74 pages • 2 hours read
David SedarisMe Talk Pretty One Day
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part One
Chapter 1 Summary: Go Carolina
Sedaris recalls his first meeting with Chrissy Sampson, his school’s speech therapist. In their first meeting, Miss Sampson had asked him which college football team he rooted for, State or Carolina. David responded, “State” (5), which prompted her to point out his lisp. She declared that he had a “lazy tongue” (7) that made him pronounce “s” words with a “th” sound and sought to help him adjust his speech patterns. David would do everything to avoid making “s” sounds, going so far as to expand his vocabulary so that he could access a greater inventory of words without “s” in them. Teachers complimented his expansive vocabulary while Miss Sampson was not fooled. She attempted many times to trip him up to no avail. In Miss Sampson’s final meeting with David, she broke down and confessed to being inexperienced as a speech therapist. When she moved her hands to her face to cry, David let slip the words, “I’m thorry” (14) only to realize soon after that Miss Sampson had tricked him into revealing that he still had a speech impediment. She signed the paperwork recommending David for the speech therapy program in the following year.
Chapter 2 Summary: Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities
As the son of Greek Orthodox immigrant parents, David’s father had had a strict upbringing where he was forbidden from listening to anything but Greek music. Unfortunately, David and his siblings do not share his enthusiasm, though this does not prevent their father from trying to start a family band. He assigns each of his young children an instrument: the flute for Lisa, a piano for Gretchen, and guitar for David.
As part of David’s guitar instruction, he meets with Mister Mancini at his studio. Mister Mancini is a midget who recounts his sexual past to young David and then forces him to treat his instrument as if performing a sexual act with a woman. One day, David sees Mister Mancini in the mall being heckled for his size by teen boys. David feels a sudden kinship with his guitar teacher, believing they are both outcasts in their own ways.
At David’s next guitar lesson, he decides that he does not want to learn guitar anymore as his true passion is singing. He performs several commercial singles for Mister Mancini who interrupts him to say, “I’m not into that scene” (29), implying that David’s actions are queer and disagreeable to him. Later that day, David tells his father that there will be no more guitar lessons. Mister Mancini has asked him to never come back. Despite this setback, David’s father remains insistent that his children grow an enthusiasm for music. He attempts to bribe them with money to listen to a Lionel Hampton record, but David and his siblings know by now that it will come with a catch.
Chapter 3 Summary: Genetic Engineering
Sedaris laments that neither he nor his siblings seem to have inherited their father’s mind for scientific invention. As a computer engineer for IBM, Sedaris’s father has a systematic way of looking at the world that differs from Sedaris’s more whimsical childhood experiments (i.e. filling his hamster’s water beaker with vodka).
While on vacation at the beach in Ocean Isle, the family plays its annual game of the Miss Emollient pageant, invented by their mother who would crown the child with the most dramatic tan. David decides to accept defeat as his sister Gretchen seems to take the crown every year. He takes a walk along the beach and comes across his father with a group of fishermen. His father beckons him over, asks him if he knows how many grains of sand are in the world, and proceeds to write out an equation in the sand. Intrigued, the fishermen gather around his father. They begin asking questions, facetiously at first, about wealth distribution and their own displacement by luxury oceanfront properties. David’s father answers each one sincerely, writing formulas in the sand. The fishermen continue to form a crowd to watch and listen to David’s father’s explanations.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Chapters 1-3 of Me Talk Pretty One Day are set primarily in Sedaris’s childhood, with each essay grappling with its own specific set of childhood memories. These opening chapters establish Sedaris’s playful “tongue-in-cheek” sense of humor, which is most apparent in the book’s chapter titles. For instance, Chapter 1 is titled “Go Carolina” as one of Sedaris’s many acts of insubordination. In this chapter, Sedaris recalls a time in his youth when he would avoid saying words that contain the letter “s” to fake an improvement of his speech impediment. The title revisits the first conversation Sedaris had with Miss Sampson in which Sedaris incriminates himself by using an “s” word when he declares that he is a fan of State. By naming the chapter “Go Carolina,” Sedaris is taking a humorous jab at evading “s” words once again by switching his allegiance to another sports team.
Chapter 1 also utilizes the comedic devices of first and second stories to set the stage for Sedaris’s rich fantasy life against a more serious reality. The first story introduces the reader to an interrogation scenario where Miss Sampson is not a speech therapist but a federal agent who extracts Sedaris from the classroom. The second story becomes apparent once a discussion of sports teams reveals Sedaris’s speech impediment, the real reason behind his extraction from his regular classroom. Whereas the first story sets up an exaggerated scenario to engage the audience in a spy fantasy, the punch of the joke lies in the second story when it is revealed that Sedaris’s true dilemma is more ordinary than the reader thinks.
Sedaris’s humor also emerges during his casual observations. In chapter 2, for instance, Sedaris wonders why his sisters’ music instructors never expected them to communicate with their instruments sexually as Mister Mancini required him to do. He writes, “On the off chance that sexual desire was all that it took, I steered clear of Lisa’s instrument, fearing I might be labeled a prodigy” (24). This statement does not suggest that Sedaris is truly fearful of untapped musical potential but, rather for comedic effect, draws attention to the phallic nature of Lisa’s instrument as an allusion to his homosexuality.
Sexuality is a major theme of chapter 2. While Sedaris never explicitly comes out as homosexual in this chapter, his awkwardness with Mister Mancini’s forceful displays of heterosexuality suggests that he was aware of his sexual difference at an early age. In fact, Sedaris’s avoidance of heterosexual rituals through deliberate misunderstanding makes up many of the punchlines in this chapter. For example, when Sedaris is told to name his guitar, he offers the male name “Oliver,” only to be forced by Mister Mancini to name his guitar after a woman. As instruments are sexualized under Mister Mancini’s instruction, Sedaris’s guitar has to have a gender that reflects what Mister Mancini feels are appropriate sexual relations. When Sedaris offers his cousin’s name “Joan” in response, Mister Mancini proceeds to ask about Joan’s breasts, not knowing about the family connection.
Chapter 3 offers a character comparison between Sedaris and his father that operates on a starting premise that the two have nothing in common. While Sedaris’s father is scientifically minded, Sedaris argues he does not share the same attribute despite examples that gradually reveal their similarities. Young David conducts experiments much in the same way as his father, from drawing hypotheses with his sister about their father’s work environment to attempting to fix a broken record player. The conclusion of the chapter reveals that Sedaris’s father engages in tall questions about the world much in the same way as his son, although their modes of going about it are different. While Sedaris’s father raptly answers fishermen’s scientific questions, Sedaris is wondering about the next Miss Emollient pageant.
The title of chapter 3, “Genetic Engineering” refers both to the computer engineering work that Sedaris’s father does as well as the notion of inherited traits. By definition, genetic engineering is the manipulation of genetic material. Applied to this chapter, the term humorously gestures to the dissimilarities between Sedaris and his father, suggesting some genes might have been altered to create two people of such variant interests.
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