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books
A universal laugh cloaked in a gay man's experience
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris Little, Brown $22.95 hardcover Reviewed by Anthony Glassman
National Public Radio personality and rampaging gay wit David Sedaris is back with his third collection of essays, Me Talk Pretty One Day.
Readers familiar with his two major previous works, Naked and Barrel Fever, know what to expect from Sedaris: a degree of selfdeprecation that would make Woody Allen uncomfortable, a rueful wit, an insane family, and a whole slew of unsatisfactory jobs. For those who don't know him, picture Oscar Wilde, Woody Allen and Sophia Petrillo from The Golden Girls, all trapped in the body of a rapidlyaging GreekAmerican from North Carolina. When reading Barrel Fever, it took a while to realize that hey, this author is gay. Naked dealt more (and more quickly) with Sedaris' sexual orientation.
This one, however, starts with it at the get-go, and never lets up. The only thing that separates Sedaris from the pack of gay wits is, well, his wit.
The book is divided into two sections. The first is the general-knowledge round of the exam, and deals with his youth and background. The second takes the reader to the present day, when Sedaris is living in France with his attractive boyfriend, a situation that Sedaris finds a lot stranger than any of his readers will. Of course, his readers are idealists who believe that brains are more important than looks, and David Sedaris is a realist who knows that they are wrong.
The first essay in the book, "Go Carolina," talks about the abortive attempt of his elementary school speech therapist to correct his lisp.
"None of the therapy students were girls," he writes. "They were all boys like me who kept movie star scrapbooks and made their own curtains.”
"Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist,” the fourth essay, is a phantasmagoric romp through the writer's attempts to make art using images instead of words, Running from college to college and spending most of his budget on methamphetamine, he falls in with the wrong crowd: people who make "pieces" and talk about their upcoming installations at abandoned warehouses where the rats understand the
Not Feeling Yourself?
.
performance art more than the patrons.
"Other group members stored their bodily fluids in baby-food jars or wrote cryptic messages on packaged skirt steaks. Their artworks were known as 'pieces,' a phrase I enthusiastically embraced. 'Nice piece,' I'd say. In my eagerness to please, I accidentally complimented chipped baseboards and sacks of laundry waiting to be taken to the cleaners. Anything might be a piece if you looked at it hard enough. High on crystal, the gang and I would tool down the beltway, admiring the traffic cones and bright yellow speed bumps. The art world was our conceptual oyster, and we ate it raw."
It is, however, in Section Deux, as it is described in the book, where the title and theme really come together. Having visited his boyfriend's cottage in France, Sedaris takes a beginning French class before returning there, repeating pithy phrases in a foreign language that will never arise in any normal conversation not scripted by the writers of a textbook. Arriving back in la belle France, Sedaris still can't communicate with the locals. Wackiness ensues, like ordering multiple numbers of things he needs only one of, because he can't remember the genders of French nouns and doesn't want to be
ridiculed.
·
"A masculine kilo of feminine tomatoes presents a sexual problem easily solved by asking for two kilos of tomatoes. I've started using the plural while shopping, and Hugh has started using it in our cramped kitchen, where he stands huddled in the corner shouting, 'What do we need with four pounds of tomatoes?'
""
The best way to review a David Sedaris book is simply to tell the person reading the review to read the darn book. Unlike many a "gay wit," a phrase used once too often in this article, Sedaris' books aren't phallocentric to the exclusion of everything else. Many a queer writer writes solely for their own orientation and gender; a lesbian writer might be accessible only to other lesbians, a bisexual author might throw odd bits of plumbing into sex scenes. Sedaris, however, writes universal books cloaked in a gay man's experiences. And he does it well, and so funny you could plotz.
His sister Amy Sedaris is introducing another generation of Americans to the Sedaris wit in her show Strangers with Candy on Comedy Central, and it's damn funny. But, on the whole, reading Me Talk Pretty One Day is a more satisfying experience, and one guaranteed-to make you run out and buy his other books.
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