The essays collected in David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day cover a wide range of topics, but nearly all of them revolve around the way Sedaris thinks about his own identity. With this in mind, he interrogates his sexual orientation and the many efforts he makes to cultivate an interesting and alluring personality, whether this means becoming a conceptual artist or trying to blend into life in Paris as an American who can barely speak French. What’s most noteworthy about his preoccupation with his own identity, though, is that it largely centers around his obsession with how others perceive him, not necessarily on how he feels about himself. Accordingly, many of the essays in Me Talk Pretty One Day are fueled by a sense of insecurity, as Sedaris strives to embody a certain identity instead of embracing the one he already has. And yet, the essays themselves are also unapologetic in their rendering of Sedaris’s singular personality, ultimately suggesting that his preoccupation with how he presents himself is, in fact, an integral part of who he is. By spotlighting his self-consciousness in such a confident way, then, Sedaris suggests that experiencing insecurity is simply part of what it means to be human.
Sedaris’s attempt to come to terms with how his identity fits into the world at large emerges in the book’s first essay, “Go Carolina,” in which a speech therapist removes him from his fifth-grade class to work with him on getting over his lisp. Each Thursday, he must get up in the middle of class and go to Miss Sampson’s office to practice the proper pronunciation of the letter s. This, he feels, calls attention to him, and he becomes embarrassed by the fact that he is one of only a few students in school who are forced to work with Miss Sampson. To make matters worse, he doesn’t want to identify with the other boys who need speech therapy, since none of them are popular. Nevertheless, there’s nothing he can do to avoid this association. In retrospect, he jokes that the teachers might as well have called him and the other students with lisps the “future homosexuals of America,” going on to suggest that their lisps “betrayed” their efforts to fit into the heteronormative world of North Carolina in the 1960s. In this moment, Sedaris implies that he’s mortified he might not be able to hide his sexual identity as a young gay man, thereby revealing his insecurity about who he is and how others might perceive him in light of this.
Of course, it’s reductive to draw conclusions about sexual orientation based on stereotypes about how people speak. However, Sedaris’s discomfort about working with Miss Sampson says something about his desire to be the one to control how he presents himself to the world. This desire is especially apparent in “Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist,” in which Sedaris decides as a young man that he must be an artist, despite his evident lack of talent. His eventual decision to adopt an identity as an avant-garde artist signals just how far he’s willing to go in order to have control over his public image. After dropping out of two art programs, he makes friends with a number of conceptual artists and starts taking meth with them. The first time he takes speed, he knows immediately that he has found his favorite drug, since speed “eliminates all doubt,” allowing him to stop asking questions like, “Am I smart enough?” and, “Will people like me?” That Sedaris is so eager to silence these questions in the first place is worth noting, since it indicates just how much he cares about how others view him. To that end, his fear of being seen as inferior or unextraordinary has led him to seek out ways of eliminating his self-consciousness. Along with taking drugs, one way to do this—it seems—is by adopting a rather extreme personality as an artist who creates pieces that are too strange and obtuse for most people to grasp. This, in turn, is a way of feeling superior to the average person and ignoring his insecurities, though he later realizes in a sober moment that the identity he has adopted as a misunderstood artist is rather meaningless and unrewarding.
As Sedaris gets older, he doesn’t feel the need to go to such extreme lengths to hide his insecurities or micromanage his public image. However, this is not to say that he manages to leave behind his feelings of inferiority. In fact, he appears to embrace his insecurities, as evidenced by the mere existence of Me Talk Pretty One Day, a book that puts self-consciousness on full display. For instance, Sedaris doesn’t shy away from writing multiple essays about his lacking French skills when he moves to Paris. Instead of trying to take attention away from his linguistic challenges, he examines them in great detail in essay after essay. What’s more, he responds similarly to the experience of taking an IQ test. After a lifetime of secretly hoping he might be a genius, he receives an embarrassingly low score. And although he laments this outcome, the very process of lamenting—the process of writing it as a personal essay—suggests that he has learned how to unabashedly accept his shortcomings. In this sense, these revelatory and confessional essays are themselves testaments to Sedaris’s ability to come to terms with the person he is without taking drastic measures to hide his true identity. As a result, he frames such identity-related insecurities as not only natural, but also unavoidable and—in the end—worth laughing about.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Identity and Insecurity ThemeTracker
Identity and Insecurity Quotes in Me Talk Pretty One Day
No one else had been called, so why me? I ran down a list of recent crimes, looking for a conviction that might stick. Setting fire to a reportedly flameproof Halloween costume, stealing a set of barbecue tongs from an unguarded patio, altering the word hit on a list of rules posted on the gymnasium door; never did it occur to me that I might be innocent.
The question of team preference was common in our part of North Carolina, and the answer supposedly spoke volumes about the kind of person you either were or hoped to become. I had no interest in football or basketball but had learned it was best to pretend otherwise. If a boy didn't care for barbecued chicken or potato chips, people would accept it as a matter of personal taste, saying, “Oh well, I guess it takes all kinds.” You could turn up your nose at the president or Coke or even God, but there were names for boys who didn't like sports. When the subject came up, I found it best to ask which team my questioner preferred. Then I’d say, “Really? Me, too!”
“One of these days I'm going to have to hang a sign on that door,” Agent Samson used to say. She was probably thinking along the lines of SPEECH THERAPY LAB, though a more appropriate marker would have read FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA. We knocked ourselves out trying to fit in but were ultimately betrayed by our tongues. At the beginning of the school year, while we were congratulating ourselves on successfully passing for normal, Agent Samson was taking names as our assembled teachers raised their hands, saying, “I've got one in my homeroom,” and “There are two in my fourth-period math class.” Were they also able to spot the future drunks and depressives?
“Seriously, though, it helps if you give your instrument a name. What do you think you'll call yours?”
“Maybe I'll call it Oliver,” I said. That was the name of my hamster, and I was used to saying it.
Then again, maybe not.
“Oliver?” Mister Mancini set my guitar on the floor. “Oliver? What the hell kind of name is that? If you’re going to devote yourself to the guitar, you need to name it after a girl, not a guy.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Joan. I’ll call it…Joan.”
“So tell me about this Joan,” he said. “Is she something pretty special?”
Joan was the name of one of my cousins, but it seemed unwise to share this information. “Oh yeah,” I said, “Joan’s really…great. She’s tall and…” I felt self-conscious using the word tall and struggled to take it back. “She’s small and has brown hair and everything.”
[…] 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.
I knew then why I’d never before sung in front of anyone, and why I shouldn’t have done it in front of Mister Mancini. He'd used the word screwball, but I knew what he really meant. He meant I should have named my guitar Doug or Brian, or better yet, taken up the flute. He meant that if we’re defined by our desires, I was in for a lifetime of trouble.
Either one of these things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations. The moment I took my first burning snootful, I understood that this was the drug for me. Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit? These are questions for insecure potheads. A speed enthusiast knows that everything he says or does is brilliant.
Immediately following the performance a small crowd gathered around my father, congratulating him on his delivery and comic timing.
“Including your father was an excellent idea,” the curator said, handing me my check “The piece really came together once you loosened up and started making fun of yourself.”
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.”
I was given two weeks to prepare, a period I spent searching for a briefcase and standing before my full-length mirror, repeating the words “Hello, class, my name is Mr. Sedaris.” Sometimes I’d give myself an aggressive voice and firm, athletic timbre. This was the masculine Mr. Sedaris, who wrote knowingly of flesh wounds and tractor pulls. Then there was the ragged bark of the newspaper editor, a tone that coupled wisdom with an unlimited capacity for cruelty. I tried sounding businesslike and world-weary, but when the day eventually came, my nerves kicked in and the true Mr. Sedaris revealed himself. In a voice reflecting doubt, fear, and an unmistakable desire to be loved, I sounded not like a thoughtful college professor but, rather, like a high-strung twelve-year-old girl; someone name Brittany.
I jotted these names into my notebook alongside the word Troublemaker, and said I’d look into it. Because I was the writing teacher, it was automatically assumed that I had read every leather-bound volume in the Library of Classics. The truth was that I had read none of those books, nor did I intend to. I bluffed my way through most challenges with dim memories of the movie or miniseries based upon the book in question, but it was an exhausting exercise and eventually I learned it was easier to simply reply with a question, saying, “I know what Flaubert means to me, but what do you think of her?”
As Mr. Sedaris I lived in constant fear. There was the perfectly understandable fear of being exposed as a fraud, and then there was the deeper fear that my students might hate me.
“Who are you,” she asked. “I mean, just who in the hell are you to tell me that my story has no ending?”
It was a worthwhile question that was bound to be raised sooner or later. I’d noticed that her story had ended in mid-sentence, but that aside, who was I to offer criticism to anyone, especially in regard to writing? I’d meant to give the issue some serious thought, but there had been shirts to iron and name tags to make and, between one thing and another, I managed to put it out of my mind.
One more flush and it was all over. The thing was gone and out of my life. […] And I was left thinking that the person who'd abandoned the huge turd had no problem with it, so why did I? Why the big deal? Had it been left there to teach me a lesson? Had a lesson been learned? Did it have anything to do with Easter? I resolved to put it all behind me, and then I stepped outside to begin examining the suspects.
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.
My father has always placed a great deal of importance on his daughters’ physical beauty. It is, to him, their greatest asset, and he monitors their appearance with the intensity of a pimp. What can I say? He was born a long time ago and is convinced that marriage is a woman’s only real shot at happiness.
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.
My brain wants nothing to do with reason. It never has. If I was told to vacate my apartment by next week, I wouldn’t ask around or consult the real estate listings. Instead, I’d just imagine myself living in a moated sugar-cube castle, floating from room to room on a king-size magic carpet. If I have one saving grace, it’s that I’m lucky enough to have found someone willing to handle the ugly business of day-to-day living.
Hugh consoled me, saying, “Don’t let it get to you. There are plenty of things you’re good at.”
When asked for some examples, he listed vacuuming and naming stuffed animals. He says he can probably come up with a few more, but he’ll need some time to think.
