A #1 national bestseller, I was drawn to this book by word of mouth, but was convinced to buy it thanks to the well put-together David Sedaris table found at Barnes & Noble. You know how busy I have been, so it took me a while to get to this book in my very large pile. I’ve had it since December and I feel very accomplished to have it completed.
David Sedaris is a man who grew up in South Carolina before moving around the United States to San Francisco, Chicago and New York before ending up in Paris, France. Me Talk Pretty One Day is his memoir of trying to grow up and find his place as an individual. Dreaming of hitting it big and becoming famous, Sedaris has it rough as a child already recognizing himself as a homosexual at the age of eleven. Sent to speech pathology for a lisp, and suspecting that others like him are also being sent to kick out more than just the lisp, Sedaris searches for a way to become comfortable with himself. It is hard when even his guitar instructor turned him away for singing showtunes, but he eventually made some type of progress, if you can call it that. Constantly moving from city to city, job to job, Sedaris has been a personal assistant for a woman obsessed with catching a lost cockatoo for a reward and has moved the boxes of enough variable people to get a better understanding of the confusing human race. Leading to a life in Paris with his boyfriend Hugh, Sedaris finds some sense of security.
I found this memoir to be enjoyable to read, but I was hoping that it would be more like a novel. Especially in Part One (Sedaris’s portion devoted to living in the United States), the author jumps around between both random topics and time periods. It seemed as if he was jumping to the places that would give him the appearance of a misunderstood artist sitting in a nest of human hair or a troubled young adult with a flair for drug use. I wasn’t hip to the “edge” Sedaris was trying to portray because it just left the tale jagged and rough. I was hoping for more of something like his first chapter in speech class but was left disappointed until Part Deux. Part Deux (you guessed it, Sedaris’s portion devoted to living in France) is a much more enjoyable, less edgy storyline that flows much better than the jumpy Part One. Finally returning to anything relating to his title (Me Talk Pretty One Day) since the first chapter, Sedaris talks about his adventures in France learning the language and trying to communicate and exist in a foreign country. He finds himself defending the United States at dinner parties, being the scapegoat for America-hating Europeans, and fascinated by American tourists who speak negatively about him in English without knowing he can understand everything they are saying. This is a much better section of the memoir, so please make sure you plow through Part One to get to it. I was disappointed, though, on the seemingly lack of a general ending. Unless you count the fact that some of his family who could afford the trip came to France to celebrate Christmas as an ending, it is hard to find when the last chapter is really devoted to Sedaris’s father’s quirk of buying and hiding fruit past its expiration date.
I found this book enjoyable and it was nice to have to pass the time. I have said that Part Deux was exponentially better than Part One for storyline and chronological factors, but let me continue to say that I would only read this for bare entertainment. I can only see reading this to pass the time. It did and I had fun, but I cannot see reading this for any higher purpose because it seems that by the last page of this novel, the author is still searching for any shred of purpose and therefore has nothing to offer the reader besides his version of daydreams he has while staying awake after switching to caffinated tea instead of drugs. It’s fun as long as you just stay on the surface, as the author seems to do. Success for its wit, comedy and point of view, I can understand the limited crowd it has drawn while still making the work a national bestseller.
“The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.”
-James Bryce
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