Me Talk Pretty One Day

“I agreed but, because none of my speech classes ever made a difference, I still prefer to use the word chump”

When Sedaris relays to his mother how Miss Samson had tricked him into revealing his lisp, she is amused and calls him a “sucker” (15). Sedaris insists that while he agrees with that sentiment, it is not a complete victory for Miss Samson. His avoidance of “s” words had a far greater impact on his life than his speech classes. As an adult, he argues that he still prefers words without the letter “s,” including the word “chump” instead of “sucker.” This last word is Sedaris’s final act of defiance closing the chapter. 

“On the off chance that sexual desire was all it took, I steered clear of Lisa’s instrument, fearing I might be labeled a prodigy”

Mister Mancini, Sedaris’s music teacher had the inappropriate habit of insisting Sedaris treat his instruments as if he were having sexual relations with a woman. As a gay boy, the advice did not resonate with him. As an adult looking back at Mister Mancini’s instruction, Sedaris finds his advice funny. He jokes that if Mister Mancini’s advice were true and that sexual desire made a person a better musician, then as a gay youth, he would have been an expert at playing a phallic instrument.

“This was a persona I’d been tinkering with myself: the outcast, the rebel”

After encountering several teen boys heckling Mister Mancini at the mall for his size, Sedaris sees another side of his guitar instructor. He realizes that Mister Mancini’s sexual confidence might be compensating for his loneliness. He determines that Mister Mancini might be an “outcast” and “rebel” like him and that they have a lot more in common than he initially thought. For Sedaris, this means having different interests than boys his age, such as his love of Billie Holiday and his growing awareness of his sexual identity.

“I knew then why I’d never before sung in front of anyone, and why I shouldn’t have done it in front of Mister Mancini. He’d used the word screwball, but I knew what he really meant. He meant I should have named my guitar Doug or Brian, or better yet, taken up the flute. He meant that if we’re defined by our desires, I was in for a lifetime of trouble”

When Mister Mancini interrupts Sedaris’s singing to tell him “I’m not into that scene” (29), he is referring to Sedaris’s sexuality as a gay man. Prior to his performance for Mister Mancini, Sedaris had not realized that his love of commercial jingles and Billie Holiday indicated anything about his sexual identity, but Mister Mancini’s negative response is telling. While Mister Mancini never explicitly names Sedaris’s sexuality as the reason why the lessons cannot continue, he expresses his disapproval indirectly by referring to Sedaris as “screwball.” Sedaris infers from that expression that his disapproval is tied to his sexual identity.

“There was a time when I could listen to such a record and imagine myself as the headline act at some magnificent New York nightclub, but that’s what fantasies are for: they allow you to skip the degradation and head straight to the top”

After Mister Mancini ends his lessons with Sedaris, Sedaris’s father attempts to reignite his son’s interest in music by bribing his children to listen to a Lionel Hampton record. Sedaris shares that before his experience with Mister Mancini, he might have been able to listen to the record and fantasize about being a singer. However, after sharing his vulnerable dream of being a singer with Mister Mancini and having it dashed by his instructor’s homophobia, he is not sure if fantasizing about being a singer is viable anymore.

“Without copying anyone else, she had invented her own curious personality, which I envied even more than her artistic ability”

Gretchen, Sedaris’s sister starts to exhibit an artistic ability at an early age, a talent that matches what their mother calls an “artistic temperament” (39). Sedaris interprets this as seeming to operate on another planet’s rules, of inhabiting another fantasy plane. He envies her natural artistic ability, but even more so, he envies her unique sense of moving through the world in a way that seems to feed her artistic curiosity.  

“After a few months in my parents’ basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations”

Sedaris’s entry to the art world has always been accompanied by drug use in some form. While the debilitating effects of meth are obvious, his implication of conceptual art as a dangerous activity suggests that his involvement in the art form is similarly addictive. His introduction to other meth-addicted conceptual artists’ conceptual art enables his meth addiction. As meth and conceptual art seem to enable one another in Sedaris’s experience and lead him into trouble, he makes the overstatement about their socially debilitating effects as a means of dramatizing their negative impact on his life.

“I find myself attending these performance pieces the same way certain friends drop by their AA meetings. I still do a lot of selfish and terrible things. I do not, however, treat myself to hot-cocoa enemas before an audience of invited guests. Minor as it seems, this has become something to celebrate”

After leaving the conceptual art world and his meth addiction behind, Sedaris still attends performance art shows. He comments on the excruciating experience of attending these performances, likening it to attending an AA meeting as a newly sober person greeting non-sober friends. While there is a shared history of addiction, Sedaris’s sobriety removes him from the immediate struggles of those who are still battling the same addictions. While this is a figurative example, it is also a literal one applicable to his past meth addiction. As his addiction has always been associated with conceptual art, his attendance at performance art shows feels like revisiting the past as a survivor.

As he watches a particularly painful performance involving grotesque interactions with food, he admits that while he still does terrible things, he no longer participates in such graphic performances for local fame or recognition. By leaving the conceptual art world, he also leaves his addiction behind along with its enabling factors.

“We might not have been the wealthiest people in town, but at least we weren’t one of them”

Throughout the book, Sedaris is attuned to class and social differences that stem from early awareness. When his family moved to North Carolina, his parents were sure to raise their children outside of the state’s cultural determinations of class status. They were forbidden from saying “y’all” or chewing tobacco for fear that they would assimilate to Raleigh’s working class. The quotation suggests that while they were not the Raleigh working-class or wealthy, they were comfortably American middle-class.

“Still, though, at least he tries”

In descriptions of Sedaris’s brother, Paul, he often emphasizes his gruff traits, but finds his attempts at connecting with his family to be endearing. While Paul may not be graceful or socially appropriate at times, Sedaris admits that he is the only one who went to see their father directly after their mother’s passing. In moments of need, Paul exhibits his redeeming qualities.

“The cat’s death struck me as the end of an era. It was, of course, the end of her era, but with the death of a pet there’s always that urge to string black crepe over an entire ten- or twenty-year period. The end of my safe college life, the last of my thirty-inch waist, my faltering relationship with my first real boyfriend: I cried for it all and wondered why so few songs were written about cats”

Mourning his cat, Neil’s death, Sedaris laments the crucial moments in his life that Neil had been around to observe. While mourning the death of humans is considered commonplace, Sedaris wonders why grief over the loss of a beloved pet is often treated with less gravity. He argues that pets accompany humans through so much of their lives and memories that they warrant some public commemoration. This notion is amplified by the chapter’s later revelation of Sedaris’s mother’s death, which is mourned alongside the loss of another family pet.

“The youth in Asia begged him to end her life”

In this chapter exploring human and pet deaths, Sedaris’s father considers putting their Great Dane, Melina to sleep when her health worsens. Sedaris is reminded of a Japanese television program he watched as a child where a Japanese youth encouraged another to climb up a flagpole despite his insistence that it was too hard. The youth’s cry of “This is too hard for me” (78) reemerges for Sedaris when he hears his father utter those same words in response to the idea of putting Melina to sleep. The phrase “youth in Asia” and “euthanasia” are homonyms that doubly enforce Sedaris’s connection between the Japanese program and his father’s grief.

“Their words remind him of a more gracious era, of gentler forces straining against the well-worn leash”

When Sedaris’s father replaces his Great Dane, Melina with another dog of the same breed after she passes away, he still receives the same amount of attention from passersby who remark on the dog’s size. While Sedaris’s father once adored the attention that Melina would receive on their walks, he is less excited by Melina’s replacement whose energy is much more forceful than her predecessor. The quotation’s sentiment applies to Sedaris’s father’s feelings towards Melina, but also refers to a parallel grief over the loss of Sedaris’s mother, which occurred around the same time as Melina’s death. The wistfulness of this sentiment suggests Sedaris’s feelings about the irreplaceability of humans and animals.

“The way I saw it, if my students were willing to pretend I was a teacher, the least I could do was return the favor and pretend that they were writers”

As an underpaid writing instructor, Sedaris enters his teaching job without any prior experience. Much of his pedagogy involves haphazard assignments and loose lesson plans. He reasons that his poor performance as a teacher is comparable to the students’ lack of enthusiasm for taking a mandatory writing course at an art school. However, the class can continue to function fine if he and his students acknowledge what is lacking and accept their roles as imposters.  

“The New York skyline would appear on the horizon and we’d all stop talking. If you happen to live there, it’s always refreshing to view Manhattan from afar. Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless”

In this scene, Sedaris and the rest of Patrick’s moving company are in the van on their way to another job when they see the New York skyline. This image symbolizes their firsthand experiences with wealth inequity in New York City. As movers, they have insight into how people across social strata live, especially those who are privileged. They are guided by Patrick, an ardent communist whose political beliefs determine which jobs they accept and which to refuse. While Patrick’s decisions lend a sense of order to the chaos of social and economic competition in New York City, Sedaris realizes that they understand only a small portion of the city’s wealth disparity. At a distance, the New York skyline represents a totalizing desire for wealth that eludes everyone in the van just struggling to get by in the city.

“When the cranes arrived to build a twelve-story hotel right outside our bedroom window, Hugh and I decided to leave New York for a year or two, just until our resentment died down a little. I’m determined to learn as much French as possible, so we’ll take an apartment in Paris, where there are posters and headlines and any number of words waiting to be captured and transcribed onto index cards, where a person can comfortably smoke while making a spectacular ass of himself, and where, when frustrated, I can lie, saying I never wanted to come here in the first place”

The last line of the quotation refers back to an earlier sentiment in the chapter that Sedaris expresses about his desire to live abroad in an attempt to escape accountability for his actions. Sedaris expresses this sentiment initially as part of his idealization of France and a life abroad with Hugh. After several trips to France and stumbling through learning a new language and the country’s customs, he has grown critical of American habits and sensibilities. When his critique of the U.S. reaches a climactic point, he and Hugh decide to move to France for a while. This returns Sedaris to his original fantasy of escape with the exception that he gets to live his fantasy this time.

“Understanding doesn’t mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Far from it. It’s a small step, nothing more, yet its rewards are intoxicating and deceptive”

Sedaris struggles with learning the French language, especially under the instruction of an abusive instructor in Paris. After many trials, he finds that he can understand her insults, but that his journey to full language acquisition is not over yet. He still has to master speaking and responding in French, but in the meantime, he feels the excitement of comprehension.

“The camera glides over the cities of my past, capturing their energetic skylines just before they’re destroyed by the terrorist’s bomb or advancing alien warship. New York, Chicago, San Francisco: it’s like seeing pictures of people I know I could still sleep with if I wanted to”

In a chapter that explores Sedaris’s love of cinema and escape from cinematic fantasy, he argues that living can be done vicariously through watching movies. While his obsession with movie theaters in France is puzzling to visitors who much prefer visiting the country’s other landmarks, Sedaris insists in the joys of going to the theater in France, which he much prefers to American theaters. In this quotation, he reveals that his love of French movie theaters has slowly turned his allegiance from the U.S. towards a French lifestyle. He has forged a commitment with France but can enjoy vicarious intimacy with U.S. cities through the screen.

“Once considered relentlessly positive, we seem to have substantially lowered our expectations”

As an American expat living in France, Sedaris notices that one prominent quality of the U.S. is a sense of American optimism. This is embodied through the friendly and conversational behavior of Americans at the airport that Sedaris notices. While this is largely a positive attribute, Sedaris notes that it has certain shortcomings, especially when the attitude elides the true gravity of social problems. In the example that follows, Sedaris recalls a television segment about an art program offering homeless people tours of museums rather than supplying them with food, a more urgent need. This optimism of service seems to overlook the reality of social issues.

“In a world where everyone is known by their occupations, Hugh and I are consistently referred to as ‘the Americans,’ as if possessing a blue passport was so much work that it left us with no time for anything else”

As Americans living in France, Hugh and Sedaris are conscious of their exceptional presence as American citizens. The quotation seems to make a larger social commentary about American exceptionalism and U.S. presence abroad. After spending some time in France, Sedaris has developed his social consciousness regarding the prevalence of U.S. presence elsewhere in the world, something which colors his relationship to the U.S.

“The incident at the fair had caused me to worry that perhaps my vachometer was reading a little higher than anyone else’s, and it pleased me to realize that, at the time they were hit, I’d been rooting for the young men down on the field… Watching even the sorriest of sporting events bears no resemblance to coming upon an accident and hoping to exploit it for your own personal gain”

In this chapter, Sedaris grapples with the idea of spectacle in tragedy. After admitting to finding pleasure in watching a woman dangle close to her death on a stuck carnival ride, he starts to experience guilt when he reflects on the incident while watching angry vachettes attack volunteers in a field. Comparing the two spectacles, he acknowledges that there is something more alarming about witnessing a woman in danger and hoping to tell the story of her tragedy one day to others as a form of entertainment.

“As a child I’d always harbored a sneaking suspicion that I might be a genius. The theory was completely my own, corroborated by no one, but so what? Being misunderstood was all part of the package”

Sedaris’s self-deprecatory humor is as much a part of his characterization as it is his admission of arrogance. In this quotation, he reveals his early childhood arrogance so that he can later debunk it with humor through examples that show otherwise. His belief in his own genius is a self-formed theory, a statement that is comical in itself as it demonstrates a conviction of his own fiction. 

“But it doesn’t interest me to manipulate the French. I’m not keyed in to their value system. Because they are not my people, their imagined praise or condemnation means nothing to me. Paris, it seems, is where I’ve come to dream about America”

While the above sentiment refers to Sedaris’s “Mr. Science” fantasy in which he envisions himself as a brilliant scientist, it also gestures to Sedaris’s larger feelings about France and the U.S. As in other moments in the book when he opts to experience the U.S. through France, living abroad provides a medium for him to appreciate America. This medium is a large part of Sedaris’s fantasy life where his imagination allows him to enjoy his reality in a way that a more literal narration of it would not permit.