Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

(Book Review)

I'm currently getting ready for a course in "Applied Linguistics" I hope to do next year. And I've been thinking of what I can read up on to prepare.

The field of linguistics intimidates me a little bit, so I was trying to develop a reading list that would slowly ease me into it as painlessly as possible.
I remembered my sister talking about this book a year or so ago at the family dinner table. She described David Sedaris humorous struggles with his speech impediment as a child, and as an adult his struggles to learn the French language.
Her description of it sounded pretty interesting, and the themes of the book sounded like they were related to language acquisition. So I decided to put this at the beginning of my reading list.

My co-worker, who is also preparing to enter a similar program, and I had a conversation about what we were doing to prepare for the course, and when I mentioned I was planning on reading this book, he didn't understand. "You should be reading textbooks on applied linguistics," he said. "That book's not going to help you at all."

I tried to explain that the idea was to ease myself into it, but he still thought I was nuts.

And in truth, after reading this book I can safely say he was right. None of it was really of any value. But it was a very pleasant read nonetheless, so I'm not complaining.

The book is 272 pages long. Of this, only about 10 pages or so are related to studying a foreign language. The rest are just humorous essays on a variety of topics.

Apparently each of the chapters in this book was originally published as a seperate magazine story, and then later compiled into one book. And it reads like the hodge podge that it is. The jumps between chapters are a bit jarring.

Although David Sedaris has a reputation as a great humorist, I've got to say I found some of these chapters were just so-so. Some of them are better than others however. When he's on, he's really on. But much of the book is filler. It's not quite laugh out loud funny, but more mildly amusing.

However what saves the book is that even when Sedaris isn't quite hitting all the laugh marks, he never gets boring. You get drawn into all his stories, and find yourself smiling a little bit at the bizarreness which is just everyday life. When he describes all the wackiness of his family, you think to yourself, "Hmmm, I guess every family has its quirks."
When he describes his career as a drugged out want to be artist, you think, "Hey, he's even more screwed up than I am."
When he describes all the menial jobs he's worked over the years, and all the humiliations they entailed, you think to yourself, "glad I'm not the only one."

It is for this reason that, in my opinion, the book loses a lot when you find out many of these stories aren't entirely truthful. I first heard about this through Whisky Prajer's blog a couple years back (link here). He in turn links to the Slate article about the controversy (link here)which was inspired by Alex Heard's article in the New Republic (link here).

All of these links touch on the question of how much leverage a humorist should be allowed. It's something I go back and forth on to be honest, and it's probably not a question that can be definitively answered. I'll just say that for me, the stories in this book were interesting in direct proportion to how much I believed they were based on reality. Some authors can tell you stories you know are complete fantasy (Terry Pratchett comes to mind) and still get you to laugh. David Sedaris's stories, on the other hand, seem to lose a lot if you find out they're mostly imagined.

Anyway, leaving that aside and moving onto other parts of the book...

The second half of the book was written while Sedaris was in France, and is mostly about his observations of French life, cultural clashes, and his struggles to learn the French language.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in a foreign country, I could identify with some of it.

For example, like Sedaris I also enrolled in a language school with other international students (in my case they were mostly Chinese and other Asian students). And like the school mentioned in Sedaris's book, we all communicated to each other through a language that was native to none of us (Japanese in our case, instead of French). And like Sedaris, I felt slightly out of place because I was a lot older than the other students. (He was 40, attending a class filled with 18 and 19 year olds. I wasn't quite that old, but I was 30 when I was attending a class filled mostly with people 10 years younger than me.)

And even though none of my teachers were as terrible as his was (assuming his description wasn't another exaggeration) I can also attest to the overwhelming sense of accomplishment you feel when you realize you are understanding perfectly everything the teacher says, even if your language skills aren't good enough to reply to it yet.

(I could go on listing little things in his book I identified with, but you get the point. And perhaps I'm bordering on arrogance a little here, as if David Sedaris and I are the only ones who ever had an overseas experience. In this day and age probably most middle class Americans have either studied or taught abroad at one point in their lives So perhaps most of us have our own points of identification with the language and cultural struggles he describes.)

I also enjoyed Sedaris's description of American exceptionalism, and why it sometimes fails to impress other countries. "Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two!'" (from page 157).

...As I mentioned before, this book touches a wide variety of topics, so it's difficult to summarize everything. I'll just close on one more little tidbit of information I found interesting. I found out from this book that the song "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)", which I remember as a classic from my childhood, and which I always thought was an established American folk song, started life as a Coca-Cola jingle in the 1970s--(wikipedia article here). Well, you learn something new everyday I guess.

Link of the Day
Chomsky on HARDtalk, Nov. 09

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris: Book Review (Scripted)