Best-selling author and satirist David Sedaris has shared so many hilarious personal anecdotes with his fans — and I count myself among them — that it’s surprising to learn that his fast rise to fame in the early 1990s remains unexplored territory.

And it seems like it would be fertile ground. David Sedaris had been keeping a diary for years when he began reading excerpts from it for audiences in Chicago (he’d moved there from North Carolina to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago). One night, at a club called Lower Links, Public Radio International’s Ira Glass heard Sedaris and asked him to appear on a show called “The Wild Room.”

This eventually led to Sedaris’ breakthrough moment in 1992: reading “Santaland Diaries” — about his time working as Crumpet, one of Santa’s elves at Macy’s — on NPR’s “Morning Edition.”

The original “Santaland Diaries” segment for NPR (may contain language not suitable for children):

The wildly popular radio essay — which has been known to cause drivers to pull off the road because they’re laughing too hard to drive — led to monthly segments by Sedaris on “Morning Edition,” as well as offers from soap opera producers (Sedaris is an unabashed fan of the genre); “Seinfeld”’s writers; book and magazine publishers; an NBC news magazine show involving Michael Moore that was in development; and movie producers interested in adapting "Santaland Diaries."

"But I keep thinking," he told the New York Times in 1993, "that what the producers really want is for it to be a story about a heterosexual guy who's working as an elf because he's being pursued by the mob and he's hiding out. I could see them wanting to make it a Michael J. Fox vehicle."

And while Sedaris, who was then living with partner Hugh Hamrick in New York City’s Soho district, accepted a few of the offers that came his way, he kept his job as a $10-an-hour apartment cleaner, according to that same New York Times article.

“I don’t feel that it’s humiliating or anything scrubbing people’s toilets, if they pay you to do it,” Sedaris told the Times. “Besides, a lot of times I can watch soap operas.”

Since then, of course, Sedaris’ star has risen to the highest heights, and he comes to the Michigan Theater for an appearance Wednesday, April 14 as part of the Ann Arbor Conversations series. He now lives with Hamrick in France — a source of several hysterical essays, including “Jesus Shaves,” from “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” wherein French language students of various backgrounds struggle to have a conversation about Easter.

In the essay, Sedaris is rebuffed for his awkward explanation about a large rabbit that delivers chocolate, and the teacher explains: "'Here in France the chocolate is brought by the big bell that flies in from Rome.' I called for a time-out. 'But how does the bell know where you live?' 'Well,' she said, 'how does a rabbit?' It was a decent point, but at least a rabbit has eyes."

Sedaris has also grown more ambitious as an essayist, as demonstrated by my all-time favorite Sedaris essay, “Repeat After Me,” found in “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.”

Though ostensibly about a visit with his sister Lisa, who owns a parrot (hence the title), the essay takes a funny but unflinching look at Sedaris’ conflicted feelings about the way he uses his family members — his years of conversations with, and memories of, them — as raw material for his writing. (Sedaris' misgivings specifically arise when a filmmaker expresses an interest in adapting "Me Talk Pretty One Day" for the screen, and he begins to imagine a Hollywood depiction of his family.)

"Maybe before the credits roll, we see this … man getting out of bed in the middle of the night, walking past his sister's room, and continuing downstairs into the kitchen. A switch is thrown, and we notice, in the far corner of the room, a large standing birdcage covered with a tablecloth. He approaches it carefully and removes the cloth, waking a blue-fronted Amazon parrot, its eyes glowing red in the sudden light. Through everything that's gone before this moment, we understand that the man has something important to say. From his own mouth the words are meaningless, and so he pulls up a chair. The clock reads 3 a.m., then four, then five, as he sits before the brilliant bird, repeating slowly and clearly the words, 'Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.'"

"Repeat" thus offers up one of those rare occasions when you can say "I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me" with complete seriousness. And any writer who can pull that off is one I'll go out of my way to listen to.

Jenn McKee is the entertainment digital journalist for AnnArbor.com. Reach her at jennmckee@annarbor.com or 734-623-2546, and follow her on Twitter @jennmckee.

David Sedaris on "The Daily Show" in 2008: