- /AMYSEDARISROCKS
A week or so ago I got the chance to talk to author/actress/comedian Amy Sedaris about her new book, Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People (my review of it is in this week's paper). I was really excited to be able to talk through her process with Paul Dinello (who wrote and acted with Sedaris for Strangers with Candy and currently writes for The Colbert Report). Sedaris' brand of comedy has always seemed uncalculated to me, like she just funnels her weird personality into whatever project she's working on and lets the results be what they may. Understanding the development of a book like Simple Times felt really important in understanding how to receive its weird mix of tongue-in-cheek unhelpfulness and sincere passion for crafting.
I missed our first interview due to time difference mix-up (read. due to me being stupid) but that ended up being unexpectedly serendipitous due to a bunch of interviews being published later that week where she fielded almost all of my original questions (my favorite interview is here at the AV Club). That meant I got to nix broad questions about crafting in general (which she has repeatedly said she is sick of anyway) and instead talk about Sedaris' constant fight to preserve imperfection, Jane Pittman's style sense and why shitty instructions help keep the book honest.
Amy Sedaris will be in Portland tonight at the Bagdad Theater talking, answering questions and just being her charming self. Show starts at 7:00 pm. Buy your tickets here.
Can you talk about your writing process with Paul Dinello? In other interviews you've said that you had a tendency to want to take things in a more straight-forward direction and he would push you towards the funnier end.
Right, he always does that. I give him my thing like, “No Paul, this is serious!” and then the humor just comes from him making fun of me trying to take something so seriously. Because I'm the first one to make fun of anything but there are certain things that I'm serious about - especially the rabbit chapter [in her previous book, I Like You] or something — and he's just rolling his eyes, making fun of me, like “Who cares?”
But you know, the thing about these books is I'm in charge. I get to be the executive producer, and when I'm in charge people have to do things the way I want them to do it. So I have a good time when I go to Paul and I say, “This is what this is. This is what this chapter's going to be.” Then we'll throw around some ideas or we'll be sitting in the same room and he might write something based on the list of things that I gave him or he's writing while I'm talking and yelling at him and he'll just get it off his chest first, what he thinks would be funny. Then we'll go with that or we'll add to it or subtract to it and we just start rewriting and rewriting it. And there are other things like the “Making Love” chapter that he completely wrote on his own. I contributed, like, a couple of words because with this book so much of the writing and production of the book happened at the same time so I didn't really have that luxury of really thinking about what I wanted to say about “Nature Crafts” or whatever. He was really helpful about that; he'd spearhead a chapter while I was taking care of what the crafts were in that section or how I was going to shoot that or what the costume was going to be.
So it was different than I Like You because everything was happening at once. Like, with “Making Love” I knew what I wanted it to look like, like I wanted the brown paper and those canary yellow robes and I knew what crafts to get and he just took it from there.