Me Talk Pretty One Day
by David Sedaris
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Book Reviews of Me Talk Pretty One Day
Book Review: Honest and Hilarious, Honestly
Summary: 5 Stars
Honesty. Pure, unrivaled honesty. Even Augusten Burroughs' tales of family crazies cannot touch the honesty of David Sedaris's written word, and Me Talk Pretty One Day is no exception. He is brutally honest when describing his father's obsession with saving and eating food long past its expiration date. He is painfully honest when he discloses his drug abuse while feigning artistic inclinations. I think it is this honesty that makes me love Sedaris. I am truly jealous of the candor with which he can tell any story, no matter how embarrassing or slandering it might be. It amazes me that his honesty can literally make me sob but a few pages later can make me laugh until I cry.
The dramatic, emotional swings are paralleled in the bi-continental setting of the short stories in Me Talk Pretty One Day. Sedaris explores the entire spectrum of his life from the time he is his South Carolina grade school taking speech lessons to lessen his lisp to his forays into learning French while living in France, the short story providing the title line. The book is full of binaries: self-conscious pre-teen to self-accepting fifty-something, despising his family to accepting the quirks of his parents and five siblings, and drug addicted to stone sober.
These binaries are not special to Me Talk Pretty One Day, however. Naked, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Blue Jeans all exemplify Sedaris's honest look at the changes one takes in life. He is able to poignantly address crazy neighbors and Christmas whores but also look at the funny side of death and addiction. Perhaps the thing that makes Me Talk special is that Sedaris deftly balances the bittersweet with absurd in a way that, at the end of the book, makes you feel like you've just walked away from one really great therapy session where you realized that a) you can deal with your problems and b) at least you don't have it as bad as this Sedaris guy.
And it is so funny. I laughed until I snorted. This is not to say that Sedaris's other books are not funny because they are very much so, but Me Talk just has something special about it that makes it unique. Again, Sedaris's honest look at himself is what makes it so personal and like a close best friend. He is able to find the humor in the fact that he is not as smart as his partner and his partner makes him feel better about this fact by stating that he is good at things like "vacuuming and naming stuffed animals." My favorite part of the book occurs in the short story with the same title as the book, in which Sedaris takes us through his evolution from speaking one French word at a time ("ashtray" and "bottleneck") to speaking French phrases: "'Is them the thoughts of cows?' I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves displayed in the front window. `I want me some lamb chop with handles on `em.'" I can open to the page this quote appears on and laugh out loud like I had never read it before.
This book is so worth the money and time. If you've not read Sedaris before, this is a great place to start. If you are a longtime fan of Sedaris, you will appreciate his ability to make you think deeply about hilarious instances and to make you laugh at things you probably shouldn't laugh at.
Book Review: Summary and Reaction to me talk pretty one day
Summary: 3 Stars
Page 141-200The collections of short stories in Me Talk Pretty One Day are still similar to the stories that I summarized prior to this. Each story is about something noteworthy that has taken place. The chapter begins on page 142, where David Sedaris writes about his dislike for computers, and all modern technology. The following story tells about how he met his partner and about his new home France. After getting together with his partner Hugh, Sedaris moves to France with Hugh, who lives there most of year. Mostly everything Sedaris does revolves around France, and Hugh throughout the rest of the story. Some of these things include Sedaris trying to learn French, and Sedaris's relationship with his friends and family. The next story is titled Jesus Shaves. This deals with Sedaris's opinions on religion. He questions why things such as why a rabbit was chosen to be the symbol of Easter. The following two chapters deal with his troubles of learning to speak French. One struggle was his inability of learning the correct verb endings. When he would purchase groceries he would always buy more than necessary in order to hide his embarrassment of not being able to understand the plurals of French words. The pages of 138-200 deal with his struggles.
This collection of short stories lack a transition from his childhood in North Carolina and these later stories about learning French and living in Paris with his boyfriend. Luckily, the quality, and humor in each story are so great that the lack of a transition does not matter! The story titled Jesus Shaves is a great example of the quality of humor Sedaris writes because his opinions are so diverse and different from most others. Who would have questioned why a rabbit represents Easter, especially with humor? Sedaris questions anything he can, and does it well. He writes everything with humor, which is rare for a writer to do well. This made me appreciate his stories even more! I thought it was great when he wrote about his experience of learning French. He was determined and dedicated. Teachers that hated him, and would rather have a cesarean section than be with him did not stop his quest for mastering the language. I admire him for putting up with those sorts of things. I try to relate myself to him in that way because I believe it will make me try harder at things that are not effortless. The most astonishing thing is that this book can be so great, even though he has not done anything important to write an autobiography about himself.
1. Page 177, "He nice, the Jesus. He makes the good things, and on the Easter we be sad because somebody makes him dead today." This quote symbolizes the title, Me Talk Pretty One Day. My interpretation of the title is that he believes he will not be heard until he can talk well. The quote uses bad grammar, and cannot show what the person is trying to say in the best possible way. The quote should really say something like, Jesus is superior because he makes everything good and on Easter we mourn his death. This would inform people much better because it uses better grammar.
Book Review: Quirky Family and Life Well Expressed in "Me Talk Pretty"
Summary: 4 Stars
David Sedaris would admit he's had trouble getting his message across.
As a youth at his dad's insistence, he tried communicating through music, from a guitar teacher more interested in bedroom swingin' than guitar slingin'. As he got older, he attempted it through performance art, only to push museum audiences' patience in his performances (and his life to its edge through substance abuse) before his family humorously intervened. He's avoided pronouncing s's so not to lisp as a youth, and ordered groceries in French plurals not to be misunderstood as an adult.
Be thankful he chose the written word, even chipped away from his manual typewriter. To be sure, his masterful "Me Talk Pretty One Day" addresses Sedaris' failures to communicate with family: foul-mouthed little brother Paul, dangerous, stunningly beautiful sister (actress/writer Amy Sedaris), their redneck-resisting, jazz-loving dad Lou, and boyfriend Hugh (who share a home and their own communication breakdowns living in France as Americans.) But in honest moments, Sedaris lets us laugh often at his and our fear of ostracism.
He revisits this point consistently through his stories, each easily read independently and none more than 10 pages. He casually mocks his family's resistance to assimilate into North Carolina culture, a family friend's spending (almost) every minute in New York City afraid of would be shysters, and an American couple's fearing Sedaris as a French pickpocket while the husband shows his wife "my Paris." The need to fit even permeates the book's wilder stories: Sedaris' daydreams in his next-to-last chapter, his borrowed tall tales from Hugh's childhood and from walking a French county fair, even the literally side-splitting "Big Boy" (which broke my children up when yours truly read it aloud on a recent cross-state road trip.)
But "Me Talk Pretty" is most enjoyable when Sedaris' shows his love and respect for the family and friends he gently skewers. His sister wears a fat suit to enrage her weight-concious father, who eats spoiled food rather than waste it. Sedaris shares the funny, heartbreaking story of how family dogs helped his parents worked through their kids' leaving home, his mother's passing, and even the death of their beloved Great Dane, Melina. For all Sedaris' stories at their expense, you realize by book's end his home (with family and with his boyfriend) was the only place his and his family's witty iconoclasm could rest its pen and sword.
Book promotion compared Sedaris' style with Dorothy Parker and James Thurber, but he lacks Parker's bitter venom (if also her stiletto-sharp wordplay). But "Me Talk Pretty One Day" borrows as easily from Erma Bombeck's sense of family detail and your favorite travelogues to effectively show how good it feels to belong and the joy of expressing it. Highly recommended.
Book Review: Funny "haha" or funny "ha"?
Summary: 3 Stars
(Three-and-a-half stars)
Sedaris has a death-grip on popular creative nonfiction. This is refreshing, in a way. Looking at the Grishams and Pattersons that dominate popular fiction, it's nice to see that a collection of personal essays can succeed without similar melodrama and weak writing. Sedaris tells stories of irreverence in an irreverent way, giving us the humor and sparing us the saccharine when writing about his childhood speech impediment, putting animals to sleep, or being addicted to drugs whilst hopelessly tangled up in Raleigh's performance art scene.
That's not to say the collection is hilarious. Sure, Sedaris gives us humor, but it's on the page funny. It's funny like Martin Amis or a Monty Python script. It's all very clever, with the randomness arranged so that it looks like it wasn't arranged. So, while Sedaris really is a funny guy, I don't remember laughing while reading the book.
I said that the essays succeed without the melodrama and weak writing of popular fiction, a true statement, for sure. However, the essays don't always escape some form of over-the-top and flawed writing. The reason my chuckles remained internal--and my main complaint about Sedaris--is the visibility of his craft.
There's a lot to be gleaned from studying the essays found in Me Talk Pretty One Day: how to set up a forward-moving story and write it using language and images that go just far enough without being obtrusive. This collection is such an easy read because the essays are, essentially, all the same. Some are better than others ("Twelve Moments In the Life of an Artist" and "Go Carolina" are both very entertaining and well-written), but it's Creative Nonfiction 101. I'm not saying that everything needs to be dense and literary--to darken the humor and thicken the craft here would surely segregate the audience, and I imagine that only a portion of Sedaris fans would enjoy something like Hot Water Music or The Stranger. Books like that attack something visceral in the reader as opposed to merely giving him/her a quirky little read that might press lightly on the skin.
This is the third collection of essays I've read by David Sedaris (the other two being Holidays On Ice and Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim), and even if he seems to be getting more cookie-cutter as I look at his work chronologically, the essays in Me Talk Pretty One Day are worth a read. The second half of the book in particular is very well done, and when he has a strong tie from one story to the next he gives himself more room to develop an idea. This act of trying to tell us something other than a good story is when he's at his best. That said, these are often good stories and nothing more, which isn't too bad of a backhanded complement if you think about it.
Book Review: Funny, indeed. Just not that terribly hilarious...
Summary: 3 Stars
"Me Talk Pretty..." is yet another reason why it's a really bad idea to have inflated expectations about a work of fiction.
Well, bad idea for me, anyway.
I picked Sedaris shortly after having read an Augusten Burroughs. That was 4 years ago (I think). Back then, I was optimistic in the hopes of finding another author with that knack for self-mockery coupled with acerbic wit and a distinct lack of care about giving a fig on what others thought. Plus...not coming on as someone who tries to be funny, but...is...just...*is*.
Indeed, he doesn't even have to be gay. (I didn't want to think that only gay men can have the monopoly on dysfunctional prose - where would that leave the rest of us poor sods?)
Seriously - I thought those expectations of mine were pretty shallow. Bordering on predictable if not totally taken for granted.
And so, 4 years (or so) ago, I opened "Me Talk Pretty..." and braced myself to be swept away by the comic stylings of yet another funny author.
Two chapters later and I slammed the book shut. I can't believe it. I was bored.
A few years on and it remained shut. And I began to feel miffed with the idea that I may be cheating myself. Who knows? Sedaris' sensibilities may be different from Burroughs'. But that doesn't automatically mean it's bad.
So I reread those first 2 chapters, armed with an admittedly sketchy vow to soldier on. No matter what happens. My criteria were still the same. But I held onto them with a markedly less white-gripped tenacity.
Sure enough, there were funny moments in this book. 'Jesus Shaves' and 'Picka Pocketoni' I liked. Really liked. There are a few things I love more than indulging in a fantasy wherein other people are as discomfited, neurotic, and hassled as I've been when I was among people who spoke a different tongue.
Otherwise, Sedaris' chronicles of his crystal meth days, his stint as a glorified furniture mover and assistant to a volatile South American, and forays into being an inglorious college professor were somewhat negligible. Oftentimes, it felt as if the humor was being forced.
There's a sense of affectation particularly when he was in his 'artist' phase - and no amount of excuse as being a drug addict back then may be enough to compensate for the odd behavior expected of someone under the influence. Because, yes, he was odd during his days as a user, but the accompanying exploits were hardly...uhmm...funny.
Hence, the 3 stars. Good thing this was bought from a secondhand bookshop. Else I'd be really really depressed. Maybe I'd need another 4 years (or so) before I could give another Sedaris book a try...