"Gretchen reaches into her purse and pulls out a palm-sized black book... I mistake it for a pocket Bible, super-abbreviated, with only the good parts included, and just as I wonder, wait - what good parts? I realise it’s for addresses, that it is, true to its colour and size, my father’s Little Black Book."

This week there's just one essay, "Pussytoes" – Sedaris’ response to the death of his father, Lou, about whom David has written, to great acclaim and occasional disbelief, many times in his long career. His father's decline in his later years had turned him from the monster recalled in earlier essays to a gentler person.

"One of the things I’d heard again and again at the church that morning was, “Lou was a real character.” A character is what you call a massively difficult person once he has reached the age of eighty-five. It’s what Hitler might have been labelled had he lived another three decades."

David Sedaris plays to packed houses across the world but loves coming back to his adopted home in the UK to record a selection of his most recent work for BBC Radio 4. “When I first started doing these shows, there were a lot of Americans in the room – but now there’s just a few,” he says. “It’s a great feeling to have built an audience, here in the UK.”

Producer: Steve Doherty
A Giddy Goat production for BBC Radio 4 Show less