Talking Pretty
David Sedaris has been called anything from a genius to a liar and doesn’t seem to mind a word of it. He is the author of bestsellers such as Barrel Fever, Holidays on Ice, Naked, and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Sedaris is a regular writer for Esquire and The New Yorker, as well as the author of the amazingly funny collection of essays that is Me Talk Pretty One Day (Little Brown and Company, 2000, 272 pgs.) He got his start on the National Public Radio (NPR) show This American Life, and can still be heard occasionally on the show. He also collaborates with his sister, Amy Sedaris, to write plays (Barclay).
His personal life is his writing; the essays in Me Talk Pretty One Day are about his life as it happened. Many of them are from his childhood and almost all of them involve his family. It is obvious that he is very close to them, from the way he describes them, even though it isn’t always the most flattering terms. This book is a comedic memoir of Sedaris’ life, up in to the present. In Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris uses his unique and humorous stories to expose aspects of interpersonal relationships and communication, and share his own personal morals about life.
The first essay of the book, “Go Carolina”, opens with a very funny scene about a television agent coming for their suspect. It perfectly illustrates his relationship with his speech therapist who is trying to correct his lisp and from which he is desperately trying to escape. From the first page Sedaris’ humor and sarcastic tone are obvious. Not one of the essays has been left untouched by it. The book is set up in a way that it divides into two parts. The first half, Part One, is thirteen essays mainly about his childhood growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina. He shares his experiences with strict speech therapists, midget music instructors, and going to art school without having an ounce of talent and an addiction to speed. Of course, Sedaris makes it clear in this book how much talent he really does have. The second half of the book, part Deux, is fifteen short essays about his more recent life. Sedaris recounts his experiences moving to and living in France with his boyfriend Hugh. He also focus’s on his difficulty with learning the language, which creates some of the funniest material in the book. There is no evident order in which these essays come to readers. There is no timeline followed, in fact, most of the time it isn’t quite clear where exactly in Sedaris life the essay takes place. We know an approximate age from the experiences being described. Sedaris’ tone throughout the entire book is extremely sarcastic and puts a comic spin on every situation described. We see this in many of the essay’s titles, such as “The Youth In Asia”, which describes the sad story of euthanizing a family cat. The title essay, “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, describes the author’s struggle with learning to speak French.
Throughout the book, Sedaris exposes various aspects of human to human communication and how people express themselves inarticulately. Many of the books essays circle around the theme of communication. As independent critic Gerard Brown says, “From its first pages, the book proposes language as a marker and suggests that the inability to express oneself articulately is tantamount to idiocy” (Brown). And in reading the book, one can’t help but agree with him. In the very first essay, “Go Carolina”, we get the first taste of this. A young Sedaris battles with his school speech therapist and tries desperately to avoid changing his lisping s. To do this he decides to build an impressive vocabulary of synonyms without the letter s. “‘Yes,’ became ‘correct,’ or a military ‘affirmative.’ ‘Please,’ became ‘with your kind permission,’ and questions were pleaded rather than asked” (Sedaris 11). To him, expanding his vocabulary is a way of proving that he is smarter than her, and that he can communicate well despite his lisping voice.
Another illustration of exposing communication comes in the second half of the book when Sedaris attends a French class. We see again how Sedaris connects communication with intelligence. “My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom and accompanied me onto the wide boulevards. Stopping for a coffee, asking directions, depositing money in my bank account: these things were out of the question, as they involved having to speak” (Sedaris 171). After being singled out by his hostile teacher, Sedaris is determined to do better by spending hours on homework and writing assignments. He does not want to be thought of as unintelligent so he avoids speaking at all instead of risking speaking wrong. However, throughout the entire book Sedaris is not afraid to be his own critic.
Lastly, Sedaris brings to light the question: can we really communicate with others at all? When faced with the daunting task of explaining what Easter is to a Muslim student in French, his entire class fumbles their answer. As seen in the essay “Jesus Shaves”, “‘He call his self Jesus and then he die one day on two… morsels of … lumber.’ The rest of the class jumped in. offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm. ‘He die one day and then he go above my head to live with your father’” (Sedaris 177). After observing this sad explanation for the holiday, Sedaris lets us in on his own thought process as well as to make us think for ourselves. Are we really able to express ourselves and our feelings and opinions about things accurately to those around us? “I wondered then if, without the language barrier, my classmates and I could have done a better job making sense of Christianity, an idea that sounds pretty far fetched to begin with”(Sedaris 179). Readers are confronted with this revelation about communication and enticed to think about it in their own context.
Another important role of this book is that it acts as somewhat of a moral guide about life, but without preaching. Sedaris exposes his readers to his personal beliefs throughout the book. He is sharing his experiences, thoughts and revelations about life but in a very subtle way. None of the lessons about life are jumping out of the pages; rather, Sedaris makes his readers dig for his advice. His views about the value of things become apparent in “The Great Leap Forward”. Sedaris disguises his lesson in an amusing story about a job he had as a personal assistant to a rich Columbian woman. He endures tantrums, being yelled at, and humiliated by this woman until finally one day he is offered another job as a moving guy. The work is hard and exhausting, the pay is lousy and his coworkers are ex-murders. Despite this, Sedaris finds contentment more here than being boxed in an office. His new boss, Patrick, is a communist who teaches Sedaris about integrity via customer service. Patrick, the communist, would rather move an unpacked apartment up and down five flights of stairs for a nice girl than take a job from a successful young professional. “I just had to understand that for Patrick, moving a certain kind of person was the equivalent to me calling a pigeon Cheeky- it simply wasn’t worth the money to him”(Sedaris 118). It is obvious from this essay that integrity and personal happiness are worth far more to Sedaris than money and materials.
In one of the most memorable essays of the book, “YouCan’t Kill the Rooster”, Sedaris uses his younger brother, Paul, to share with his readers yet another lesson about life. Sedaris shows the reader that the true quality of a person is on the inside rather that what is seen externally. This time however, it is more cleverly hidden within the story. In the essay, Sedaris describes the strangely close relationship between his conservative father and younger brother. At first “The Rooster” seems obscene and rude to his own family. “When my father complained about his aching feet, the Rooster set down his two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew and removed a fistful of prime rib from his mouth, saying, ‘Bitch, you need to have them ugly-ass bunions shaved down is what you need to do. But you can’t do shit about it tonight, so lighten up, motherfucker.’ All eyes went to my father, who chuckled, saying only, ‘Well, I guess you have a point’” (Sedaris 64). However, the Rooster, as well as his relationship with his dad is just very misunderstood. The Rooster is later described as his father’s main support and friend. “It was a difficult time, but the two of them stuck it out, my brother placing his small, scarred hand on my father’s shoulder to say, ‘Bitch, I’m here to tell you that it’s going to be all right. We’ll get through this shit, motherfucker, just you wait’” (Sedaris 68). So while it first appears that the Rooster is crude and disrespectful, readers find out that he is really incredibly loyal and kindhearted.
Me Talk Pretty One Day is a wonderful collection of extremely entertaining and insightful essays. David Sedaris uses his unique humor to captivate his reader’s attention and keep him reading all of the way through. Throughout the book he shares his stories as well as his beliefs. Sedaris teaches his readers life lessons through his hilarious essays. He also exposes interpersonal communication, ones ability to communicate and how this is so important to him. It is very interesting how he somehow rolls all of this into one amazing book. Despite whatever Sedaris has been called: If this reviewer were to choose, I’d call him a genius.
David Sedaris has been called anything from a genius to a liar and doesn’t seem to mind a word of it. He is the author of bestsellers such as Barrel Fever, Holidays on Ice, Naked, and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Sedaris is a regular writer for Esquire and The New Yorker, as well as the author of the amazingly funny collection of essays that is Me Talk Pretty One Day (Little Brown and Company, 2000, 272 pgs.) He got his start on the National Public Radio (NPR) show This American Life, and can still be heard occasionally on the show. He also collaborates with his sister, Amy Sedaris, to write plays (Barclay).
His personal life is his writing; the essays in Me Talk Pretty One Day are about his life as it happened. Many of them are from his childhood and almost all of them involve his family. It is obvious that he is very close to them, from the way he describes them, even though it isn’t always the most flattering terms. This book is a comedic memoir of Sedaris’ life, up in to the present. In Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris uses his unique and humorous stories to expose aspects of interpersonal relationships and communication, and share his own personal morals about life.
The first essay of the book, “Go Carolina”, opens with a very funny scene about a television agent coming for their suspect. It perfectly illustrates his relationship with his speech therapist who is trying to correct his lisp and from which he is desperately trying to escape. From the first page Sedaris’ humor and sarcastic tone are obvious. Not one of the essays has been left untouched by it. The book is set up in a way that it divides into two parts. The first half, Part One, is thirteen essays mainly about his childhood growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina. He shares his experiences with strict speech therapists, midget music instructors, and going to art school without having an ounce of talent and an addiction to speed. Of course, Sedaris makes it clear in this book how much talent he really does have. The second half of the book, part Deux, is fifteen short essays about his more recent life. Sedaris recounts his experiences moving to and living in France with his boyfriend Hugh. He also focus’s on his difficulty with learning the language, which creates some of the funniest material in the book. There is no evident order in which these essays come to readers. There is no timeline followed, in fact, most of the time it isn’t quite clear where exactly in Sedaris life the essay takes place. We know an approximate age from the experiences being described. Sedaris’ tone throughout the entire book is extremely sarcastic and puts a comic spin on every situation described. We see this in many of the essay’s titles, such as “The Youth In Asia”, which describes the sad story of euthanizing a family cat. The title essay, “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, describes the author’s struggle with learning to speak French.
Throughout the book, Sedaris exposes various aspects of human to human communication and how people express themselves inarticulately. Many of the books essays circle around the theme of communication. As independent critic Gerard Brown says, “From its first pages, the book proposes language as a marker and suggests that the inability to express oneself articulately is tantamount to idiocy” (Brown). And in reading the book, one can’t help but agree with him. In the very first essay, “Go Carolina”, we get the first taste of this. A young Sedaris battles with his school speech therapist and tries desperately to avoid changing his lisping s. To do this he decides to build an impressive vocabulary of synonyms without the letter s. “‘Yes,’ became ‘correct,’ or a military ‘affirmative.’ ‘Please,’ became ‘with your kind permission,’ and questions were pleaded rather than asked” (Sedaris 11). To him, expanding his vocabulary is a way of proving that he is smarter than her, and that he can communicate well despite his lisping voice.
Another illustration of exposing communication comes in the second half of the book when Sedaris attends a French class. We see again how Sedaris connects communication with intelligence. “My fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom and accompanied me onto the wide boulevards. Stopping for a coffee, asking directions, depositing money in my bank account: these things were out of the question, as they involved having to speak” (Sedaris 171). After being singled out by his hostile teacher, Sedaris is determined to do better by spending hours on homework and writing assignments. He does not want to be thought of as unintelligent so he avoids speaking at all instead of risking speaking wrong. However, throughout the entire book Sedaris is not afraid to be his own critic.
Lastly, Sedaris brings to light the question: can we really communicate with others at all? When faced with the daunting task of explaining what Easter is to a Muslim student in French, his entire class fumbles their answer. As seen in the essay “Jesus Shaves”, “‘He call his self Jesus and then he die one day on two… morsels of … lumber.’ The rest of the class jumped in. offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm. ‘He die one day and then he go above my head to live with your father’” (Sedaris 177). After observing this sad explanation for the holiday, Sedaris lets us in on his own thought process as well as to make us think for ourselves. Are we really able to express ourselves and our feelings and opinions about things accurately to those around us? “I wondered then if, without the language barrier, my classmates and I could have done a better job making sense of Christianity, an idea that sounds pretty far fetched to begin with”(Sedaris 179). Readers are confronted with this revelation about communication and enticed to think about it in their own context.
Another important role of this book is that it acts as somewhat of a moral guide about life, but without preaching. Sedaris exposes his readers to his personal beliefs throughout the book. He is sharing his experiences, thoughts and revelations about life but in a very subtle way. None of the lessons about life are jumping out of the pages; rather, Sedaris makes his readers dig for his advice. His views about the value of things become apparent in “The Great Leap Forward”. Sedaris disguises his lesson in an amusing story about a job he had as a personal assistant to a rich Columbian woman. He endures tantrums, being yelled at, and humiliated by this woman until finally one day he is offered another job as a moving guy. The work is hard and exhausting, the pay is lousy and his coworkers are ex-murders. Despite this, Sedaris finds contentment more here than being boxed in an office. His new boss, Patrick, is a communist who teaches Sedaris about integrity via customer service. Patrick, the communist, would rather move an unpacked apartment up and down five flights of stairs for a nice girl than take a job from a successful young professional. “I just had to understand that for Patrick, moving a certain kind of person was the equivalent to me calling a pigeon Cheeky- it simply wasn’t worth the money to him”(Sedaris 118). It is obvious from this essay that integrity and personal happiness are worth far more to Sedaris than money and materials.
In one of the most memorable essays of the book, “YouCan’t Kill the Rooster”, Sedaris uses his younger brother, Paul, to share with his readers yet another lesson about life. Sedaris shows the reader that the true quality of a person is on the inside rather that what is seen externally. This time however, it is more cleverly hidden within the story. In the essay, Sedaris describes the strangely close relationship between his conservative father and younger brother. At first “The Rooster” seems obscene and rude to his own family. “When my father complained about his aching feet, the Rooster set down his two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew and removed a fistful of prime rib from his mouth, saying, ‘Bitch, you need to have them ugly-ass bunions shaved down is what you need to do. But you can’t do shit about it tonight, so lighten up, motherfucker.’ All eyes went to my father, who chuckled, saying only, ‘Well, I guess you have a point’” (Sedaris 64). However, the Rooster, as well as his relationship with his dad is just very misunderstood. The Rooster is later described as his father’s main support and friend. “It was a difficult time, but the two of them stuck it out, my brother placing his small, scarred hand on my father’s shoulder to say, ‘Bitch, I’m here to tell you that it’s going to be all right. We’ll get through this shit, motherfucker, just you wait’” (Sedaris 68). So while it first appears that the Rooster is crude and disrespectful, readers find out that he is really incredibly loyal and kindhearted.
Me Talk Pretty One Day is a wonderful collection of extremely entertaining and insightful essays. David Sedaris uses his unique humor to captivate his reader’s attention and keep him reading all of the way through. Throughout the book he shares his stories as well as his beliefs. Sedaris teaches his readers life lessons through his hilarious essays. He also exposes interpersonal communication, ones ability to communicate and how this is so important to him. It is very interesting how he somehow rolls all of this into one amazing book. Despite whatever Sedaris has been called: If this reviewer were to choose, I’d call him a genius.
