U.S. author David Sedaris says he always clears his stories with family members. (Anne Fishbein/Little, Brown and Company/Associated Press)American humorist David Sedaris still discovers something funny in his own life every day, but he says he's become "fairer" in the way he writes about personal experiences.

In Toronto on a book tour to support his latest collection When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Sedaris said his often biting humour has had unpredictable consequences over the years.

His books, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and Me Talk Pretty Someday, draw on experiences from his upbringing in a large, unconventional family in North Carolina or his move to France with his painter boyfriend Hugh. His writing frequently appears in The New Yorker and Esquire.

The ways that readers have reacted to his stories sometimes leave him flabbergasted, he told CBC cultural affairs show Q.

"It never occurred to me that people would call my brother's house at two in the morning and say 'Do the rooster,'" he said, noting the reference was to his short story You Can't Kill the Rooster.

Nor do readers always understand that mining his past for humour doesn't mean he's estranged from his family.

"I wrote a story about mother locking my sisters and I out of the house during a snowstorm and I was signing books one night and this woman came up and said, 'Did you ever forgive your mother?'" Sedaris said.

"I thought [the story] was funny," he said, explaining that he's always been careful to stay on the right side of his family and to respect their privacy.

"Whenever I write about someone in my family, I give it to them to read first and ask if there is anything they want me to change or get rid of," he said.

But it was a story about a French-language teacher he studied with in France that brought home to him the need for a more balanced approach to his writing, Sedaris said.

"She threw chalk at people. She stabbed a Korean girl in the eye with a pencil and told her to go back to Seoul. It never occurred to me that my teacher would ever see the essay," he said. But the essay was sent to her and feelings were hurt.

"One thing I left out of that story is that I really liked my French teacher and I thought she was funny and she did a lot of really good things for her students … and it was my laziness that hurt her."

The cover of When You Are Engulfed In Flames was David Sedaris's own blackly humorous choice (Little, Brown and Company/Associated Press)His new book When You Are Engulfed in Flames reflects on the theme of mortality, which Sedaris says he thinks about now he's over 50 (he's actually 51).

While it still teases the humour out of every situation, he thinks it strikes a new tone.

"I would like to think I've become fairer," he said.

Sedaris, who made his reputation as a humorist with SantaLand Diaries, the 1992 essay about his stint working as an elf during Christmas at a Macy's department store, is known for deadpan delivery and off-the-cuff sarcasm in public appearances.

But he's lost part of his schtick, the always glowing cigarette, after successfully quitting smoking in, of all places, Japan.

"I was in Hiroshima and I was in a hotel and there was a booklet in my hotel. It was titled Best Knowledge of Disaster Damage Prevention and Favours to Ask of You. It was broken into little chapters — When you check into a hotel, When you find a fire, and When you are engulfed in flames," Sedaris said.

"I loved that because if you were engulfed in flames you'd say 'What did it say in that book? What did it say in that book?' "

The distinctive book cover, a Vincent Van Gogh called Skeleton with Cigarette, was Sedaris's own blackly humorous choice.

He said he carries with him a notebook in which he writes his experiences every day, and a day rarely goes by in which he doesn't discover something funny.

"In Normandy, where I spend the summer, there is one day when I wrote down just one thing. My big thing that day is that I saw a centipede attacking a worm. That's enough," he said.

Sedaris is at Ben McNally Books in Toronto Friday, at the Collected Works Bookstore in Ottawa on Saturday and Sunday in Montreal at Place Montreal Trust.