In what is almost a yearly tradition now, the much-beloved writer, humorist, essayist, and orator David Sedaris will come back to Santa Barbara in an Arts & Lectures–hosted evening at the Arlington Theatre on Wednesday, May 3 — and we couldn't be more grateful. After all, the man who has made his life's work of recounting his life in piercingly thoughtful, gently sweet, wryly wise, and outright hilarious memoirs and essays, after all these years, does not stop being great at what he does, and he's found quite the connection in Santa Barbara audiences. You might say he's stolen our hearts.
Speaking of thievery, his newest work takes the title Theft by Finding. In his new book and in his upcoming talk, Sedaris will take us back in time by recounting pieces pulled from his own journals over the years, sharing with us snippets of a life rich with unique experiences and observations. Sedaris learned the phrase “theft by finding,” a British term, while traveling in England. “I found a five-pound note on the street, and my friend Pam said it was theft by finding: If you find something, you don't bother to figure out if it's lost or stolen,” he said. In his new collection, whether it's “the things I found, the stories people told me, or the jokes I heard — it just made sense as a title.”
The book documents 25 years of Sedaris's life, spun from the pages of the diaries he began keeping when he was 20. “My boyfriend calls it David Copperfield Sedaris,” he said. A great deal of Sedaris's work comes from his own observations of life, and he's renowned for raising the potency of the mundane to reveal its profundity.