Me+Talk+Pretty+One+Day

   =//Me Talk Pretty One Day//= David Sedaris 272 pages. Little, Brown and Company. $14.99.

A Mixed Attempt at Hilarity

__Me Talk Pretty One Day__ is David Sedaris’ fourth book and first work of nonfiction. It is a book of autobiographical essays about the author’s life. The book is divided in two parts, the first of which chronicles his childhood and young adulthood in the US, and the second, his move to Normandy, France with his boyfriend. Growing up in Raleigh, NC, with a tanorexic sister, a slang-talking brother, a sister with multiple personalities, and a food-hoarding father, his bizarre family is the subject of a considerable number of essays. The most memorable character in the book is David’s younger brother Paul, a.k.a. “the Rooster”. “Certain motherf*kers think they can f**k with my sh*t but you can’t kill the Rooster. You might can f**k him up sometimes but, b*tch, but nobody kills the motherf**king Rooster. You know what I’m saying?” For various reasons, including his flagrant choice of words, people thought that he came from a different family, but then again, no one in David’s family was normal. Paul’s parents had given up on him by the time he had graduated high school, and so they decided to send him to Technical College. He dropped out two weeks later and, finding that a freshly sanded and polished floor gave him immense satisfaction, formed his own company, Silly P’s Flooring, named because Silly P was the name he would have chosen if he was a rapper. In Normandy, Sedaris took French classes from a malicious teacher who absolutely loathed him, and often made it known. She said to David in one class “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” On the very first day she accused a Yugoslavian student of planning genocide. During a lesson on holidays a student raised her hand and asked what Easter was. The class, faced with the challenge of explaining Easter to a Muslim, in their erratic French, came up with this explanation: “He call his self Jesus and then he die one day on two…morsels of…lumber.” Brilliant lines like these exemplify Sedaris’ comic genius. His experiences in France, specifically him trying (and failing) to learn French, inspired the title of the book. Many of Sedaris’ essays are truly funny, and his ludicrous humor is amazing. The funniest essay in the book recounts the history of David’s family’s pet ownership. Their dog had given birth to a litter of puppies and when it looked like one of them was dead “our mother placed the creature in a casserole dish and popped it into the oven, like the witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ ‘Oh, keep your shirts on,’ she said. ‘It’s only set on 200. I’m not baking anyone; this is just to keep him warm.’ The heat revived the sick puppy and left us believing our mother was capable of resurrecting the dead.” The essay is full of quick eulogies: “‘Don’t take it too hard,’ my mother said, removing her oven mitts. ‘The world is full of guinea pigs: you can get another one tomorrow.’” This was her consolation after a failed attempt at “the oven trick”. A problem with the book is that the many of the stories were published individually previous to the book, so that there is not a coherent plot line or an encapsulating theme to unite the essays. There are also a few essays where the joke falls flat, as in //Nutcracker.com// and //21 Down//. If you are looking for a compilation of mostly funny essays I would recommend this book, but if you want something more, like a deeper message, you wont get it from __Me Tak Pretty One Day__.

-Raina Martens