Amy Sedaris

Sedaris was born in Endicott, New York, the fourth of six children in a Greek Orthodox family. Her parents were Sharon Elizabeth (née Leonard), a homemaker, and Louis Harry "Lou" Sedaris, an IBM engineer. Her father was born in Cortland, New York to immigrants from Apidea in Greece, and her mother was Anglo-American from Binghamton, New York. Sedaris' mother was Protestant and her father was Greek Orthodox. Her paternal grandmother did not speak English and owned a shoe shining store in New York. Sedaris' mother died of lung cancer in 1991, while her father died in 2021. When she was four, her family moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where she grew up with her five siblings: Lisa, David, Gretchen, Tiffany, and Paul. Her sister Tiffany died by suicide in 2013. She recalled feeling weird in that new environment, as her family was not southern and followed Greek traditions. As a child Sedaris liked playing dress-up and putting on plays for her family. In her brother David's book Me Talk Pretty One Day, he noted that she would often assume characters to play pranks on her family. As a teenager, Sedaris' first job was at the local Winn-Dixie supermarket where she would make fake announcements over the loudspeaker, and for a while she was determined to work at the local women's prison in Raleigh. She attended Jesse O. Sanderson High School and was a Girl Scout until she graduated. At the age of 20, she and her mother worked together making and selling spanakopita. During that time, she was dating a man from Greece, and one evening after coming home from cooking, she found him unconscious on the kitchen floor. He had a brain aneurysm, and Sedaris spent the next three years caring for him. When they eventually broke up, Sedaris moved to Chicago with her brother David, and took classes at Second City and Annoyance Theatre. There she also worked as a waitress at Zanies Comedy Club.