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Guardian Books’ Hadley Freeman profiles David Sedaris and his new book, Squirrel Meets Chipmunk. Bill Bryson calls Sedaris “the funniest and most original American writer since SJ Perelman.”

Sedaris knew he wanted to be a writer from the age of 25, when he read a collection of Bobbie Ann Mason stories; he attempted to fulfil his ambition by “writing a lot of bad Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver.”

It would take almost another decade before he found success. In the meantime, he kept himself busy dropping out of two colleges, going to art school (“I know I didn’t really want to be an artist, simply because I wasn’t jealous of the other students’ success”), developing a full-blown drug habit and finding “jobs that needed no skills”, such as cleaning people’s houses and working as an elf in a department store at Christmas.