Me Talk Pretty One Day is a collection of essays about the everyday life of the author, David Sedaris. The book’s first essays detail his upbringing in North Carolina. As a child, he lives with his father, mother, and sisters. The opening essay recounts the time he’s forced to see a speech therapist in the fifth grade. Every Thursday, Miss Samson (the therapist) takes him out of class and brings him to her office, where she tries to train him to banish the lisp he has when saying the letter s. Sedaris hates this, partially because he’s one of the few boys in school who needs speech therapy. This, he believes, aligns him with a group of children who are unpopular, and he senses that the teachers might as well refer to them as the “future homosexuals of America.” Thinking this way, he wonders if his teachers are also capable of identifying the future alcoholics or “depressives” in their classrooms. Defying Miss Samson, he starts avoiding all s-words, using elaborate synonyms. A strict woman, Miss Samson dislikes this, but nothing she does gets Sedaris to stop. At the end of the year, she opens up to him and speaks emotionally about her failure as a speech therapist and about her depressing life. Seeing this, Sedaris tells her that he’s sorry, and she starts laughing, triumphantly informing him that she tricked him into using an s.
At another point in his childhood—as outlined in “Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities”—Sedaris goes with his family to a jazz concert. His father, Lou, is obsessed with jazz, always forcing him and his sisters to listen to his record collection. In another life, Sedaris thinks, his father would have made a good musician. Because he never pursued this dream, though, he decides after the jazz concert that Sedaris and his sisters should start a family band. None of them are interested, but Lou signs them up for lessons. Forced to learn the guitar, Sedaris finds himself sitting in a small room with an instructor named Mr. Mancini. Mr. Mancini is a little person, though Sedaris refers to him using the pejorative, politically incorrect term “midget.” Sedaris makes no effort to learn guitar, finding himself more fascinated by Mr. Mancini than by the instrument. When Mr. Mancini advises him to give his guitar a name, he decides on Oliver, but Mancini says it has to be a woman’s name. Eventually, he decides to show Mr. Mancini a routine he has developed on his own, which involves singing commercial jingles he’s heard on TV. In response, Mr. Mancini thinks Sedaris is coming on to him and asks him to leave, saying he doesn’t “swing that way.” After this, Sedaris tells his father that Mr. Mancini said his fingers are too small to play guitar, and he never returns for another lesson.
Sedaris’s relationship with his father is a thread that runs throughout Me Talk Pretty One Day, as Sedaris outlines his father’s idiosyncrasies in essays like “Genetic Engineering,” in which he describes his father’s obsession with mathematics and technology. As an engineer at IBM, his father often speaks at length about the future of computers or about other topics that bore Sedaris. He even pursues these conversations with Sedaris when they’re on vacation in a beach town, where his lecture about how estimating the number of grains of sand in the world attracts nearby fishermen who ironically ask him to calculate the cost of land they had to give up when rich families came to the beach town and turned it into a vacation destination. Failing to register their facetious tone, Lou diligently sets to work trying to answer the question.
Later, Sedaris goes to college and decides to be an art major because he wants to be as artistically talented as his older sister Gretchen. However, he shows little talent, so he transfers to another school and tries a different discipline within the arts. When this doesn’t prove successful, he drops out and moves into an apartment in Raleigh, where he develops a taste for meth and conceptual art. Falling in with a group of experimental artists, he scoffs at art that isn’t avant-garde, claiming to be anti-establishment when, in reality, he and his friends are mostly interested in taking drugs and making things that even they don’t understand. Surprisingly, his work is accepted by a local museum, but this embarrasses him because his friends resent his success, claiming he sold out. As time passes, he develops an interest in bizarre performance art. During one of his final shows, an audience member heckles him, poking fun at the loftiness of his absurd display. Sedaris realizes the voice belongs to his father. By the end of the show, everyone thinks his father is part of the performance, and they compliment him on his wit. This frustrates Sedaris, and when he later runs out of drugs because his dealer goes to rehab, he gives up performance art.
Lou Sedaris has unique relationships with his children, always holding them to high standards and getting disappointed when they show no interest in the things he values. In “You Can’t Kill The Rooster,” Sedaris describes the beautiful relationship his father has with Sedaris’s youngest brother, who calls himself The Rooster. Lou has high hopes for The Rooster because none of his other children have fulfilled his dreams. The Rooster, however, has no intention of following his father’s plans, and his personality is in direct opposition to Lou’s. And yet, this doesn’t bother Lou; when The Rooster calls his father “bitch,” for instance, the old man simply smiles. Observing this relationship, Sedaris and his sisters are baffled that the two men get along so well, but Sedaris recognizes a tenderness running between them—a tenderness that transcends the fact that The Rooster doesn’t live the life Lou originally wanted for him.
In terms of accomplishments, Sedaris interrogates his own working life in “Learning Curve,” in which he’s hired as a writing professor despite his lack of experience. At first, he focuses on nothing but what he’ll wear, but he soon realizes that he also needs to think about how to fill up class time, so he starts watching soap operas with the students under the pretense that this will help them learn to write. When an older student furiously asks why he’s qualified to critique one of her essays, he finds himself at a loss for words. After a moment, though, he realizes what he needs to say: “I am the only one who is paid to be in this room.” This seems to work, but then the student asks how much he earns, and when he answers, the students unite with each other for the first time all semester, loudly laughing in unison.
Later in life, Sedaris moves to New York City and lives in a small apartment. He strolls through the city in the evenings and peers into the windows of townhouses, wishing he could live in such beautiful buildings. When he gets hired as a personal assistant to a rich woman named Valencia, he’s delighted that he can spend several days a week in her house, but the job soon gets old because Valencia annoys him by pretending to be poor. She haggles over prices and tries to underpay people who need the money more than she does. In keeping with this, Sedaris’s wage is much less than it should be, but he puts up with her because he doesn’t feel like finding a new job. When a group of movers comes to move some furniture from her townhouse to a friend’s apartment, though, they offer Sedaris a job, and he accepts it. Riding away with them in their truck, he realizes that this is where he belongs—in a crowded vehicle with kind people, not in a beautiful townhouse with meanspirited rich people.
While living in New York City, Sedaris meets Hugh, a man who lives in a nice apartment and owns a small house in Normandy, France. This intrigues Sedaris, who starts dating him and eventually visits France for the first time without knowing the language. On that first visit—outlined in “See You Again Yesterday”—he only knows how to say “bottleneck,” and he says it whenever he meets somebody. The next time, though, he tries to acquire a few more words, and his process continues on each subsequent visit. At this point in the essay collection, Sedaris devotes himself to chronicling what it’s like to live in France as an American, especially when he and Hugh move to Paris for several years. During this time, he struggles to learn French under the tutelage of a frightening and rude teacher, walks around the city listening to a French audiobook for medical doctors trying to learn clinical phrases, considers the way French people view Americans, and tries unsuccessfully to remember which French words are masculine and which are feminine—a practice he finds frustrating and ridiculous. Sedaris pays close attention to the various assumptions and stereotypes that come along with national identity, especially in “Picka Pocketoni,” in which an American couple riding the metro in Paris mistakes Sedaris for a French pickpocket and says rude things about him because they assume he can’t speak English. This makes Sedaris hate them, though he also recognizes that part of his anger has to do with his own pretentiousness. This realization only makes him hate them even more.
In addition to examining cultural identity, Sedaris thinks about the ways in which intelligence impacts his sense of self. In the essays “21 Down” and “Smart Guy,” he reveals his fear that he’s unintelligent, making it clear that he wants to be seen as a genius who can easily complete crossword puzzles and has a high IQ. Unfortunately for him, though, he isn’t particularly gifted at crossword puzzles, and when he and Hugh take an IQ test, he discovers that he’s “practically an idiot.” Hugh, on the other hand, has an incredibly high IQ, a fact that makes Sedaris feel even worse about himself. Trying to console him, Hugh tells him not to take his score to heart, adding that Sedaris is perfectly good at a number of things, including vacuuming and naming stuffed animals. There might be other things Sedaris is good at, Hugh offers, saying that he needs time to think of what, exactly, these things are.
All in all, Me Talk Pretty One Day sheds light on the little details of everyday life, highlighting strange encounters Sedaris has had in a number of different contexts. Accordingly, there are too many small interactions laid out in the book to mention here. What’s important to grasp, though, is that Sedaris is interested in exposing not only the absurdities that people overlook in daily life, but also the humor that can be found in even the most mundane situations. To drive this point home, he ends the collection with a story about his father’s approach to storing food. This topic might not sound all that interesting, but Sedaris manages to emphasize the humor of his father’s strange behavior. When Lou visits him in Paris, he explains that he found a small brown object in his suitcase and tried to eat it. This is because Lou never wastes food and has no problem eating things that look spoiled. Placing the object in his mouth, he chewed it for five minutes before realizing it was a disintegrated piece of his hat. Hearing this, Sedaris knows his father will now store the hat with the rest of his rotting food, saving it for a time when he has nothing else to eat. And instead of criticizing Lou for this, Sedaris simply appreciates the humor inherent in his beloved father’s odd behavior.
