Themes
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
Lou visits Sedaris in Paris and goes to dinner with him and his friend Maja. At dinner, he explains that he found an unidentifiable brown object in his suitcase that evening and put it in his mouth, thinking it might have been a cookie. Maja is confused and asks if Lou had packed cookies. “Not that I know of, but that’s not the point,” Lou says. Sedaris understands why Maja is taken aback, but he’s unsurprised to hear his father’s story. For his entire life, Lou Sedaris has saved food in odd places. This is because he saves everything, but he especially saves food. While taking his children to the grocery store, he used to ask the staff to show him the backroom where they kept the food considered too rotten to sell. In this backroom, he would eat freely and take discounted items home.
In the final essay of Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris returns to his father, a man he will seemingly never tire of observing. This time, Sedaris turns his attention to his father’s idiosyncratic habits surrounding food and waste, portraying him as an eccentric man who would rather put an unknown object in his mouth than throw it away. And though Maja may not understand why Lou would do this, Sedaris understands all too well that his father isn’t bound by rationality. In turn, Sedaris invites readers to reflect on the odd but endearing ways in which family members deal with and even appreciate each other’s otherwise incomprehensible behavior.
Themes
Lou used to try to convince his children to eat the rotten food he stored throughout the house. He often put fruit in the medicine cabinet, but he also put things in the crisper of the refrigerator, thinking that this would keep them fresh. Taking a soft, pale carrot out, he’d encourage his children to eat it, taking a soundless bite himself. This mentality is what led him to chew on the unidentified brown object in his suitcase. After chewing for more than five minutes, he realized it was a piece of his old hat. “So you literally ate your hat?” Maja asks, and Lou says that he did, though he adds that he “stopped after the first few bites.” Hearing this, Sedaris thinks that—now that Lou knows eating his hat won’t kill him—he’ll store it away so he can eat it at a later date.
Once more, Sedaris puts his father’s quirky behavior on display. In doing so, he invites readers to consider the humorous and endearing nature of familial relationships, which often require people to simply accept the mystifying idiosyncrasies of their loved ones. Instead of criticizing his father for eating his own hat, Sedaris chooses to laugh about it, having learned to appreciate his father’s whims instead of resisting them. This, it seems, is what it often takes to foster successful relationships with family members.
Themes
