In Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris reckons with class and status, often trying to figure out how he fits into society at large. This is especially apparent in his youth and young adulthood, when class disparities feel particularly glaring because he is still in the process of establishing himself both financially and, to a certain extent, culturally. During his first few years living in New York City, for example, he acutely feels the distance between his working-class lifestyle and the wealthy, privileged existence he yearns for. However, as he grows older, his class-consciousness begins to give way to something more meaningful—namely, the desire to find a place where he can enjoy a sense of belonging. In other words, he gradually learns that, though it would perhaps be nice to have lots of money, what matters most to him is leading a life that gives him a feeling of acceptance. In turn, Sedaris’s examination of wealth and class in Me Talk Pretty One Day leads to a message about the importance of finding a sense of belonging, regardless of socioeconomic factors.
Relatively early in Me Talk Pretty One Day, it becomes clear that Sedaris was raised in the midst of a certain kind of class-consciousness. When his family moves from New York to North Carolina, his parents go out of their way to keep him and his siblings from identifying with what they see as North Carolina’s “backward way of life.” This underscores their classist outlook on southern culture and, more generally, on working-class communities. Telling their children not to say things like “y’all” or “ma’am,” they go to great lengths to prevent Sedaris and his siblings from using the regional way of speaking. “We might not have been the wealthiest people in town, but at least we weren’t one of them,” Sedaris writes, outlining his parents’ belief that southerners who speak a certain way are worth less respect. From an early age, then, Sedaris learns to divide the world up into factions, breaking people up into categories according their socioeconomic standing.
This preoccupation with class and status later brings itself to bear on Sedaris’s life when he moves to New York City as a young adult. Instead of feeling like one of the wealthier members of his surrounding community, he can’t deny the fact that there are people in the city who are exorbitantly rich. He, on the other hand, is a young man with hardly any money to his name, despite the fact that he comes from a financially comfortable family. Lacking money in the city makes him feel a “constant, needling sense of failure,” since he is “regularly confronted by people who [have] not only more but much, much more” than him. While taking walks in the evenings, he likes to look into the windows of beautiful townhouses and wonder what it would be like to live in such luxury. As luck would have it, he gets to experience this wealth vicariously when a rich woman named Valencia hires him to be her personal assistant, allowing him to spend several days a week in her enviable townhouse. Unfortunately for him, though, this experience is quite unpleasant, largely because Valencia likes to pretend that she’s struggling financially even when it’s obvious that she’s rich. According to Sedaris, Valencia must have gotten the idea that “broke people” have better lives than anyone else, since she seems to believe that people without money are “nobler or more intelligent” than rich people. With this in mind, she haggles for money, underpays Sedaris, and generally romanticizes the idea of poverty. In turn, it becomes clear that people tend to want whatever they don’t have—even if that means idealizing financial insecurity.
Eventually, Sedaris begins to prioritize happiness over status and wealth. For instance, rather than continuing to work for Valencia so he can indirectly experience a wealthy lifestyle, he decides to work with a group of kindhearted professional movers. These men have very little money and most likely come from socioeconomic backgrounds that Sedaris’s parents would frown upon, but he realizes that he’d rather be with people who accept him and treat him nicely than spend his life around insensitive people like Valencia. “My place was not with Valencia but here, riding in a bread truck with my friends,” he writes, ultimately prioritizing a sense of belonging and acceptance over wealth and the dream of upward mobility. As he gets older, he gradually abandons his focus on wealth, moving to Paris and finding pleasure not in an extravagant lifestyle, but in the slow project of learning the French language—or, in other words, learning how to fit into a social environment he finds himself drawn to. As a result, readers see that money and wealth are faulty indicators of happiness and that contentment often has little to do with a person’s ability to climb a financial or social ladder.
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Class and Belonging ThemeTracker
Class and Belonging Quotes in Me Talk Pretty One Day
[…] I broadened my view and came to see him as a wee outsider, a misfit whose take-it-or-leave-it attitude had left him all alone. This was a persona I’d been tinkering with myself: the outcast, the rebel. It occurred to me that, with the exception of the guitar, he and I actually had quite a bit in common. We were each a man trapped inside a boy’s body. Each of us was talented in his own way, and we both hated twelve-year-old males, a demographic group second to none in terms of cruelty. All things considered, there was no reason I shouldn’t address him not as a teacher but as an artistic brother.
Our parents discouraged us from using the titles “ma’am” or “sir” when addressing a teacher or shopkeeper. Tobacco was acceptable in the form of a cigarette, but should any of us experiment with plug or snuff, we would automatically be disinherited. Mountain Dew was forbidden, and our speech was monitored for the slightest hint of a Raleigh accent. Use the word “y’all,” and before you knew it, you'd find yourself in a haystack French-kissing an underage goat. […]
We might not have been the wealthiest people in town, but at least we weren’t one of them.
There was no electricity for close to a week. The yard was practically cleared of trees, and rain fell through the dozens of holes punched into the roof. It was a difficult time, but the two of them stuck it out, my brother placing his small, scarred hand on my father's shoulder to say, “Bitch, I'm here to tell you that it's going to be all right. We'll get through this shit, motherfucker, just you wait.”
In the evenings, lacking anything better to do, I used to head east and stare into the windows of the handsome, single-family town houses, wondering what went on in those well-appointed rooms. What would it be like to have not only your own apartment but an entire building in which you could do whatever you wanted? I’d watch a white-haired man slipping out of his back brace and ask myself what he'd done to deserve such a privileged life. Had I been able to swap places with him, I would have done so immediately.
Somewhere along the way she’d got the idea that broke people led richer lives than everybody else, that they were nobler or more intelligent. In an effort to keep me noble, she was paying me less than she’d paid her previous assistant. Half my paychecks bounced, and she refused to reimburse me for my penalty charges, claiming that it was my bank’s fault, not hers.
Moving people from one place to another made me feel as though I performed a valuable service, recognized and appreciated by the city at large. In the grand scheme of things, I finally had a role to play. My place was not with Valencia but here, riding in a bread truck with my friends.
I was mortified, but Bonnie was in a state of almost narcotic bliss, overjoyed to have discovered a New York without the New Yorkers. Here were out-of-town visitors from Omaha and Chattanooga, outraged over the price of their hot roasted chestnuts. […] The crowd was relentlessly, pathologically friendly, and their enthusiasm was deafening. Looking around her, Bonnie saw a glittering paradise filled with decent, like-minded people, sent by God to give the world a howdy. Encircled by her army of angels, she drifted across the avenue to photograph a juggler, while I hobbled off toward home, a clear outsider in a city I’d foolishly thought to call my own.
Before beginning school, there’d been no shutting me up, but now I was convinced that everything I said was wrong. [...]
My only comfort was the knowledge that I was not alone. Huddled in the hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overheard in refugee camps.
“Sometime me cry alone at night.”
“That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. Much work and someday you talk pretty. People start love you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay.”
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, and that made me hate them even more.
