Sedaris was born in Johnson City, New York,[3] to Sharon Elizabeth (née Leonard) and Louis Harry "Lou" Sedaris (1923–2021), an IBM engineer.[4][5][6] His mother was Anglo-American.[7] His father was born in the U.S. to immigrants from Apidea in Greece.[8] His mother was Protestant, and his father was Greek Orthodox,[9] which was the faith in which David was raised.[10][11]
The Sedaris family moved when David was young, and he grew up in a suburban area of Raleigh, the second oldest child of six. His siblings, from oldest to youngest, are Lisa, Gretchen, Amy,[12] Tiffany,[13] and Paul ("the Rooster").[14] Tiffany died by suicide in 2013, a subject David discusses in the essay "Now We Are Five", which was published in The New Yorker and included in his 2018 essay collection Calypso.[15]
After graduating from Jesse O. Sanderson High School in Raleigh, Sedaris briefly attended Western Carolina University[16] before transferring to, and dropping out of, Kent State University in 1977. In his teens and twenties, David dabbled in visual and performance art. He describes his lack of success in several of his essays.
He moved to Chicago in 1983, and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987. He did not attend Princeton University, although he spoke fondly of doing so in "What I Learned", a comic baccalaureate address delivered at Princeton in June 2006.
