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 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part One
Chapter 4 Summary: Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist
This chapter contains twelve sections illustrating different points of Sedaris’s artistic career:
One: Gretchen, Sedaris’s sister, exhibits true artistic ability in her youth that inspires the rest of the family to take on artistic projects that are ultimately short-lived. Sedaris is influenced as well although his efforts leave little to be desired.
Two: Sedaris is too distracted by visions of fame and male nude models to truly devote himself to his art. He enrolls in art classes, but none of his efforts seem to match his sister’s abilities and accolades, which he deeply envies.
Three: Entering art school, Sedaris tries out different artistic media from printmaking to pottery, seeming to fail at each one. To indulge him, his mother keeps his pottery around the house. Sedaris recalls the day the cat chipped his tooth on the pottery, avoiding it ever since. Even the lowest animals lack interest in his work.
Four: Sedaris transfers colleges, going from lithography to clay modeling before quitting altogether to fall in with a group of filmmakers. He takes up smoking pot and drops out of college.
Five: Sedaris discovers methamphetamine at the same time as conceptual art, finding the two go well together. While conceptual art gives him a way to be creative without the precision of artistic talent that he lacks, meth gives him energy and an inflated sense of his own genius.
Six: Sedaris’s dealer introduces him to a group of artists who also do meth and dabble in grotesque artistic creations. Through their influence, Sedaris creates a performance piece consisting of vegetable crates and other trash, documenting each entry with ink made of crushed ticks and mosquitos. The piece wins a juried biennial for the local art museum, meaning that it will be exhibited. His mother attends the opening and drunkenly reveals to the curator that the art in the showcase (Sedaris’s included) is no different than the shit from the ladies’ room.
Seven: Sedaris collaborates with a fellow artist and meth addict to put together a performance at an abandoned tobacco warehouse. The poorly attended performance includes Sedaris’s mother in the audience, who asks, “Are you trying to punish me for something?” (49).
Eight: The art collective that Sedaris is part of decides to part ways due to creative differences. At the same time, Sedaris receives an invitation from the local museum to put together a performance at the “Monthly Sundays” performance-art festival, which he accepts because he needs the money to buy more drugs.
Nine: Sedaris experiences some difficulties assembling the pieces for his performance. While picking up supplies at the secondhand store, the cashier reveals to Sedaris that her niece is an artist. She says that her niece is the one who made the sock monkeys Sedaris has in his hands. This offends Sedaris greatly as he loathes that his artistic practice is being compared to a craft project.
Ten: On the day of Sedaris’s museum show, he is about to cut his hair with shears as part of his performance when his father heckles him from the crowd. The audience laughs at his father’s heckles, leading the curator to believe it is an intentional part of Sedaris’s performance.
Eleven: Sedaris’s dealer enters a treatment center, leaving him without a source for drugs. He goes through withdrawal but manages to perform at a local university despite his pains. After the performance, he invites his old artist friends to his place in the hope that they might have drugs with them, but realizes quickly they are expecting the same thing of him. Without any luck, at the age of twenty-seven, Sedaris decides to apply to art school again where he knows there will be drugs.
Twelve: Sedaris watches an excruciating performance of a woman kneeling before a food altar as a statement about her eating disorder. As the next performance is about to begin, a car alarm goes off outside. The exterior disturbance leads Sedaris to come to terms with the art world he is part of and his dissatisfaction with it. He realizes that he has a choice to leave, and so he does.
Chapter 5 Summary: You Can’t Kill the Rooster
Paul is Sedaris’s younger brother by eleven years who, unlike Sedaris and the rest of his siblings, was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. As a result, Paul has absorbed all the mannerisms of “the toothless fishermen casting their nets into Albemarle Sound” (61). Paul calls himself “the Rooster” when he feels threatened and utilizes profanity in the house. A terrible fighter, Paul shows up to the family Christmas dinner with a black eye after losing a fight. As a testament to his whimsical sense of humor, he proceeds to give himself a matching black eye on the other side of his face using his sister’s makeup.
Despite his rough manners, Paul and Sedaris’s father are very close. Paul attempts to help his father grieve and move on when his mother dies, though his advice is riddled with profanity. When a hurricane damages their family house, Paul comes to the rescue with a gas grill, beer, and a “Fuck-It Bucket,” which is a bucket full of candy.
Chapter 6 Summary: The Youth in Asia
Sedaris recalls the various dogs and cats that have entered his life as well as that of his family. His family has a habit of replacing pets with ones of the same breed after they die. This was the case with Mӓdchen, a German shepherd who was replaced by a similar looking dog that the family named Mӓdchen Two. It was commonly understood that Mӓdchen Two never lived up to Mӓdchen. The family also once had a Great Dane named Melina that Sedaris’s parents adored. When Sedaris’s mother passed away, Melina died shortly after. For company, Sedaris’s father replaced Melina with another Great Dane named Sophie. While Sophie was a fine dog, Sedaris observes that his father did not exhibit the same zeal and love for him as he did Melina. Sedaris wonders what it would be like if his father had decided to replace his mother in the same way that animals in the house were replaced. He imagines a humorous scenario where his father criticizes another version of his mother for failing to do the crossword puzzle as well as her predecessor.
Sedaris also recalls a Japanese TV show that his siblings watched regularly, specifically a segment where a character named Fatty attempts to climb a flagpole. When he laments that it is too hard, his friend Komatsu says, “You must” and “It is required” (78). This interaction colors Sedaris’s grief when his cat, Neil passes away and again with Melina. In both cases, euthanasia is considered the compassionate option of allowing the two animals to pass away in peace. The difficulty of this choice reminds Sedaris of the scene between the two Japanese characters, how hard it is to perform an act of mercy towards the animals, but also the many ways it is required.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
In chapters 4-6, Sedaris portrays various struggles from drug addiction to deaths in his family. Despite the gravity of these subjects, these chapters also feature Sedaris’s sardonic humor. While lamenting the death of his cat, Sedaris also mourns the periods of his life that his cat had witnessed alongside him. He writes, “I cried for it all and wondered why so few songs were written about cats” (79). This sentiment comprises the mixed tone of these chapters, which is both mournful and playful.
Chapter 4 is told in twelve parts, providing sketches of assorted people and circumstances in Sedaris’s artistic career. As there are several years of triumphs and upheavals, the twelve sketches lend a close-up look at various moments of his career. These twelve parts reveal themselves in chronological order, beginning with Sedaris’s first interest in art through envy of Gretchen’s ability to his departure from the art world.
This chapter also reveals Sedaris’s drug addiction, a subject matter that he handles with sardonic humor despite its gravity. Sedaris glibly compares conceptual art and meth, saying, “Either one of these things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations” (44). By elevating the high drama of both conceptual art and meth, Sedaris gestures towards the humor of both practices in comparison.
Unlike the previous chapters where the introduction of other characters included Sedaris’s presence, chapter 5 is an in-depth character study of Paul where Sedaris does not appear. The chapter focuses on Paul’s hyper-masculine attributes, fostered by his Raleigh upbringing, and the offbeat sense of humor that characterizes many members of Sedaris’s family. While Paul may refer to members of his family casually as “motherfucker” and “bitch,” Sedaris’s father, who seems either impressed or bemused by Paul rather than disapproving, always deflects the aggression behind his profanity.
The chapter uses paraprosdokian, a literary device that frequently appears throughout the book. As a technique, it produces an unexpected turn in the latter half of a phrase or statement for humorous effect. It is exemplified in the instance where Sedaris discusses Paul’s determination to help their father grieve by offering the advice, “The past is gone, hoss. What you need is some motherfucking pussy” (67). Whereas the former half of the sentiment would lead the reader to believe that Paul’s wisdom would include gentler condolence, his profane utterance delivers a comedic turn away from expectation of what would be socially acceptable in that moment.
Chapter 6 parallels the stories of pet deaths and the death of Sedaris’s mother to show the intimacy of family grief for both animals and humans. By recounting multiple instances of replacing dead pets with ones that share a likeness, Sedaris sets the reader up to consider what it would mean to replace humans in the same way. By showing the failure of each replacement pet to meet the standards their predecessors had set within the family, Sedaris implies that humans, like pets, are irreplaceable after death. Sedaris tests this notion humorously after his mother’s funeral. He and his siblings imagine Sharon Two, another version of their mother, being scolded by their father for not doing the crossword puzzle as well as their mother. In this instance, Sharon Two fails to live up to their mother in much the same way as the family’s replacements pets have failed to fill the hole the previous pets have left in their lives.
The chapter title “Youth in Asia” refers to both a Japanese program that Sedaris and his siblings watch regularly and a homophonic play on the word “euthanasia.” In the former instance, Sedaris recalls a scene in which a heavy Japanese schoolboy attempts to climb a flagpole and is about to give up when his friend pushes him on by saying, “You must” and “It is required” (77). These statements, as well as the generalized body of “youth in Asia,” reoccur throughout the chapter with each death that the family experiences. The title’s homophonic use of “euthanasia” also relates to the repeated references to the Japanese program as a demonstration of mercy. When both Sedaris and his father decide to put their pets down, the refrain of “You must” and “It is required” appears in the chapter again to insist on the difficulty of their task, which is synonymous to letting someone go.
These chapters mainly highlight the interpersonal dynamics of Sedaris’s family, demonstrating that an offbeat sense of humor permeates through each member even in more sobering times.
Related Titles
By David Sedaris
