The Correspondent Book Review: David Sedaris’s idiosyncratic world of thoughtless fathers, rude friends of friends and people who don’t pack until the removal men arrive
Book Review: Me Talk Pretty One Day. David Sedaris
A friend of a friend should be beaten to death for her rudeness, collecting boxes of LPs should be illegal, the concept of Easter, and accounts of unspeakably dull childhoods fill David Sedaris’ collection of short idiosyncratic stories in Me Talk Pretty One Day. The title is the translation from French of his tentative attempts to improve speaking the language. There’s, his memories of his unthinking parents, his sister who constantly changes her personality and his change of career to become a removal man leading to a rich vein of humour.
If you’ve moved house yourself recently, you’d sympathise with David Sedaris on his thoughts as a furniture remover in New York. The heavier the boxes are with items that haven’t been looked at or used in decades the more he becomes more disgruntled – losing patience with people who fill boxes with unread books preferring moving stuffed animals which are bulky but light. He rants: “Boxes of records made me think that LPs should be outlawed or at least limited to five per person…”
The humourist describes friends, colleagues and members of his family with a surgical precision that reveals the comedy in people you might want to push over a cliff as they are so irritating. His friend Alisha occasionally visited him where she was so easy going it was a pleasure to have here around – until she brought with her friend from work called Bonnie who had, “… landed at Kennedy who convinced that given half a chance the people of New York would steal the fillings right out of her mouth…” And who continued to accuse taxi drivers, metro ticket sellers, waitresses and anyone in a shop of ripping her off. Exasperated with her rudeness Sedaris writes: “We should have beaten her to death. It was clearly the best solution…”
A master storyteller, a convivial and likeable radio voice his stories may exaggerate but are always honest and in their own way truthful. Born in 1956, New Yorker David Sedaris born rose to fame when Santaland Diaries the first of his short semi-biographical stories was read broadcast on National Public Radio in 1922. His hilarious account as working over Christmas as an Elf in a department store led to regular slots on the radio and a long list of books in which are largely semi-fictional accounts of aspects of his life.
Harry Mottram
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris is available in paperback. Published in 2000.
The BBC ran his stories in Meet David Sedaris on Radio 4 at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000twhp
He has a website with details of his work at https://www.davidsedarisbooks.com/
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