kchowell's Full Review: David Sedaris - Me Talk Pretty One Day
Call it a bad case of Spring Fever.
A yet unread collection of Peter Taylor short stories, purchased a few weeks ago on eBay, sits untouched on one of my many bookshelves. The critically acclaimed debut novel of Zadie Smith sits unceremoniously on my coffee table, a bookmark languishing somewhere in the vicinity of page 100. Not one, but two books by Annie Proulx sit half-read on my bedside table. While I know that I should devote some energy to finishing at least one of these books, I lack the necessary commitment and motivation. It’s spring, and I want to wander around outdoors as often as possible.
That is, until I discovered that David Sedaris’s newest collection of essays, Me Talk Pretty One Day, had arrived on the shelves of my local bookseller. Since it wasn’t scheduled to be available until June, I was initially skeptical when a friend told me, in mid-May, that I could rush out and pick up a copy. I ran out the same day, purchased the book, and had it read within forty-eight hours.
That’s the power that David Sedaris’s writing has over me…
If he publishes it, I’ll read it.
Like Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day is a collection of personal essays. Once again, Sedaris tackles territory that will be immediately recognizable to anyone who is familiar with his work: his family, his childhood in North Carolina, his early days in New York and his sexuality. However, there is much new material covered in this collection, most of it influenced by the time that he has spent recently living in France. While the rest of us have been going about our normal lives, Sedaris has been living part-time in France with his boyfriend, artist Hugh Hamrick, exploring Paris, struggling with the language, dealing with American tourists, and generally hating all things Gallic.
With this collection, I found that David Sedaris has matured, but he hasn’t lost his edge. Perhaps I’m growing accustomed to his style as a humorist, but I found this collection to be somewhat less brash and politically incorrect than Naked or Barrel Fever. However, it still is hilariously funny, and had me laughing aloud from start to finish.
In The Learning Curve, Sedaris recounts his experience as the teacher of a writing workshop.
A year after my graduation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a terrible mistake was made and I was offered a position teaching a writing workshop. I had never gone to graduate school, and although several of my stories had been Xeroxed and stapled, none of them had ever been published in the traditional sense of the word.
Despite Sedaris’s assertions that he was a dreadful writing teacher, his assignments sound much more interesting than the ones that I encountered while I was in school. Frustrated that the course interferes with his ability to watch One Life to Live, Sedaris wheeled a television into the classroom and had students write “Guessays” in which they theorized about what would transpire in the following day’s episode. He got more than he bargained for when he directed his students to craft letters to fictional parents in prison.
I’d never known what an actual child-to-parent prison letter might be like, but now I had a pretty clear idea. I envisioned two convicts sharing a cell. One man stood at the sink while the other lay on a bunk, reading his mail.
“Anything interesting?” the standing man asked.
“Oh, it’s from my daughter,” the other man said. “She’s just started college, and apparently her writing teacher is a real as*hole.”
In Nutcracker.com, Sedaris vents his frustration with the increasing popularity of e-mail and the internet. Sedaris hates computers, and does his best to avoid them whenever possible. Which is good news for me, as he is unlikely to ever read my reviews of his books and hate me for writing them.
Both Jesus Shaves and The Tapeworm Is In are hilarious accounts of Sedaris’s unhappy struggle to learn French. In the former, he and other students in his French class attempt, with their limited French vocabulary, to explain the concept of Easter to a Muslim Moroccan. In the latter, Sedaris escapes the onslaught of listening to spoken French all day by donning a walkman and listening to audiobooks.
After reading this collection only once, I would say that my favorite essay is Picka Pocketoni. While on the Paris Métro, Sedaris encounters two American tourists who mistake him for a Parisian pickpocket, and then proceed to talk about him and insult him in English, as if he wasn’t even there.
People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American. France isn’t even my country, but there I was, deciding that these people needed to be sent back home, preferably in chains. In disliking them, I was forced to recognize my own pretension, which made me hate them even more.
This essay will particularly resonate with anyone who has ever been embarrassed by his fellow countrymen while abroad. I think that I found this especially amusing, as something similar happened to me when a group of Duke students sat across from me on the train from Florence to Rome. They didn’t presume that I was a pickpocket, but they did assume that I didn’t speak English (I was carrying some French and Italian magazines), and they did talk about me as if I couldn’t understand them. While they tried to figure out if I was German, French, Italian or Irish (yes, apparently these students didn’t know what the predominant language is in Ireland), I waited patiently for the right opportunity to put them in their place. The tension in the essay builds similarly as Sedaris searches his brain for the appropriate verbal lashing to unleash upon the unsuspecting couple. As a bonus, Sedaris also includes an anecdote about his sister, Amy (featured on Comedy Central’s Strangers With Candy) that will make you laugh as you make a mental note to never, ever accompany her on a train.
There is a rumor floating around that Sedaris has been working on a novel, and I can only hope that there’s some truth to it. I would love to read any fiction that should spring from Sedaris’s twisted mind. In the meantime, go pick up Me Talk Pretty One Day if you’re in need of a hearty laugh.
"As far as I was concerned, the French could be cold or even openly hostile. They could burn my flag or pelt me with stones, but if there were taxider...More at HotBookSale
Compared by The New Yorker to Twain and Hawthorne, David Sedaris has become one of the best-loved humorists of our time, writing with perfect pitch ab...More at Buy.com
A recent transplant to Paris, humorist David Sedaris, bestselling author of Naked , presents a collection of his strongest work yet, including the tit...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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