David, on Tiffany

[wobblymusic.livejournal.com]

From the latest New Yorker:

"In late May of this year, a few weeks shy of her fiftieth birthday, my youngest sister, Tiffany, committed suicide. She was living in a room in a beat-up house on the hard side of Somerville, Massachusetts, and had been dead, the coroner guessed, for at least five days before her door was battered down."

More here.

Comments

[ron_newman]

Earlier posts about her:

RIP Tiffany Sedaris, 49, Somerville artist
Who was Tiffany? (photo of artistic memorial to her on the Community Path)

I don't agree that her neighborhood near Magoun Square* is "the hard side of Somerville". And I suspect that she would rather not have had this published, just as in 2004.

[* - assuming that she lived at the address where her open studio was in May]

[gingicat]

The article -- essay, really -- was very much about himself.

[ifotismeni]

As they always are :/

[ron_newman]

In Memoriam - Tiffany Sedaris, published on June 12 in (what was then still) the Somerville News. (PDF of the print version here - see page 5)

[serious-noir.livejournal.com]

And, in case anyone ever doubted it, David Sedaris is a f**king asshole, a funny asshole but an asshole.

Really gives a new low water mark for the old saying: "A writer is always selling someone out."

[emcicle.livejournal.com]

I was going to go with d*bag, but your summary works as well.

[ifotismeni]

I was wondering if anyone would post this here. Given David Sedaris' penchant for exaggeration I honesty wonder how much of this is true.

[ron_newman]

He writes about reading comments on her obituary at the Raleigh News & Observer, but I don't see any comments there. Of course, the newspaper may have later removed them.

[ron_newman]

On a lighter note, here's an LJ post from 2003 by someone who exhibited with her at Somerville Open Studios:

I Gave Bad Directions to David Sedaris and All I Got was This Lousy T-Shirt

[blacktigr.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the lighter note. Sorry I missed y'all at the bike ride. I pulled up just as the Redbones truck was leaving.

[paradoox.livejournal.com]

Yes, Sedaris is an a**hole,

But, the article reminds me that we probably all have friends on the edge of society. I sometimes worry what is going to happen to all of them. I hope we can all be good enough friends to give them whatever support they want / need. And sometimes that support might be telling them to tell their families to go f**k off.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

whatever support they want / need

An interesting point in the context of Sedaris' piece. What if one of your children, in ninth grade, prefers getting stoned to learning what she needs to learn to get a job that earns middle-class pay? Is sending her to disciplinary school "support" or "oppression"?

I do like the line, "We had other kids. You think we could let the world stop on account of any one of you?" No one is allowed to suck up a disproportion of the common resources.

[ron_newman]

She wasn't sent to just any old "disciplinary school". She was sent to this torture chamber in Maine.

[avjudge]

Yes, but remember 30+ years ago there was no internet on which to find these stories. And I would assume most parents in this situation are desperate, and have tried what's available locally -- or feel a need to escape the problem for a while (and hand it over to someone they're told has techniques & training to handle it better than they can) for their own and the rest of the family's sanity & functioning.

[paradoox.livejournal.com]

Well, my comment was mostly about adult friends (and I'm afraid I've erred too much on the side of leaving people alone).

As for kids, it is hard. My ex-wife and I kind of choose not to have kids because we realized how hard it would be and how fucked-up our childhoods were. In retrospect, I might have been good at it. But I'm living in a glass house here never having had kids.

Still as for "We had other kids. You think we could let the world stop on account of any one of you?" No one is allowed to suck up a disproportion of the common resources."... Yes I do think people do sometimes need to be allowed to suck up a disproportion of the common resources. As much as I hate where the line comes from (Marx), I'm actually become a big believer in "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" within reason.

I think I'm going to stop reading about this chain and Sedaris before I get sick and never want to listen to him or even NPR again. But, I'll probably be back later in the week.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Strange piece. I notice that it is littered with references to money and the sorts of status markers that are of concern to the middle-to-upper-middle class. But I see that he made his fame on NPR, so that makes sense.

[kalimba21.livejournal.com]

On a previous live journal post from last week, there was a link to a Dutch person interviewing David at his new, amazing old house in England. The post points to a spot where David talks about Tiffany, saying they hadn't spoken in 8 years.

I watched that video to the end, when David, laying on some grass, reads this first paragraph which is now the opener in the New Yorker piece. Then the interviewer asks him: (paraphrasing from memory) "If you could ask Tiffany one question, what would it be?" David responds, "I'd ask her if she was ever going to pay back all the money she owes me." The interviewer laughs nervously, incredulously, saying, "that's what you'd ask her?" David responds, "yes, she always said that she'd pay me back in her lifetime."

That paragraph has haunted me ever since I read it.

[ron_newman]

Link here. The comment with the video link was made last week, but my original post was way back in June, after someone on the Someday Cafe Facebook group called attention to the Raleigh newspaper's obituary.

I didn't watch the video all the way to the end, but if he really said this, my respect for him has sunk below the floor.

[pywaket.livejournal.com]

I'm sure he's terribly worried about what you think of him.

[kalimba21.livejournal.com]

Look at 24:00 on the video. It's the final minute.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

I was wondering whether or not to say the following, but, after that "money" comment -

from the New Yorker piece, it seemed that the siblings were more upset that Tiffany had spoiled their planned family reunion (to which she wasn't invited; and, yes, it appears she wouldn't have come if she had been) than that she had killed herself.

Nice people.