For David Sedaris, fact isn’t stranger than fiction — they’re intertwined.

David Sedaris will be reading from his latest work, “Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk,” which departs from his acclaimed, autobiographical style. Courtesy Anne Fishbein

The Raleigh, N.C. storyteller is famous for personal essays that combine biting sarcasm with absurd musings. But in “Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk,” his latest work, it’s nameless animals, not himself, who take the narrative spotlight. And allowing characters to be simply Dog or Cat or Rat instead of Bill or Janet or Ted is important to getting that narrative across.

“If you’re telling a story with humans you have to give them names, for one thing, because names say so much about somebody,” Sedaris said. “In this book, nobody had a name. And if they were human and nobody had a name, I would lose patience with it in about five minutes. But in fables you don’t expect names. It’s just the cat and the baboon and the rooster and the squirrel. And everyone knows what a cat and a baboon and a rooster and a squirrel look like. So really, by the second line of your sentence you’re right there into the story.”

But even with a separate voice, the animals continue to mirror the concerns of the storyteller. Some stories, like “The Grieving Owl” and “The Parrot and the Potbellied Pig,” grew from fascination with articles about anus-dwelling leeches and a healthy respect for deadlines.

Others grew out of personal loss and a sense of anxiety.

“The story about the bear, that was me making fun of me,” Sedaris said. “I feel like when my mom died I wrote a story about it, and then I wrote another story about it, and then I wrote another story about it and it was like, ‘Okay, shut up about that now.’”

And though “The Motherless Bear” has received push back from readers because of its violent themes, being brutalized by human circus owners gave the bear a captive audience for sympathy — and Sedaris, a cathartic way to relinquish his.

“At the end of the story the bear gets exactly what she wants,” he said. “And it might not be what a reader wants for the bear, but it is what the bear wanted, which is attention. When she sees someone crying she thinks that they’re crying because of her mother, but they’re just crying because she’s so pathetic.”

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Outside of animal tales, Sedaris has always tattled on his self-perceived flaws. And though the majority of his stories target his own shortcomings, Sedaris’ first observational satire did not come from self-deprecation.

Rather, he began writing monologues while trying to make peer-given art-critiques at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago more interesting.

“When it was my turn to get up and talk about my paintings, I brought in a little monologue to read out loud,” he said. “It was about a page long and it was funny — people laughed. And the teacher was like, ‘Okay, well I guess we’ll talk about that in relation to your paintings.’ And I was like ‘Oh, no, I’m done.’ And then people liked it even more because it was over. I wasn’t taking up half an hour and this way they could talk about themselves longer.”

From that classroom admiration came an opportunity to bare his soul and try his wit outside of the art school. Sedaris first turned away from character-driven monologues and towards personal narratives while preparing for a “happening” given by a classmate.

“And so I tried to write a little monologue and it didn’t come together and so at the last minute I was like, ‘Well, I know I’ve got some stuff in my diary and so we’ll try that.’ And that’s how it started,” he said. “And then somebody said, ‘Oh, I’m doing a thing next week. Can you read something then?’ and one show led to another led to another.”

Allowing humor and short essays to speak for themselves in college gave Sedaris the ability to move from small classrooms to small coffee shops to small stages to large ones. And being outside of a writer’s environment in college allowed the author to grow in his passions by working among those with different drives.

“I think I knew by that point that it wasn’t what drove me,” he said. “What I was on fire about was writing and I knew that by the time I went to art school.”

Since then, Sedaris has gone from lugging several diaries and clippings into shows to repurposing his personal musings for a broad number of formats.

But though all of his works contain parts of himself, the pieces are worked and reworked until the personal is more polished. Both in more famous recollections, like “Santaland Diaries,” and in “Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk,” where he presents himself in bear’s clothing, Sedaris displays his life while playing his cards close.

But for all his transparency, he still keeps a close watch on things getting too personal.

“I would never ever ever open my diary at random and read from it,” Sedaris said. “I would absolutely die if anyone read my diary because that’s where the real me lives and that creature can never be seen — the horrible, horrible creature that lives in my diary.”

DAVID SEDARIS

Where: The Classic Center

When: 7:30 p.m.

Price: $25 – $45