Sedaris at the height of his powers — the first half set in America (art school, siblings, odd jobs), the second in France attempting to learn the language and failing spectacularly. A masterclass in building a deeply funny, warmly human persona from the raw material of one's own inadequacy.
Sedaris's third book, and the one where everything comes together. Me Talk Pretty One Day is two halves — the first in America covering art school and siblings and miscellaneous failures of adulthood, the second in France attempting to learn the language and failing in ways that would be humiliating if they weren't so funny. The title is a line from a French-class classmate trying to conjugate a future tense, and the book builds outward from that moment into a sustained meditation on what it's like to be bad at something as an adult, in public, for years.
The linguistic material is the gold. Sedaris on French grammar is comic writing at the highest level because he's genuinely inside the experience — he moved to Paris, he took the classes, he studied with a sadistic teacher whose character-assassinations make up some of the book's best passages. What you get is a comedian explaining the specific humiliation of being unable to form a sentence, and by extension, a meditation on how much of adult identity is built on the assumption that we know how to talk. Take the talking away and the person underneath is, Sedaris suggests, still the same ridiculous creature they always were, just without the cover.
I hand this book to people before any long international trip. Especially any trip where they'll be trying to operate in a language that isn't theirs. Sedaris is a reassurance. You are going to be stupid. You are going to embarrass yourself. You are going to say something in public that makes a seven-year-old laugh at you, and the seven-year-old will be right. Sedaris has been there, professionally, and his book is a preemptive giving of permission to be the idiot you are going to be.
The American half is worth its own attention. Sedaris on his sister Amy is some of the best writing about siblings in any contemporary memoir. Sedaris on his father's jazz records. Sedaris on a methamphetamine-fueled art-school phase. The specific essays about his family are calibrated, polished, and funnier on the tenth reread. He's doing genuine craft in there — the pieces are short but they're tightly constructed, and you can feel him knowing exactly where each joke is landing.
Read it slowly. Read it in a tent at the end of a long day. If you find yourself laughing loud enough that somebody asks you what's so funny, that is a feature, not a bug, and Sedaris would be pleased.
