Inventing a Genius in a Rented Function Room

The British Council had booked us a function room above a kebab shop in Thessaloniki. I want to be precise about this: it was not near a kebab shop, or adjacent to a kebab shop, or in any spatial relationship to a kebab shop that might allow you to pretend the kebab shop was not the point. The kebab shop was the ground floor. We were the first floor. The stairs smelled of lamb fat and industrial cleaner, and the function room itself had a carpet pattern that appeared to depict either paisley or a cry for help, and there was a whiteboard on the wall that still said FIRE DRILL 14:30 TUESDAY in three languages, two of which were misspelled.

Wilde had positioned himself near the only window, which overlooked a parking lot in which a man was trying to reverse a delivery van into a space that was, by any reasonable geometry, too small for it. The van said KONSTANTINOS FRESH MEATS — QUALITY AND TRADITION on the side, and every time it reversed, the beeping provided a kind of rhythmic counterpoint to whatever anyone was saying. Wilde watched the operation with the focus of someone at the ballet.

“Extraordinary,” he said. “He’ll never fit. He knows he’ll never fit. And yet he persists. There’s your protagonist right there.”

Sedaris was sitting cross-legged on a folding chair, which is not how folding chairs are designed to be sat on, eating pistachios from a bag he’d bought at the airport. Shells were accumulating in a small cairn on the table. He’d been quiet since arriving, which in my limited experience of him meant either that he was bored or that he was memorizing everything for later deployment.

“I once spent four hours watching my father try to park a boat trailer,” Sedaris said. “Not a boat. A boat trailer. Empty. In our own driveway. He refused help. He swore at the trailer as though the trailer had agency and was choosing to be difficult. By the end he was speaking to it in Greek, which he barely knows — just restaurant Greek, just enough to order lamb — and my mother was on the porch timing him with a kitchen timer, not to be helpful, but because she wanted a precise number to quote at Thanksgiving.”

“Did she quote it?”

“Every Thanksgiving until he died. Four hours and eleven minutes. She had it engraved on a plaque.”

“She did not.”

“She absolutely did not, but she would have. That’s the thing about my family. They would have. The impulse is real. Only the follow-through is missing, and sometimes not even that.”

I cleared my throat. I had a premise to discuss, a story to plan, and two writers whose gravitational fields were already bending the conversation toward parking, which was not the subject. “The story,” I said. “Can we talk about the story?”

“We are talking about the story,” Wilde said, not turning from the window. “Your story is about a woman who attempts something she cannot possibly achieve, in public, and is too committed to stop. Your story is the van.”

“My story is about a British cultural attache who discovers that the celebrated author at her literary festival is actually a collective pseudonym — a whole village writing under one name — and then decides to impersonate him.”

“Yes,” Wilde said. “The van.”

Sedaris cracked another pistachio. “Why does she decide to impersonate him? That’s the question. Not the mechanics — anyone can put on a fake beard and a linen jacket and talk about the agony of the creative process. I’ve been to enough book festivals to know that half the authors there are already impersonating a version of themselves. The question is what makes her think she can pull it off, and what makes her unable to stop once it starts going wrong.”

“Vanity,” Wilde said.

“That’s your answer for everything.”

“Because it is the answer for everything. Vanity is the locomotive of human civilization. Every cathedral, every opera house, every literary festival in a charming Mediterranean village exists because someone wanted to be seen doing something splendid. Your cultural attache discovers a fraud, and her first instinct is not to expose it. Her first instinct is: I could do that better. I could be that person more convincingly than the people who invented that person. That’s magnificent. That’s Bunbury.”

“Who’s Bunbury?” Sedaris asked.

“A person who doesn’t exist but who is more useful than anyone who does. Ernest has an imaginary friend named Bunbury whom he visits whenever he needs to escape social obligations. Bunbury is the perfect alibi because he requires no collaboration. He simply is, because Ernest says he is. Your village has done the same thing on a municipal scale. They’ve created a Bunbury and given him a bibliography.”

I jumped in, because this was exactly the thread I needed them to pull. “And then the attache becomes a second-order Bunbury. She’s impersonating an imaginary person. She’s pretending to be someone who was already pretend.”

Sedaris set down his pistachio bag. “Okay, that’s interesting. That is actually interesting. Because here’s what happens in my family — and in every family, and in every small organization — there’s the official story about who you are, and it’s maintained collectively, and everyone knows it’s not true, and you defend it anyway. My father was a great man, according to my father. The rest of us were the village. We maintained the fiction because the alternative — admitting that he was a medium man with a talent for grudges and a surprisingly detailed knowledge of jazz — was somehow worse. The fiction was load-bearing. You remove it and the ceiling comes down.”

“So the village’s collective authorship is load-bearing,” I said. “They need this fake author to exist. He means something to the community. He’s their —”

“Their best self,” Wilde said. “Every institution creates the genius it requires. Oxford did not discover me; Oxford required someone like me and I was obliging enough to show up. Your village requires a literary genius because — why? What does the genius do for them?”

“Puts them on the map,” Sedaris said. “Tourism. Cultural legitimacy. The festival brings money. The author brings the festival. Kill the author and you kill the economy. It’s practical.”

“It is never practical. Or rather, the practical explanation is the boring one, and the boring explanation is always incomplete. Yes, tourism. Yes, money. But also: the village needs to believe it produced something extraordinary. Not a good olive oil or a reliable ferry schedule, but a mind. A sensibility. An author who appeared, as if by miracle, from this particular arrangement of limestone and bougainvillea and wrote something that made the wider world pay attention. That’s not economics. That’s theology.”

“It’s both,” Sedaris said. “Things can be two things.”

“Things are always at least three things, in my experience, and the third is usually the embarrassing one.”

I was scribbling. The van outside had given up and was now parked diagonally across two spaces, which felt pointed. “So the attache discovers the fraud. The famous author is actually — what, a committee? A book club? A collective of the village’s teachers and postal workers and one woman who runs the bakery?”

“Yes,” Sedaris said. “And she discovers it in the most humiliating possible way. Not through investigation. Through accident. She spills coffee on someone’s manuscript and two different people instinctively reach for it. Or she sees the author’s famous reclusive habits and realizes they’re a scheduling problem — he can’t attend the morning panel because the man who does mornings is the pharmacist and the pharmacy opens at nine.”

Wilde was delighted. “The pharmacist does mornings. The baker does afternoons, because she’s finished with the ovens by then. The schoolteacher does evening events because he’s already practiced at speaking to rooms full of people who don’t want to be there. Each of them has internalized a third of the author’s personality, and they bicker about continuity like actors in a long-running show.”

“The continuity bickering is gold,” I said. “That’s where the comedy lives.”

“The comedy lives in the seriousness with which they take it,” Sedaris corrected. “I once watched my sister Lisa and my sister Amy argue for forty-five minutes about whether our dead cat’s favorite window was the kitchen window or the living room window. Not whether the cat preferred the kitchen or the living room — they agreed on the room. They were arguing about whether the cat sat on the left side of the sill or the right side. And the argument mattered because they were really arguing about who knew the cat better, which was really about who paid more attention, which was really about who loved more carefully. You can’t write that argument as farce. You have to write it as though the window matters, because to them it does.”

“The window matters,” I repeated, and I meant it.

Wilde had turned from his own window and was now pacing, which in the available square footage meant taking three steps, turning, and taking three steps back. “But your attache. Let us return to her magnificent error. She discovers the fraud and decides to become the fraud. Why?”

“Because she’s better at it than they are,” I said. “She’s a diplomat. She performs identity for a living. She’s spent years being the version of Britain that foreign audiences want to see — cultured, witty, slightly shabby, apologetic about the Empire in a way that’s charming rather than genuine. She sees this collective author stumbling over his own contradictions, and she thinks: I can be a more coherent version of this person than the five people who invented him.”

“And she’s right,” Wilde said. “That’s what makes it comedy rather than morality tale. She IS better at it. Her version of the author is more convincing, more charismatic, more — consistent than the committee version. The fake fake is better than the original fake. And this should trouble everyone, and instead it delights them, because what people want from an author is not truth. They want performance. They want the author to be the kind of person who could have written those books, and a skilled performer will always be more convincing than the awkward committee of people who actually wrote them.”

“That’s bleak,” I said.

“It’s reality. Reality is bleak. Comedy makes it survivable.”

Sedaris had uncrossed and recrossed his legs on the folding chair, which creaked in protest. “Here’s where I push back. You’re making this too theoretical. Too neat. The attache is better at performing the author — fine, I buy that. But she’s also going to be terrible at specific things. She doesn’t know the village. She doesn’t know the in-jokes, the local references, the cousin who shows up drunk at every reading. The committee knows all of that because they live there. So you’ve got this gorgeous collision: she’s a better performer of the general role, and they’re better at the specific details, and neither can do without the other, and neither will admit it.”

“So they end up collaborating,” I said. “The attache and the committee. She becomes the public face, they feed her the local texture, and the fraud deepens instead of collapsing.”

“The fraud improves,” Wilde said. “It becomes more sophisticated, more layered, more — real. Until at some point the question of who the author actually is becomes genuinely unanswerable. Not philosophically unanswerable — the way a graduate student would mean it — but practically unanswerable. There are now so many layers of invention that the original question — who wrote these books? — has become stupid. The answer is: everyone and no one, which is, incidentally, the truth about all authorship, but people find that truth intolerable and so they invent the myth of the solitary genius, and your village has simply made the myth visible.”

“Don’t lecture,” Sedaris said.

“I’m not lecturing. I’m having an insight.”

“You’re having an insight at lecture speed. Slow it down. Where’s the embarrassment?”

Wilde blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“Every funny story needs embarrassment. Real embarrassment. The physical, hot-faced, wish-you-were-dead kind. Who gets embarrassed in this story, and when, and what do they do with it?”

Wilde seemed to consider this. “The attache. She’s performing the author at a public event — a reading, perhaps, or an interview — and someone asks a question that requires local knowledge. A specific detail. What was the inspiration for chapter seven? And she doesn’t know, because the baker wrote chapter seven, and the baker is in the audience watching her flounder, and the baker could rescue her but doesn’t, because the baker thinks she’s a fraud and resents her, even though the baker is also a fraud, and the resentment of one fraud toward another fraud for being a better fraud is — that’s something. What is that?”

“Tuesday,” Sedaris said. “That’s every family dinner. That’s my father resenting my mother for telling his stories better than he told them, even though he told them first, even though they happened to him. The resentment of the original toward the copy who improved upon the original. It’s the most human emotion there is and nobody talks about it because it makes you sound petty, and it is petty, and petty is where all the interesting stuff lives.”

I asked about escalation. The picaresque structure — Ignatius Reilly careening from disaster to disaster — requires each deception to generate a new problem that requires a bigger deception. Where does it escalate?

“The author gets shortlisted for a prize,” Sedaris said immediately. “A real one. A significant one. And now the attache has to go to the ceremony, because the committee can’t send the pharmacist — he gets nervous in crowds and once fainted at a school recital — and the baker refuses to leave the village because she has a bread schedule she will not compromise, and the schoolteacher would go but his version of the author is too different from the one the attache has been performing, and so the attache goes to the prize ceremony as a woman impersonating a fake person created by a committee of villagers, and she has to give a speech.”

“The speech,” Wilde said, and he was smiling now in the way that meant he was already composing it in his head. “The speech about the solitude of the creative life. Given by a woman who is not the author, about a process that did not happen in solitude, to an audience that has already decided what authorship means and is not interested in being corrected.”

“And the speech is beautiful,” I said. “That’s the thing. The speech has to be genuinely beautiful. Genuinely moving. She talks about the loneliness of writing, the terror of the blank page, the feeling of being inhabited by characters who are more real than you are — and every word of it is a lie, and every word of it is also true, because she is, at that moment, inhabited by a character more real than she is. She’s become the author. The performance has eaten the performer.”

Sedaris was nodding slowly. “That’s the Sedaris problem. The thing I can never quite solve in my own work. You perform yourself long enough and you can’t find the edge anymore. Where does the persona end and the person begin? I’ve been telling stories about my family for thirty years and at this point the stories are truer than the family. My sister Amy is a character I’ve written. She’s also my sister. She’d tell you herself that the written Amy is better company.”

“Better company,” Wilde murmured. “Yes. The performed self as improvement upon the original. Lady Bracknell would understand. She invented herself so thoroughly that the question of who she was before the invention became not only unanswerable but impolite.”

“So the attache becomes the best version of an author who never existed,” I said. “And the village lets her, because her version is better for business. And she lets herself, because being someone else is a relief. And the whole arrangement is a fraud that makes everyone happy, which means it’s not a fraud at all, which means —”

“Which means you have a problem with your ending,” Sedaris said. “Because if nobody’s harmed and everybody’s happy and the lie is better than the truth, then what’s the story? Where’s the knife? A story where fraud makes everyone’s life better and there are no consequences is not satire. It’s a TED talk.”

“The consequences are internal,” Wilde said. “She loses something. The ability to be — what is the dreadful modern word — authentic. She becomes so good at being the author that being herself feels like the performance. Going home to London, sitting in her real flat, eating her real dinner — that’s the acting. The village is where she’s real, and in the village she’s fake, and this is either the human condition or a clinical diagnosis, and I genuinely don’t know which.”

“Both,” Sedaris said. “Things can be —”

“If you say things can be two things one more time I will defenestrate myself, and given that we are one floor above a kebab shop, the indignity would be considerable.”

Sedaris ate a pistachio. Chewed it slowly, with the timing of someone who knew the pause was doing more work than the words.

“The knife,” he said, “is the moment she realizes she likes being fake more than being real. Not as a philosophical position. As a felt experience. She wakes up in the village and she’s happy, and she knows the happiness is built on a lie, and she doesn’t care. And the not caring — the genuine, bone-deep not caring — that’s the scariest thing in the story. Because it means the self is negotiable. It means identity is a lease, not a deed. And most people would rather not know that.”

Outside, the delivery van had finally departed, leaving a grease stain on the asphalt in the shape of — I’m not sure what. Something that had been one thing and was now something else. Wilde was looking at it.

“The kebab shop,” he said.

“What about the kebab shop?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking that we are three writers in a rented room above a kebab shop, inventing a person who does not exist, and downstairs a man is serving lamb to strangers, and his work is more honest than ours, and he will never know it, and that’s fine. That’s perfectly fine.”

Sedaris gathered his pistachio shells into his palm and looked around for a bin. There wasn’t one.

“There’s never a bin,” he said. “In my experience. At the important moments, there’s never a bin.”

He put the shells in his pocket. We left the function room. The whiteboard still said FIRE DRILL 14:30 TUESDAY. Nobody had come. Nobody, I suspected, ever would.