Family Friend Slams David Sedaris Over Column About Dead Sister

In May, Tiffany Sedaris, youngest sister of comedian David Sedaris, killed herself. Her death inspired this piece in the New Yorker, in which David Sedaris talked about his sister.

A few days after getting the news, my sister Amy drove to Somerville with a friend and collected two boxes of things from Tiffany’s room: family photographs, many of which had been ripped into pieces, comment cards from a neighborhood grocery store, notebooks, receipts. The bed, a mattress on the floor, had been taken away and a large industrial fan had been set up. Amy snapped some pictures while she was there, and, individually and in groups, those of us left studied them for clues: a paper plate on a dresser that had several drawers missing, a phone number written on a wall, a collection of mop handles, each one a different color, arranged like cattails in a barrel painted green.

Now a friend of Tiffany's has posted a scathing guest column in the Somerville, Mass. Journal, arguing that David Sedaris painted an inaccurate and self-serving portrait of his sister:

I found David Sedaris’ article, “Now we are five,” in the Oct. 28 New Yorker to be obviously self-serving, often grossly inaccurate, almost completely unresearched and, at times, outright callous. Some of her family had been more than decent, loving and kind to her. “Two lousy boxes” is not Tiffany’s legacy. After her sister left with that meager lot, her house was still full of treasures. More than two vanloads of possession were pulled from there and other locations by friends. She was a hoarder of items worthless to most but vitally important to her. There were fantastic art materials -- milk crates of angular rocks (good ones), each crate containing one round stone, which perfectly fits the hand, bearing signs of some form of unorthodox flint knapping to bash and hammer the rocks into shapes she needed; dozens of boxes of antique broken ceramics or stained glass for her mosaics, many dug out of the ground from a hidden 19th Century dump whose location she shared only with me, my favorite broken bit being the bottom part of a piece of green McCoy pottery that now only said, “Coy,” (pure Tiffany wit); ephemera; old CDV photos; old letters; fragments of vintage children’s books; her collection of antique baleen corsets; an original picture sleeve from the Little Richard 45, “ooh! My soul/true, fine mama;” her antique baby blue high chair, in part covered with ancient happy dolphin decals in which sat a doll, representing her; and an old stuffed rabbit, a rabbit, representing the rabbit she once owned named “Little Sweet Miss Bitsy Who’s Its,” a.k.a., “Hooos,” (the number of ooo’s varied with her pronunciation) -- she gave the rabbit away when she could no longer afford or manage to feed it/care for it -- she had already long since given away her cat, Mister Wonderful; those beautiful, multicolored old vivid lead-paint broom handles David mentioned, which she used to have strung together as a divider between rooms when she had a larger apartment; and the cheap plastic flowers she scattered around her body before taking her life. I could go on and on.

Michael Knoblach goes on to argue that her unstable mental health was not helped by her brother's public mockery of her in his writings:

In an interview on Dutch TV, given about a month after Tiffany’s suicide, David was asked, “What if you could ask her one question?” He replied, “Can I have the money back that I loaned you?” He laughed. “She borrowed all this money from me. She said, ‘I will pay you back in my lifetime.’ I can’t believe I fell for that.”

David should consider the payment for his article about Tiffany’s suicide to be a debt paid in full. David’s detachment and insensitivity is insulting and offensive to all who loved Tiffany, likely including his own family. Maybe David could have given Tiffany some more of the money he made off of stories about her. He repeatedly heard she was living a hardscrabble life.

David spent a good 10 to 20 percent of the article talking about how to name the posh beach house he bought on a whim, three weeks after his youngest sister died, destitute, from a brutally violent suicide in her ramshackle hovel on the “hard side of Somerville, Massachusetts.” I have a good suggestion as to how to name the new beachfront vacation home, the one with a nice view from David’s bedroom, one of a few houses David owns. Perhaps this one should be named, “The House of Shame.”