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
After graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sedaris is offered a position as an adjunct writing instructor. He is completely unqualified to do this, having never published anything, but he accepts the job, focusing on how he’ll present himself, what he’ll wear, and the briefcase he’ll take to class. When he finally gets to the classroom and sets down his briefcase, though, he realizes he hasn’t prepared at all. Worse, he sees that—contrary to his expectations—his students aren’t going to just start talking and asking questions. Rather, he has to figure out what to talk about and bring them out of their shells. On his first day, he gives them an in-class writing assignment. The next class, he brings cigarettes and ashtrays, since he himself can never write without smoking.
Sedaris’s position as a writing instructor is a perfect storm for his fear of inadequacy, since he doesn’t have any teaching credentials. To make matters more difficult, he focuses on the wrong aspects of his role as a teacher, thinking exclusively about how he will present himself to his students. This makes sense, considering that his first instinct is always to worry about how he appears to others. And yet, it doesn’t matter whether or not he looks professional if he doesn’t know what to do once he’s standing before his class—a situation that only exacerbates his insecurities about his role as an instructor.
Themes
Sedaris is proud of his idea to let his students smoke until a student with asthma raises his hand and says that Aristophanes never smoked, nor did Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters. Sedaris listens to this, writing down the names of these writers so he can look them up later. He hasn’t read much, mainly watching movie renditions of classic literature. As the semester continues, Sedaris fears that his students will find out that he’s a fraud. In order to assert his authority, then, he frequently gets up to open or close the door, figuring that only the professor has the right to control the temperature and noise level of the classroom. With this in mind, he obsesses over the door, causing his students to wonder why he cares so much about whether it’s open or closed.
As an instructor, Sedaris thinks almost exclusively about whether or not he deserves the authority he has over his students. Of course, his fear of inadequacy is compounded by the fact that he actually doesn’t know what he’s doing. Despite this dynamic though, it’s worth pausing to note that, for all his insecurities and lack of confidence, Sedaris is quite comfortable admitting his own shortcomings—after all, the majority of the essays in Me Talk Pretty One Day list the many ways in which he fails to measure up to other people’s expectations. In this way, Sedaris frets over his feelings of inadequacy while unabashedly owning up to them as if they’re nothing to be ashamed of.
Themes
Sedaris assigns his students to write a letter to their mothers in prison, thinking that this is a fantastic assignment until a student comes up to him after class and, distraught, tells him that both her father and her uncle are in prison. After this experience, Sedaris stops giving his students in-class assignments, instead inciting conversations about celebrity gossip or asking them for good recipes—he does this under the pretense that such conversations will spark creativity, but in reality, he’s just desperate to find ways to fill up class time. He also gives the students an opportunity to publicly discuss their sex lives, but most of them don’t want to do this. Consequently, Sedaris starts screening soap opera episodes in class, using the time to catch up on television.
Once Sedaris gets over the initial anxiety surrounding teaching, he leans into his role as an instructor—despite the fact that he still doesn’t feel as if he knows what he’s doing. Rather than posturing as a well-versed professor, he does whatever he wants. In doing so, he exercises his power over the class even though he feels like a fraud. In other words, he doubles down on his insecurities while also completely owning up to his lack of experience, paradoxically remaining true to himself even though he’s terrified his students will see him for who he is.
Themes
When an anonymous student complains to the writing department about Sedaris’s use of class time, he tasks his class with writing predictions about what will happen on the next episode of the soap operas they’re watching. He thinks this is a great assignment, though he’s incensed when a student guesses that one of the characters will choke on a sandwich. This appalls Sedaris, who knows that a main character in One Life to Live would never die in such a disgraceful way. Feeling as if he has taught One Life to Live as seriously as his colleagues teach James Joyce or William Faulkner, he no longer allows his students to watch television in class, instead giving them boring essay assignments.
Sedaris’s unconventional teaching style catches up with him when a student complains about his strange pedagogical practices. Instead of letting this scare him into running a traditional class, though, he merely adds a writing assignment to the periodic viewings of soap operas like One Life to Live. In doing so, though, he realizes that his students aren’t taking the class seriously, and the fact that this makes him so angry suggests that he truly believed in the value of his lessons about soap operas. In turn, readers get the sense that, though Sedaris resorted to watching television in class because he didn’t know what else to do, he has more or less managed to convince himself that this is a sound approach to teaching writing. In a certain way, then, he has come to see himself as a legitimate instructor.
Themes
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One of the students in Sedaris’s class is a woman who is much older than the students. She is, in fact, older than him. She never contributes to class discussion, and she always sits on the opposite side of the table as everyone else. After returning essays to the class one day, though, Sedaris is surprised by this woman’s reaction to his written comments. In her essay, she wrote about her messy divorce, and though she rendered her intense emotion, she also ended the piece in the middle of a sentence. “Who are you,” she asks Sedaris. “I mean, just who in the hell are you to tell me that my story has no ending.” Sedaris has been dreading this question about his qualifications all semester. Unsure of what to say, he asks if can tell her the following day, but she says no.
Finally, Sedaris has to reckon with his worst fear—namely, that his students will challenge the legitimacy of his authority. He fears this because he feels inadequate, knowing that he doesn’t have the experience or credentials to justify why, exactly, he’s qualified to critique his students’ writing. When he scrambles and fails to come up with an answer, readers once again see the extent to which his insecurities interfere with his ability to be himself, since he could simply dismiss this student’s question as inappropriate or rude and move on. Instead, though, he indulges her question because it’s something he’s been asking himself since he started teaching.
Themes
All eyes on him, Sedaris tries to answer why he’s qualified to be a writing professor. Then, suddenly, it hits him: “I am the only one who is paid to be in this room,” he says. As soon as he says this, he knows it’s a satisfactory answer and even a “perfectly acceptable teaching philosophy.” From this point on, he will be able to teach confidently, knowing without question that he deserves his position. Swelling with conviction, he asks his students if they have more “stupid” questions, and the older student raises her hand once again and asks how much Sedaris makes. In response, Sedaris answers honestly and then watches as the class unites for the first time all semester, all of them laughing so loudly that he has to close the door so they don’t disturb the “real teachers” in nearby classrooms.
Just when Sedaris manages to cement his authority by pointing out that he’s the only person in the room who was deemed worthy of teaching, he loses all semblance of power by answering his student’s question about how much he gets paid. He didn’t need to answer this question and could have easily dismissed it, but the fact of the matter is that he lacks experience and isn’t used to fielding difficult questions from students. Indeed, he answered out of a sense of naivety and inexperience—the very things that made him feel insecure and inadequate in the first place. And this time when he rushes to close the door, the act doesn’t establish his authority. Instead, it helps him hide his feelings of inadequacy from the people in neighboring classrooms.
Themes
