it years ago!''