“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.”
page 68, You Can’t Kill the Rooster
Table of Contents
Why Me Talk Pretty One Day?
I first heard about David Sedaris and Me Talk Pretty One Day years ago from my friend Chloe. Fast forward a couple years and I was browsing the non-fiction shelves at Book City and just so happened to spot this book on the shelf along with a few other of David Sedaris’ books. So I bought a copy and read it this week.
Regular readers of my book reviews may remember that it has been a hot minute since I’ve read a non-fiction title. In fact the last non-fiction title I read was Here Where We Live Is Our Country by Molly Crabapple back in June. In that review I mentioned not reading any more non-fiction for the duration of that summer – well, dear reader it is now November and I am now in the mood to read some non-fiction again.
And what better way to get back into non-fiction than reading a essay collection? Essay collections are my favourite form of non-fiction as they make for easier reading due to their structure. I can read an essay or three in the collection, put the book down for the day and then come back to it the next day without feeling I like I had to stop in the middle of some big story arc or important moment.
Without further ado, let’s get into it.
The Book
Me Talk Pretty One Day is an essay collection consisting of a total of 28 essays of varying lengths, the book itself splits the essays into two parts, the first part containing 13 and the second containing the rest. The first part contains essays about his youth, his experiences growing up in the suburbs of Raleigh, NC, and his experiences as a young man in various workplaces. The second part contains almost entirely essays about his experiences living in France and learning the French language, and consequently it is referred to as “Deux” (French for two).
The Good
As I understand it David Sedaris’ trademark style for the stories he writes is a sort of deadpan humour where he makes otherwise ordinary everyday situations funny. That is very much the case here from the very beginning with the story titled “Go Carolina” which talks about his experiences with a speech therapist in school.
Lines like these had me laughing purely because of the way they are written:
The woman spoke with a heavy western North Carolina accent, which I used to discredit her authority.
page 7, Go Carolina
Some of my favourite essays from the first part of this collection include Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist where he talks about his experiences with speed (the drug) and joining a collective of artists who also happen to be speed addicts.
We were clearly ahead of our time but figured that with enough drugs, the citizens of North Carolina would eventually catch up with us.
page 50
The sheer absurdity of that particular story makes that line funnier. I feel just piecemeal quoting from David’s stories doesn’t do them justice because the humour is woven into the whole, the entire story is a bit and the humour doesn’t quite hit with just these quotes. But I’ll continue sharing them so you don’t have to take my word for what his writing is like.
Another story titled You Can’t Kill the Rooster depicts David’s brother Paul as someone who talks like a rapper baffling all his family members.
My brother’s voice, like my own, is high-pitched and girlish. Telephone solicitors frequently ask to speak to our husbands or request that we put our mommies on the line. The Raleigh accent is soft and beautifully cadenced, but my brother’s is a more complex hybrid, informed by his professional relationships with marble-mouthed, deep-country work crews and his abiding love of hard-core rap music. He talks so fast that even his friends have a hard time understanding him. It’s like listening to a foreigner and deciphering only shit, motherfucker, bitch, and the single phrase. You can’t kill the Rooster.
page 61, You Can’t Kill the Rooster
This particular story ends with what is my most favourite line in this collection, which you can find at the very beginning of this review.
As for the stories in the second part, they are also quite funny, I especially found his anecdotes about learning French particularly amusing and his frustration with the concept of gendered nouns struck a chord with me. Gendered nouns are an asinine concept and I appreciate that it isn’t something I have to worry about when writing in English.
I absorbed as much of her abuse as I could understand thinking—but not saying—that I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to Lady Crack Pipe or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?
page 170, from the titular essay Me Talk Pretty One Day
I found David Sedaris’ writing style in Me Talk Pretty One Day generally easy to read and humorous and I am glad for that. I have read other books earlier this year where the humour really did not work for me and I ended up really disliking those books because of it. Humour is extremely subjective and when it works, it works but when it doesn’t it becomes a really grating reading experience.
The Bad
Now that I’ve gotten the good out of the way, I have a couple minor critiques and one large one to make. The first is a matter of form, some of the stories in this collection are too short, they feel like fragments of stories, a single anecdote stretched out over just a few pages. This occurs more in the second part of the book and it does make that part feel more repetitive due to the shared themes and topics (France, and the French language).
The second minor critique is about one particular story titled The Great Leap Forward. This story is about David working first as a live-in secretary for a rich heiress and then for a moving company run by a communist. My problem with this story is that I cannot tell what David is trying to say about communists or communism more broadly, like with the other stories in this book, it is written in his usual humorous tone but I can’t tell how David himself feels about communists. There are some valid & funny critiques made of communists but there’s also this particular line that is just…weird and not the good kind of weird.
It was my understanding that communists preferred beefy, corn-fed girls with thick ankles and strong backs, all the better for threshing wheat and lugging heavy sacks of rice.
page 116, The Great Leap Forward
The title of the story refers to Mao Zedong’s industrialization program by the same name. And other than one mention of Mao via way of the owner of the moving company listening to Mao’s speeches, the Great Leap Forward does not actually come up in the story.
Now, I don’t expect poignant critique of Mao Zedong or the Great Leap Forward (which was a massive failure and caused one of the largest famines in human history) from David Sedaris of all people but at the same time, what was the point of naming the story that? It reeks of the pervasive anti-communist sentiment common to a lot of American media. Just a throwaway jab because communism and communists make for easy targets.
The Ugly
As part of my research and thought process for this review, I looked up David Sedaris so I could become more familiar with who he is and was as a person. I looked up photos, read at least one interview and I also read his Wikipedia page. On that page, there is a section with the title Truth of nonfiction work which mentioned an essay written by Alex Heard and published in The New Republic on March 19, 2007.
As I read Alex’s essay, my opinion of David Sedaris and his particular writing style soured a fair bit. Alex talks about various stories from David’s catalogue and he fact-checks them. I’ll keep my critiques here limited to Me Talk Pretty One Day and more specifically to two stories Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities and Go Carolina.
In Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities David Sedaris introduces a character by the name of Mister Mancini, the titular midget guitar teacher who is described as such:
A fastidious dresser stuck in a small, unfashionable town, Mister Mancini wore clothing I recognized from the Young Squires department of Hudson Belk. Some nights he favored button-down shirts with clip-on ties, while other evenings I arrived to find him dressed in flared slacks and snug turtleneck sweaters, a swag of love beads hanging from his neck. His arms were manly and covered in coarse dark hair, but his voice was high and strange, as if it had been recorded and was now being played back at a faster speed.
page 21, Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities
Near the end of the story when David tells Mancini that he would rather sing in the voice of Billie Holiday than play the guitar which ends up in David performing some commercial for Mancini and Mancini reacts with this particular homophobic tirade:
“There were plenty of screwballs like you back in Atlanta, but me, I don’t swing that way — you got it? This might be your ‘thing’ or whatever, but you can definitely count me out.” He reached for his conch shell and stubbed out his cigarette. “I mean, come on now. For God’s sake, kid, pull yourself together.”
page 29, Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities
Now, the problem in Alex Heard’s words:
Too bad none of it happened. Well, one thing happened. Sedaris did briefly take guitar lessons from a little person, but he made up Mancini’s style, quirks, and speeches, and he invented the moment when Mancini thought young David was making a pass at him. Sedaris admitted as much during our interview, but I already felt sure of it, because I’d found a man who, like Sedaris, took guitar lessons from Mancini when he was a child.
This American Lie by Alex Heard for The New Republic
I have no doubt that David Sedaris has experienced many instances of homophobia in his life which makes this particular bit of fiction even more pernicious. The story as it is written expects us to find some bit of connection in the homophobic experience David faced which is based upon the assumption that this book is a work of non-fiction and this is a true story. So the effect I feel instead is that David has created this strawman of a person for the purposes of a bit. It removes any semblance of dark humour from the whole thing.
As for Go Carolina, it is also based on a fiction:
The same thing happens in “Go Carolina,” a story in which fifth-grade David is drafted into a speech-therapy class because he lisps. Sedaris would have you believe that, by this time, he was already flamboyantly gay and that only he and similarly fey lads were compelled to take speech therapy. “None of the therapy students were girls,” he writes. “They were all boys like me who kept movie star scrapbooks and made their own curtains.”
Things didn’t unfold that way. Sedaris told me so, as did his old principal at Brooks Elementary School, a retired Raleigh educator named John Mallette. Mallette wasn’t angry after reading the story (which I faxed), just confused. “I don’t understand why he thinks we would make decisions about a speech class based on such factors,” he said. “I’m sorry it seemed that way to him.”
This American Lie by Alex Heard for The New Republic
You will have noticed that after my initial description of the book as an essay collection I stopped referring to David Sedaris’ writing as essays and started calling them stories. Essays in the context of non-fiction implies that the writing draws upon things that actually happened, even if names are changed to protect the innocent, the actual events are as the author remembers them happening i.e as close to facts as one’s memory allows.
Instead I now think of this book as a collection of short stories—and more pointedly I think of them as fiction. With Alex Heard having fact-checked two of the stories in this collection and proven them to be based on David’s healthy imagination rather than anything that actually happened, it makes me question the veracity of every other story here. How much of it is non-fiction vs not? This particular question has overwhelmed the aspects of the book I did like.
So much of the humour of this book works because it uses the mundane nature of every day life as its wellspring of wit. Consequently, since we don’t know how much of it is true, the humour in this book seems to be on shaky ground and all of it just loses its lustre. At a fundamental level I feel betrayed by this book and the way it is advertised. The phrase that comes to mind is – bait and switch.
Concluding Thoughts
While I enjoyed some aspects of Me Talk Pretty One Day like David’s writing style and his ability to make everyday situations seem humorous, all of it is coloured by the fact that some of it just isn’t based on fact. I am not opposed to reading more of David’s writing in the future but going forward I will be considering them humorous fiction rather than what they are usually advertised and categorized as which is non-fiction.
I encourage everyone who has read this book and David Sedaris’ other work to also read Alex Heard’s essay if you haven’t before. I think it will change your perspective.
That’s all from me. See y’all in the next one.
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