Me Talk Pretty One Day: Book Review

Go take a walk. Seriously. Walk around your house, around your hometown, around your neighborhood, around a city you've never been to before. Now tell me your thoughts and observations.  

It still won’t be as biting and critical as David Sedaris’ notes would be.

I picked up Me Talk Pretty One Day because I mistakenly thought that it was a funny story about a guy trying to learn French. There is a small piece about that, but really the book is a series of observations about his family, the French, Americans (and a sub-category of that: New Yorkers), meth-fueled art, and speech therapy coaches. It wasn’t a bad thing, it’s just that… I realized that I’m not overly fond of David Sedaris. Everyone called his work “hilarious”, “laugh out loud funny” and “sarcastic.” Fantastic, I thought. I like sarcasm and funny books. This should be good. The only part that I actually liked was the French teacher and her insults to the students. The rest of the book seemed like a self-indulgent pity party for Mr. Sedaris without trying to make it a pity party.

David Sedaris hates most things, most people, and wants everyone to love and adore him so that he can shove his success in their faces, turn them down or scoff at them. It’s like he wants to hate to want to be loved. Now there’s a psych case waiting to happen.

I didn’t like the period of his life that involved a lot of illegal drug-taking and so-called “art”, which is just post-modernist weird crap. I thought his family odd- past the point of funny and more into dysfunctional. I disliked his strange interests in things, choosing to learn “bottleneck”, “ash tray” and “lobotomy” in French over more practical phrases. Mostly, I disliked his overall personality. He is the type of person who would watch someone on the verge of a grisly death and memorize the details so that he knew how to tell the story to his friends later. Call me old-fashioned, but I call that morbid and crass.

However, there has to be a reason he is still writing books and people are giving these books good ratings: taste. There is clearly a market for snarky, bitter people who love themselves and love to hate to be loved. Ugh.

Basically, know your taste. Sure, it’s good to reach outside of your comfort zone and try something new (and this was quite outside of my comfort zone), but there’s no need to push yourself to continue something you dislike. For instance, I won’t be picking up another David Sedaris book anytime soon, though I will concede that I was oddly transfixed by a life so different from mine. It’s kind of like the feeling you get when you can’t look away from a car accident scene.

Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5

You would probably like Larry David, Steve Martin, maybe Dennis Leary or Bill Burr. I’m not sure. Basically, any comedian who whines about how the world owes them something is a good bet for people with those “tastes.” You might also like Chuck Palahniuk if you enjoyed the morbidity and peculiarity, but would’ve liked it to be grittier.