Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Me Talk Pretty One Day


                The name David Sedaris may sound familiar; whereas his voice might be even more recognizable if you have ever tuned into This American Life on NPR (National Public Radio). He is a man well known for his witty humor, collection of stories and essays; one being Me Talk Pretty One Day. Before this book hit the shelves and became main stream, he read several of the essays from the book on NPR. Little, Brown and Company published the book and it was released May 2, 2000.  Sedaris finds reflects on his own life and draws humor from these situations. It is a collaboration of essays that have been split into “deux” parts.  In the first segment he reflects on his life prior to his move to Normandy, France.  I was dead from laughing after I read the first chapter. He talks about when he was younger in grade school and was forced to speech therapy for his lisp. Then in part deux he talks about his move to France.

From chapter one- “Go Carolina”
“None of the therapy students were girls. They were all boys like me who kept movie star scrapbooks and made their own curtains. ‘”You don’t want to be doing that,’” the men in our family would say. “’That’s a girl thing.’” Baking scone and cupcakes for the school janitors, watching Guiding Light with our mothers, collecting rose petals for use in a fragrant potpourri: anything worth doing turned out to be a girl thing. In order to enjoy ourselves, we learned to be duplicitous. Our stacks of Cosmopolitan were topped with an unread issue of Boy’s Life  or Sports Illustrated, and our decoupage projects were concealed beneath the sporting equipment we never asked for but always received. When we asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, we hid the truth and listed who we wanted to sleep with when we grew up, “’A policeman or a fireman or one of those guys who works with high-tension wires.’” Symptoms were feigned and our mothers wrote notes excusing our absences on the day of the intramural softball tournament. Brian had a stomach virus or Ted suffered from that twenty-four-hour bug that seemed to be going around.”
“’One of these day’s I’m going to have to hang a sign on that door,’” Agent Samson used to say. She was probably thinking along the lines of SPEECH THERAPY LAB, though a more appropriate marker would have read FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA.
                I would recommend this book because it was able to make me laugh out loud and typically I’m not the type of person to “lol” to literature. It was a very entertaining and kept me wanting to read more constantly. I was able to read it effortlessly, he isn’t the type of author to pick up a thesaurus and find a replacement word just in order to use big words. (i.e. big-gargantuan) And that said I suggest you download, or go pick up a copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day, if you’re looking for a large laugh!


1 comment:

  1. The way you delivered this project was one of my favorites in the class. I could see that you related to the story in a lot of ways, and that is, in my opinion, the most important thing to a story as well as the most beautiful thing that can happen. I have not read the book but from the way you described it it sounds hilarious, and it seems truthful. David Sedaris seems to tell a story that only he could, and those too are the best stories. I found it interesting as well all the places that David Sedaris has lived in his life, the amount he has traveled is inspiring in a lot of ways. This book was also talked about in my Public Speaking course a few semesters ago, and it seems to touch the people that read it in pretty profound ways, so I will have to look at it. The best writers are real and David Sedaris seems to be that, above everything else.

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