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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Me Talk Pretty One Day, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Insecurity
Humor, Commentary, and Observation
Class and Belonging
Family, Love, and Support
Summary
Analysis
Like a television show in which cops come to a perpetrator’s house, knock on his door, and tell him to come with them, David Sedaris is sitting in his fifth grade class when a woman enters and asks to see him. Instantly, he thinks about all the things he’s done wrong recently: he lit a supposedly flame-resistant Halloween costume on fire, stole grill tongs from somebody’s unwatched porch, doctored the word hit on a poster by the school’s gym. Frantically wondering why he’s in trouble, he doesn’t even stop to think that he might be innocent.
That Sedaris immediately assumes he’s done something wrong when somebody singles him out suggests that he is the kind of person who constantly fears punishment or disapproval. Of course, this is a natural way for a kid to respond to a stranger bursting into his classroom and asking to see him, but Sedaris’s guilty conscience is tinged with both insecurity and humor—a combination that characterizes his general outlook on life throughout the essays in Me Talk Pretty One Day.
Active
Themes
Walking down the hall, the woman who summoned Sedaris introduces herself as Miss Samson. She then asks if he roots for “State or Carolina.” Sedaris knows this is a common question in North Carolina, where everyone is obsessed with college football and loyal to their teams. Sedaris, for his part, doesn’t care about sports, but he’s learned that it makes people suspicious if he tells them that he—a boy—doesn’t like football. Accordingly, he always tries to guess which team the other person likes. Looking at Miss Samson’s red sweater, he interprets it as an indication that she roots for State, so he says, “Definitely State. State all the way.” Hearing this, Miss Samson slyly asks him to repeat himself because she is, as Sedaris later finds out, a speech therapist sent to work with him on eliminating his lisp when saying the letter s.
Sedaris feels as if his lack of interest in sports sets him apart from everyone else in his community. Given that many of the essays in Me Talk Pretty One Day examine—albeit in offhanded ways—traditional conceptions of masculinity, it’s important to note that Sedaris doesn’t conform to what everyone seems to see as the typical manifestation of boyhood. In other words, his lack of interest in football has larger implications, suggesting his sense of alienation and his divergence from traditional gender roles.
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Themes
In her office, Miss Samson tricks Sedaris into saying a number of words that contain the letter s. Whenever she speaks, she goes out of her way to emphasize her perfect enunciation, often pointing out that Sedaris’s lisp is a sign that his tongue is lazy. Sedaris comes to dread his sessions with Miss Samson, especially because the other boys who have to see her are unpopular, though he can’t help but acknowledge that they are similar to him. “You don’t want to be doing that,” these boys’ fathers often tell them. “That’s a girl thing.” These boys—including Sedaris—are always forced to hide their true interests because they aren’t considered manly enough. In retrospect, Sedaris notes that there should have been a sign on Miss Samson’s door that read: “FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA.” He also wonders if his teachers could identify the future alcoholics and “depressives.”
Newly self-conscious about his lisp, Sedaris starts avoiding s-words at all costs. To do this, he uses elaborate and longwinded alternative phrases, finding synonyms in a thesaurus he convinces his mother to buy him (through what she refers to as “endless pestering” and he refers to as “repeated badgering”). This does not entertain Miss Samson, who tries hard to trick Sedaris into using words that contain the letter s. Still, it’s no use, and his lisp doesn’t improve—nor, for that matter, do any of Miss Samson’s other students improve at their enunciation. Finally, just before Christmas break, Sedaris has his final meeting with Miss Samson, who is about to move to a new school. Letting down her guard, she tells him that they’ll spend their last session having a casual conversation, but he still refuses to use s-words.
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"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
Miss Samson tells Sedaris about her holiday plans, revealing that her fiancé is at war in Vietnam. This means she’ll spend Christmas alone with her grandmother. As she continues to talk, she admits the disappointment she feels that none of her students have improved. She says she wanted to prove herself by helping them but now she feels like a failure. “My students don’t like me,” she says. As she covers her face with her hands, Sedaris says, “Hey, look, I’m thorry.” Instantly, she looks up with a smile, saying, “I got you,” and laughing at him. That night, Sedaris relays this story to his mother, who says, “You’ve got to admit that you really are a sucker.” But because he’s never banished his lisp, he prefers to use the word “chump.”
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