It takes guts and a degree of honesty bordering on masochism to open your cupboard and expose your skeletons for everyone to see, and it takes something special to translate these into prose. Like David Sedaris has done in Me Talk Pretty One Day, a collection of autobiographical vignettes that recount his formative years in North Carolina up to his days as an American expat in France.
Sedaris has a keen eye for the absurd and these little things in every day life that, if dismissed and allowed to pass by and float away, are mundane, but if captured and preserved on paper, will reveal kernels of truth of whatever subject you happen to take in. Through well picked accounts, we get to know Sedaris, his mom and dad, and some of his siblings, intimately. These complete strangers become individuals you'd have the feeling you know or at least recognize the type of by the time you've read the book through. You'd grin and give a knowing nod should you chance upon Sedaris in the street.
Everybody has a scrape with fear of being left behind and made an outcast like what Sedaris as a fifth-grader experienced when he had to enrol in his school's speech therapy program to cure his lisp, unsuccessfully though, which made him worry that other students in the program might succeed, "turn their lives around, and leave me stranded." Most of us, as a kid, has probably dealt with dad trying to push his unrealized dream upon you. It's his dream, not yours, but he's dad, after all, and so you give in and give it a go. Sedaris did. Against his will he took guitar lessons, only to freak out his midget guitar teacher.
David Sedaris's dad, Lou, to whom he dedicates his book to, is a (now retired) IBM engineer, a jazz aficionado, a closet painter, and, like in most families, at a loss when it comes to communicating with his offspring. As offspring, you're probably just as stumped. Unless you're a last born and refers to him as "b**ch" and "motherf**ker". It worked for Paul, "my father's best ally and worst nightmare" Sedaris writes about his youngest sibling. Lou is as upright as they come and I can only imagine his prudish embarrassment when being around Paul. But then, unlike his older brother and sisters whom have all moved away and maintain contact by telephone, Paul is always there for Lou, come hell or high water, either to offer a F**k-It Bucket (a bucket filled with candy) or just some words of consolation ("B**ch, I'm here to tell you that it's going to be all right."). Paul was there for his dad when their mother died, a free spirit who would trick her Great Dane into falsely thinking that she was being attacked by Sedaris and then take pictures of him lying on the floor with the dog ripping holes in his sweater. She would also organize the family's annual Miss Emollient Pageant, in which Sedaris would participate in earnest.
Before moving to France, Sedaris lived in New York and got by as a personal assistant to a rich Colombian woman who likes to feign poverty before moving on as part of a moving outfit run by Patrick, an Irish "card-carrying communist", and trucking furniture around with Richie, a six-foot-four convicted murderer, and Ivan, a Russian diagnosed with residual schizophrenia. Through Bonnie, Sedaris, and you and I the reader, get to experience New York as a tourist. An American tourist. "I expect to be treated like an American," Bonnie, a first-timer in the Big Apple and convinced that everyone is out to get her and her hard earned money, proclaims. And experience Americans outside America. In a train in Paris, to be precise, and involving a couple, Martin and Carol, who are convinced that Sedaris is a pickpocket. Sedaris, who moved to France after having made Hugh, a successful fellow New Yorker who owns a house in Normandy, his own ("You will be mine" writes Sedaris) describes Americans as a "loud" people.
David Sedaris is the real deal, hoss, just you see.
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