David Sedaris: Up in 'Flames'

David Sedaris ''Nothing is real to me until I've written it down. Often people will say, 'Is it therapeutic for you to write?' No!''

He's got a voice that's naturally impish and wry and redolent of keen insight into human foibles. So try, for a moment, to imagine that you're listening to best-selling humorist and NPR star David Sedaris — who grew up mainly in Raleigh, N.C., and still has a Southern tinge to his locutions — while having tea with him in his London town house. (It's the 51-year-old author's third household abroad, in addition to homes he maintains in Paris and the French countryside with his longtime boyfriend, painter Hugh Hamrick. But please, don't begrudge these men their largesse, since aspiration is entirely American, even if they no longer are.) On the eve of a North American book tour for his new collection, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Sedaris had smart things to say about addictions, recent scandals involving autobiographical memoirists, and all the juicy personal details he has yet to reveal.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Your new book has a painting by Vincent Van Gogh on the cover of a skeleton smoking a cigarette. How'd you pick that?
DAVID SEDARIS: I got a postcard of it when I was in Amsterdam. I kept that postcard for a long time, and I kept pulling it out and looking at it.

Did you go see the actual painting itself in Amsterdam?
I like museum gift shops, not the museums themselves.

Why?
Because in the gift shop you can walk out with something. In the museum you can't. [Laughs] Anyway, I think people will be shocked to know that it's a Van Gogh painting. Best thing he ever did. Army bases don't want to carry the book, or don't want to display it. Because they think it's a joint the skeleton is smoking. The publisher at Little Brown had to explain to them that this was before joints. This is just what cigarettes looked like. What's funny is the idea, Oh, we don't want to corrupt those Army men. [Laughs raucously]

You write, in an extended 80-page chunk of the new book, called ''The Smoking Section,'' about giving up cigarettes a short while back. Were you scared to swear off a vice that you've always associated with the act of writing itself?
My editor at The New Yorker reminded me, ''You're certainly not the first writer to give up smoking.'' Everyone feels the same thing. Everyone says, ''Oh, now I won't be able to write again.'' Just wait it out and it'll happen. That's how I felt with drinking, too. I always thought I couldn't write unless I was drinking.

On your book tours, you read material aloud to audiences and sort of test-drive it. You've been performing a number of animal fables in the past few years. What made you start writing those?
It was like a lazy way of getting back into writing fiction. Because if you write about two people, say Jim and Suzanne going out to lunch — I have to explain what they look like. But if I say, squirrel and chipmunk? Everybody knows what those look like. It's just kind of a shortcut. I've been working on this story about an ugly fox. And he's really, really ugly. I just came up with an ending for it, just before you came here. I thought, Okay, that feels better than any of the other endings I had. But I have absolutely no idea what it means. I didn't sit down and plot it. When I sat down to write, it didn't occur to me that a suicidal mouse and a suicidal deer would be involved, or that the fox's mother would offer to have sex with him. It also involves a lot of senseless death.

NEXT PAGE: ''When I write fiction, it always tends to be way over the top.... I'm always amazed at people's ability to hold themselves back, and not to think, Okay, well as long as I can make stuff up, I'm gonna make up like huge, huge stuff!''