me talk pretty one day by david sedaris essay

Me Talk Pretty One Day

74 pages • 2 hours read

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-13

Chapters 14-16

Chapters 17-19

Chapters 20-22

Chapters 23-25

Chapters 26-27

Key Figures

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day is a collection of twenty-seven essays exploring the author’s childhood in North Carolina, his relationship with his family, his time living in France, and observations about American social life. The book is comprised of two sections, Part One and Part Deux in which the latter half focuses primarily on Sedaris’s time in Normandy, France. Told with sardonic humor, each chapter deploys various levels of fantasy, irony , and other narrative comedic techniques to highlight the mundanity of Sedaris’s everyday experiences while also adding relief to more grave subjects.

The first three chapters of the book take place at different points in Sedaris’s childhood. They explore the early beginnings of his fantasy life, which allows him to make sense of other people’s responses to his speech impediment and sexuality. In response to a persistent speech therapist, Sedaris concocts a spy fantasy to situate his struggles in overcoming his speech impediment. This sets the stage for future challenges to authority, especially as his sexuality eventually becomes an issue for those around him such as his homophobic music teacher. These chapters also contrast Sedaris’s creative imagination with his father’s more scientific approach to life.

Later in Part One, the author reveals some of the struggles in his early artistic career, including his drug addiction alongside the ups and downs of his visual arts practice. With humor, Sedaris discusses his errors as a young artist as well as his encounters with grief. He also reveals the loss of his mother and several beloved pets in the family. The introduction of a foul-mouthed brother and other unconventional family responses to mourning mitigates with humor some of the solemnness of the author’s subjects of death and grief.

In the last chapters of Part One, Sedaris explores some of his job struggles as an underpaid writing instructor, an underappreciated personal assistant to an eccentric heiress, and a mover. The author offers commentary about social and economic disparity, particularly in New York City where wealth distribution is prevalent. While Sedaris achieves a greater level of financial stability as an adult, these chapters articulate his preference for things that are simple and non-pretentious over something with more glamorous appeal. He much prefers hot dogs to the elaborate and expensive entrées in SoHo, and supports his sister Amy’s antics that defy conventional standards of beauty in favor of unconventional displays of humor.

Part Deux takes place primarily in France, a country that Sedaris begins exploring after meeting his partner, Hugh , who owns a second home in Normandy. The author shares his struggles with learning French, negotiating American and French customs, and finding ways of expressing his unique sense of humor in a French setting . Sedaris’s gradual acquisition of the French language and time spent in France leads him to question American sensibilities, something which he has never thought about until he has spent considerable time outside of the U.S. From his many language blunders to his awkward efforts at translation, he learns humility and gains appreciation for the ways in which new language and cultural acquisition can pleasantly surprise.

In the final two chapters of Part Deux, the author reflects on how the past converges with the present. In considering his trouble with sleeping, he reveals how alcoholism had served as an unhealthy sleep-aid for some time before his fantasies took their place as a slightly healthier way of occupying time at night. This practice, coupled with Sedaris’s father’s odd behavior of keeping and consuming food past its prime, is a comment on compulsive behaviors that one brings from the past into the present. The author suggests that his fantasies are a way of coping in his sobriety, as his father’s eating habits are creative compulsions. While these compulsions may lead to trouble at times, he gestures to how they are, in some ways, an opening to see reality and its objects in a different light.

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Me Talk Pretty One Day

By david sedaris, me talk pretty one day analysis.

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Written by Elizabeth Oscar

Me Talk Pretty One Day is a collection of autobiographical essays about David Sedaris . The book is divided into parts, where part one talks about his childhood life in North Carolina while part two talks about his life in Normandy, France. As a child, Sedaris lives with his family in North Carolina. However, he is experiencing speech challenges and is unable to pronounce letter s. His teacher’s efforts to help him prove futile. Sedaris’ father, Lou, loves jazz music and lobbies his family to attend jazz concerts. Lou contemplates starting a family band. As a result, he enrolls his children for guitar lessons. Sedaris is not amused and he quits afterwards.

In part two, Sedaris talks about adjusting to a new culture in France. He has gone to France courtesy of his lover, Hugh. Hugh owns a home in France. However, Sedaris is struggling to learn French. Sedaris compares and contrasts lifestyles between America and France. Eventually, he comes to question American sensibilities. After a long stay in France, Sedaris starts viewing the world in another perspective. The book shows the experiences encountered by Sedaris in everyday life. Despite the challenges, Sedaris chooses to be patient although sometimes he is pretentious.

From an early age, Sedaris leads a fantasy life. However, he comes to realize that everybody perceives the world differently. Things that are perceived normal by certain group of people are usually abnormal to another group. Despite living in America for many years, he questions its sensibilities at later years when living in France. Most of the characters in these essays show love and support to family members irrespective of differences.

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Me Talk Pretty One Day Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Me Talk Pretty One Day is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What’s is the setting time place social climate

This depends on which specific essay you are referring to.

What type on conflict are represented here

This depends on which story in the collection you are referring to. The collection of essays in Me Talk Pretty covers a wide range of topics but most notable is Sedaris sense of identity and Insecurity. As an American living in Paris, who can...

Why do you think Sedaris uses nonsense jumbles of letters— meismslsxp and palicmkrexjs, for example—in several places? How would his essay be different had he used the real words instead?

David Sedaris sprinkles scrambled nonsense words like " meimslxsp " and " lgpdmurct " into his essay His purpose is to illustrate his adult self returning to study the French language in Paris. He finds the experience "nerve-racking". Words and...

Study Guide for Me Talk Pretty One Day

Me Talk Pretty One Day study guide contains a biography of David Sedaris, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Me Talk Pretty One Day
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Essays for Me Talk Pretty One Day

Me Talk Pretty One Day essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Me Talk Pretty One Day — Critical Analysis Of Me Talk Pretty One Day By David Sedaris

Critical Analysis of Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

• Categories: American Literature Literary Devices Me Talk Pretty One Day

About this sample

Words: 870 |

Published: May 14, 2021

Words: 870 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

• Sedaris, D. (2010). Me talk pretty one day. Paris: Hachette.

Should follow an “upside down” triangle format, meaning, the writer should start off broad and introduce the text and author or topic being discussed, and then get more specific to the thesis statement.

Provides a foundational overview, outlining the historical context and introducing key information that will be further explored in the essay, setting the stage for the argument to follow.

Cornerstone of the essay, presenting the central argument that will be elaborated upon and supported with evidence and analysis throughout the rest of the paper.

The topic sentence serves as the main point or focus of a paragraph in an essay, summarizing the key idea that will be discussed in that paragraph.

The body of each paragraph builds an argument in support of the topic sentence, citing information from sources as evidence.

After each piece of evidence is provided, the author should explain HOW and WHY the evidence supports the claim.

Should follow a right side up triangle format, meaning, specifics should be mentioned first such as restating the thesis, and then get more broad about the topic at hand. Lastly, leave the reader with something to think about and ponder once they are done reading.

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Summary and Reviews of Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

Me Talk Pretty One Day

• Critics' Consensus:
• Readers' Rating:
• First Published:
• May 1, 2000, 224 pages
• Jun 2001, 224 pages
• Biography & Memoir
• 1980s & '90s
• Humor & Satire
• Immigrants & Expats
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About This Book

Book summary.

Tells a most unconventional life story. "Original, acid, and wild" --said the Los Angeles Times . Written as 17 autobiographical essays.

"As far as I was concerned, the French could be cold or even openly hostile. They could burn my flag or pelt me with stones, but if there were taxidermied kittens to be had then I would go and bring them back to this, the greatest country on earth." David Sedaris's new collection, Me Talk Pretty One Day, tells a most unconventional life story. It begins with a North Carolina childhood filled with speech-therapy classes ("There was the lisp, of course, but more troubling than that was my voice itself with its excitable tone and high, girlish pitch") and unwanted guitar lessons taught by a midget. From budding performance artist ("The only crimp in my plan was that I seemed to have no talent whatsoever") to "clearly unqualified" writing teacher in Chicago, Sedaris's career leads him to New York (the sky's-the-limit field of furniture moving) and eventually, of all places, France. Sedaris's move to Paris poses a number of challenges, chief among them his inability to speak the language. Arriving a "spooky man-child" capable of communicating only through nouns, he undertakes language instruction that leads him ever deeper into cultural confusion. Whether describing the Easter bunny to puzzled classmates, savoring movies in translation (It Is Necessary to Save the Soldier Ryan), or watching a group of men play soccer with a cow, Sedaris brings a view and a voice like none other. "Original, acid, and wild" --said the Los Angeles Times to every unforgettable encounter.

Chapter One Go Carolina

ANYONE WHO WATCHES EVEN THE SLIGHTEST amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office. The door opens, and the person holding the knob is asked to identify himself. The agent then says, "I'm going to ask you to come with me." They're always remarkably calm, these agents. If asked "Why do I need to go anywhere with you?" they'll straighten their shirt cuffs or idly brush stray hairs from the sleeves of their sport coats and say, "Oh, I think we both know why." The suspect then chooses between doing things the hard way and doing things the easy way, and the scene ends with either gunfire or the gentlemanly application of handcuffs. Occasionally it's a case of mistaken identity, but most often the suspect knows exactly why he's being taken. It seems he's been expecting this to happen. The anticipation has ruled his life, and now, finally, the wait is over. You're sometimes led to believe ...

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Dominant Tone of David Sedaris’s Essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day” Essay

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Being an eminent writer means using various means of speech and literary techniques to make writing mesmerizing, scintillating, and exquisite. By means of witty and subtle literary tricks, words and phrases might be adopted and given new shades of meaning. Due to emotional emphasis and stresses, a writer’s work might be full of lyric, sarcastic, or nostalgic strains that are in charge of the whole mood of a book. A writer’s ingenuity appears in many forms, be it a word choice or a particular grammatical structure, but “tone” is a device that is liable for depicting and illustrating a writer’s attitude to a situation they portray. Via a tone, readers are susceptible members to the course of events they witness, as the gloomy and harsh reality are supplanted by spine-chilling or humorous books, where irony or sarcasm is the tone component.

The tone is a literary device reflecting the writer’s attitude concerning the subjects they write about or reflects their perception or evaluations towards members or characters they interact with or describe. Utilizing a particular tone, be it a nostalgic one or pessimistic, a writer builds up a relationship with a reader via messages and the whole mood a writer conveys. An author resorts to diverse techniques reinforcing the tone stress. A narrator displays their word structure manifesting their particular writing traits, figurative language implementation, or a punctuation choice for establishing a narrative voice. The employment of these techniques makes readers understand the hidden meaning behind the lines.

David Sedaris, with his “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” is a telling example of the literary tone’s impact on his writing. This essay is about a middle-aged man struggling with his insecurities and emotional barriers and tries to achieve his long-standing goal in terms of French learning. Combating unpleasant obstacles, he does not lose his heart and confronts his formidable and sinister teacher. To introduce this mood, Sedaris employs humorous and sarcastic tones to highlight the learning process as a joyful and embarrassing process at the same time. Sedaris(2010) writes, “AT THE AGE OF FORTY-ONE, I am returning to school and have to think of myself as what my French textbook calls “a true debutant.” This sentence is a case of self-irony with a sarcastic tone. The first sentence part printed in upper case is correlated to “a true debutant” phrase that sounds ridiculous and ironic by implication. Obviously, a forty-something man cannot be a debutant; he might lack some knowledge, but he is not a total ignoramus. It is a case of sarcastic tone reflecting odd quirks of his fate.

The humorous and sarcastic tones are dominant ones in David Sedaris’ essay. Learning a new language is always complicated, as a person has not developed listening, speaking, and writing skills yet. When people hear an unknown word, they cannot differentiate sounds. Some people describe this learning aspect as troublesome and unpleasant, while Sedaris uses his unique and extraordinary description. When he interacts with his teacher and does not mull over her saying, he uses a combination of random letters, such as “even a fiuscrzsa ticiwelmun knows that a typewriter is feminine (2010).” Sedaris penetrates the humorous approach in his whole essay to make it a fleeting and page-turner writing.

Sedaris, D. (2010). Me Talk Pretty One Day . Little, Brown Book Group.

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IvyPanda. (2022, November 2). Dominant Tone of David Sedaris’s Essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day”. https://ivypanda.com/essays/dominant-tone-of-david-sedariss-essay-me-talk-pretty-one-day/

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IvyPanda . (2022) 'Dominant Tone of David Sedaris’s Essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day”'. 2 November.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Dominant Tone of David Sedaris’s Essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day”." November 2, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/dominant-tone-of-david-sedariss-essay-me-talk-pretty-one-day/.

1. IvyPanda . "Dominant Tone of David Sedaris’s Essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day”." November 2, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/dominant-tone-of-david-sedariss-essay-me-talk-pretty-one-day/.

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IvyPanda . "Dominant Tone of David Sedaris’s Essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day”." November 2, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/dominant-tone-of-david-sedariss-essay-me-talk-pretty-one-day/.

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The Hem of His Garment

If you were to say to me, “You can be in a room with either Chris Rock or the Pope,” I’d say, “Chris Rock, please.” Nothing against the Pope, but he’s never made me laugh. Neither has he come up with a viable solution to America’s gun problem the way Chris Rock has, saying that the firearms themselves can be unregulated but that every bullet should cost five thousand dollars.

“O.K.,” you’d continue. “Julia Louis-Dreyfus or the Pope?”

“Oh, no question,” I’d tell you. “The cursing on ‘Veep’ amounted to poetry, so Julia Louis-Dreyfus.”

“Stephen Merchant or—”

“Stephen Merchant.”

The same goes for Stephen Colbert, Mike Birbiglia, Tig Notaro, Conan O’Brien, Whoopi Goldberg, Jimmy Fallon, Ramy Youssef, and Jim Gaffigan—most of whom I know or have met at one time or another.

The crazy thing is that I didn’t have to choose between any of the above and the Pope. For reasons I will never quite understand, I got to be in a room with all of them—plus a hundred or so others who had also been summoned, without much advance notice, to the Vatican on a late-spring morning in June, when Rome was hot but not so hot that all you could talk about was how hot it was.

Like everyone I spoke to the night before our papal audience, when, minus Jimmy Fallon, the American contingent gathered for dinner, I’d initially thought that my invitation—which was sent by e-mail—was spam. “Right,” I said to the screen of my laptop. “Nice try, Russia.” I didn’t click on the attachment until Stephen Colbert assured me that it was legitimate, and that the Pope really did want to meet with comics and humorists from around the world in three days’ time, and at six-forty-five in the morning. The invitation made it sound like there’d be a dialogue, as if the Pope had questions or needed to ask us a favor, something along the lines of “Do you think you could maybe give the pedophilia stuff a rest?”

Everyone’s got a Catholic-clergy joke up their sleeve, perhaps one they heard at a party. Mine is: A cop stops a car two priests are riding in. “I’m looking for a couple of child molesters,” he tells them.

The priests look at each other. “We’ll do it!” they say.

Substitute rabbis or Baptist ministers for priests, and you’ll get nothing. I mean, the Catholic Church earned those laughs, and every time its senior clerics look away, or quietly send an offending clergyman to the back bench, it’s making this scandal larger than its ministry, at least to an outsider such as myself.

“Can you help me turn this around?” I imagined the Pope asking. “How can we get back to the sex-starved-nun jokes we all so enjoyed in the past?”

This is a man who had just been caught using an Italian word that translated to “faggotry” for the second time in three weeks. After our visit, which was covered by seemingly every news organization on Earth, the gaffe would be brought up again and again, especially in comment sections, by people convinced that, had they been invited to the Vatican, they’d have stayed home in protest, or perhaps would have attended and then caused a scene, most likely one involving paint.

It didn’t bother me, though. When I heard that the Pope had said “faggotry,” I laughed, in large part because it’s a funny word. Then, too, it’s not something you’d call a person—it’s not like “Shut up, fag.” Rather, it connotes behavior: “Take your faggotry outside, please.”

Pope Francis can’t preside over same-sex marriages, but he created a firestorm within his Church by blessing gay people about to be married. “If they accept the Lord and have good will, who am I to judge them?” he asked, in 2013.

Then, yes, he said “faggotry,” but he apologized for it. Both times. I don’t think that he’s a homophobe so much as an eighty-seven-year-old. (“I said what again? Really?”)

My feeling is that if you want a church that is a hundred per cent gay-friendly, go join one—there are plenty to be had—or start your own. “Yes, but I want Our Lady of Sorrows to celebrate Pride Month,” I can hear someone whining.

It’s like going to Burger King and demanding a Big Mac. If you want a Big Mac, go across the street to McDonald’s. Jesus.

Also, I wasn’t bothered by the Pope’s use of “faggotry” because I’m not queer; I’m gay. The difference is that queer people are offended by just about everything. Gay people just wonder what they’ll wear to the Vatican at the crack of dawn, and what the proper etiquette is.

“If he holds out his hand, you can opt to kiss his ring!” my friend Leslie, who was brought up Catholic, wrote when I told her I was going.

I was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church. There, we kissed the priest’s hand when receiving Communion, though twice I moved up a few inches and kissed his watch instead, just to see how he’d react.

“Actually, no,” another friend wrote. “This Pope hates having his ring kissed, so if he holds out his hand, just shake it.”

I was in Sussex when my invitation arrived. It was eight-thirty in the morning, and by lunchtime I had my plane ticket and had booked a hotel within walking distance of the Vatican, which, like the city-states of San Marino and Monaco, is its own separate country, and could thus be added to a list I have on my computer titled “Countries I Have Been To.” The Vatican would be my sixtieth.

There’s another list on my computer titled “Stars I Have Seen.” People don’t count if they are onstage in a concert or a play. They have to be at large, or at an occasion we were both invited to. According to an online article my travel agent sent, one that referred to my fellow Vatican invitees as “yucksters,” I’d soon be adding two American comedians, a British one, and an actress, also American, to my list.

“Plus the Pope,” Hugh reminded me when I told him that I was definitely going.

“Oh, right,” I said, the way I might have had he said, “Plus Sully Sullenberger.” I guess I’d been limiting my list to entertainers and people who aren’t in show business but dazzle nevertheless, like Ann Richards, the late governor of Texas. If I don’t see the Pope as dazzling, I suppose it’s because I’m not religious in any way. On my deathbed, I’ll likely cover my bases and beg for forgiveness, but not until I’m coughing up blood, or see Hugh reaching for the plug of my respirator.

Does that make me an agnostic or a flat-out atheist? I do believe there was someone named Jesus who was a revolutionary, but I don’t think he was God’s son, or that he was resurrected. It was a shame that I was invited to the Vatican, actually—like sending me to the U.S. Open when I’ve never watched a football game in my life. I thought of the millions of people in the world who’d give anything to meet the Pope and realized that I knew only two of them: my friend Ewan’s cleaning lady and Stephen Colbert, who’s so Catholic he taught Sunday school.

The dress code on the invitation was daytime formal, which I was told amounted to shined shoes and a suit. The only one I had at my fingertips was bought nine years earlier, when I was invited to Buckingham Palace. The late Queen hosted tea parties every summer for do-gooders of one stripe or another, and I was included on account of all the rubbish I’d collected by the sides of British roads. She and I didn’t meet, but I saw her—she was standing within hearing range, close enough for me to comprehend how truly tiny she was. Her feet were the size of hot-dog buns. We’d been told to leave our phones and cameras at home, but everyone around me had snuck one in, and they were all going bananas.

Me, I’m just not a picture person. Am I glad other people have cameras? Sometimes. Like at the dinner Stephen Colbert arranged the night before our papal audience. I look at the photos of the assembled guests and wonder, What was I doing there? Why not Garrison Keillor, Tina Fey, or Donald Glover, to name just three of a thousand more qualified people? It was like a reproduction of “The Last Supper” with one of the disciples replaced by Snoopy.

“Does anyone have a favorite God joke?” Colbert asked as our final course was served. “It doesn’t have to be your own.”

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For most of the evening, I’d sat across from Whoopi Goldberg, who had no appetite and passed me all her plates after just a bite or two. That meant double servings of four separate pasta dishes, two steaks served on rafts of eggplant, four rich smothered dumplings, two tomato salads, and two cherry-and-goat-cheese pavlovas, plus all the food I snatched from the plate of Jim Gaffigan’s youngest son, who was seated to my right. Now my pants no longer fit, and my watchband was cutting off the circulation in my left hand. Even my throat was swollen. I cleared it before taking the floor.

“So God tells Adam, ‘I’m going to make you a wife, a helpmate, the most beautiful woman who ever lived. She’ll be terrific in bed, enthusiastic, and uncomplaining. But it’ll cost you.’

“Adam asks, ‘How much?’

“ ‘An eye, an elbow, a collarbone, and your left ball.’

“Adam thinks for a minute, then asks, ‘What can I get for a rib?’ ”

The polite but underwhelming response I got from people who tell jokes for a living—who fill stadiums—should have taught me a lesson. Instead, I told another one.

“What’s the worst part of having sex with Jesus?

“He’s always wanting to come into your heart.”

Thank God Colbert told a joke as well. It was, he warned us, decades old, and one of the first he ever wrote. But at least he wrote it. Mine were ones people had told me at book signings. I don’t belong here, I thought, embarrassed, for the umpteenth time that evening.

Usually, I comfort myself by remembering that everyone secretly feels out of place. Here, though, I’m pretty sure it was just me. That said, my fellow-guests were welcoming and, it goes without saying, terribly, terribly funny, just as they were at six-forty-five the following morning, when we met at an entrance gate near the Pope’s living quarters and were led to a magnificently frescoed room in the Apostolic Palace. There, we joined the hundred other people who’d been invited: more international writers and comics, most of them from Italy. I knew only one, a woman named Luciana Littizzetto, whom I’d met years earlier, in Turin. She was the only non-Vatican representative to address the crowd that morning. Her remarks lasted a minute or two and were in Italian, as were the Pope’s.

The assembled group stood and applauded as he entered the room and took his thronelike seat before us. It speaks to the man’s humility that he allows every rank-and-file clergy member to outdress him. The cardinals were resplendent in their black cassocks, which had bright-scarlet buttons and a matching sash called a fascia. Better still were the Papal Gentlemen, who wore morning coats and white bow ties coupled with elaborate bibs, often with medals hanging off them. The Swiss Guard looked like Renaissance-era toy soldiers in their multicolored striped outfits, standing just so with feathers in their helmets, their halberds held before them. Even the friars in their dung-colored robes and sandals were more strikingly dressed than the Pope, who looked a bit mother-of-the-bride in a white cassock with a shawl-type thing over his shoulders. He wore a skullcap and, around his neck, a cross on which you could have crucified the late Queen of England.

The Pope read a prepared statement of which we were each given a copy. It amounted to: laughter makes the world go round. His voice was soft and passionless. At one point, he got a reaction by sticking a thumb above his ear and wagging his fingers, but, as one member of the American delegation said afterward, “we really just laughed out of politeness.”

The part that moved me took place after his address, when, row by row, we were led up the aisle and personally greeted. The Pope remained seated and shook each of our hands. Some people brought him gifts; others leaned in to tell him something. I think I said, “Thanks for having me.” Standing before him, I felt the same pity I’d felt for the Queen and would feel for anyone who has to meet people for a living. Nothing stirred inside me the way that it did in 2015, when, rounding a corner at the White House, where I’d been invited to talk with some speechwriters, I happened upon President Obama. For a moment, standing there with my mouth hanging open, I feared that I might spontaneously combust—with respect, with pride and awe. The encounter with the Pope, though, was like meeting the Dalai Lama: not an inconvenience by any stretch, not uninteresting, just “Oh, hi.”

Many people, after the handshake, walked a few steps, pulled out their phones, and then took a selfie with the Pope in the background. It was so tacky. I said to the Italian seated to my right, “You’d think he was Santa!”

As at any good fashion show, the majority of our time was spent waiting, but the clothes we saw made it all worthwhile. The difference, I thought, was that these outfits weren’t for sale. Then my friend Austin wrote from the States and told me that while in Rome I had to go to Gammarelli, a bespoke tailoring business, founded in 1798, that’s been dressing the Pope and his associates for generations. It wasn’t too far from my hotel, so late in the afternoon I went with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who wore great clothes and was seemingly up for anything. I’d worried on the walk over that Gammarelli wouldn’t sell to laymen. “I’m going to tell them that my brother is a priest,” I said to her, “that he’s my same size, and I thought this might make for a good Christmas present.”

I figured they must hear that a lot, though, so when the time came I told the salesman, who was young and slender and spoke very good English, that I collect religious garments from around the world.

“He’s actually a noted historian,” Julia said.

I looked at her, like, Fuck . If I wanted to be put on the spot like this, I’d have come with my sister Amy.

“I also study history,” the young man said. “What is your area of concentration?”

I panicked. “Sometimes I write for magazines,” I told him.

What I wanted was a black cassock. That’s the ankle-length robe Catholic priests wear. I wanted one because they’re slimming, they’re classic, and they’re beautifully made, at least at Gammarelli.

“We start by choosing the wool,” the young man said, handing me a book of fabric samples. “Then we select the buttons and take your measurements.”

A Gammarelli cassock generally takes months to make and involves several fittings. The price, which is steep, reflects the high quality of work that goes into it. That said, it’s not as involved as a bespoke suit—there are no pants to worry about, no zippers in this case—but it is intricately pleated and lined. I was still willing to go ahead with it and was being measured when the young man left the dressing room and returned with a cassock that was already finished but had never been collected. Perhaps the priest who ordered it had died, or had been sent to prison. Whatever the case, it fit me very well except for the length, which could easily be adjusted.

Next came the Roman collar. The outfit’s fine without it, I thought, until I added it and realized, Whoa, you really need the collar. Then came the fascia, and I got two—the classic black one and a scarlet model that a cardinal would wear.

“Is it against the law to dress like a priest?” I whispered to Julia as I did up the last of the thirty-three buttons, each of which symbolizes a year of Jesus’ life and leaves you wishing he’d been crucified at twelve, especially if, like me, you’re developing arthritis in your fingers.

I loved the idea of wearing my cassock on the street. Then I imagined myself walking along and being approached by a person in distress or, worse yet, by another priest asking me if I’d heard the news about Father O’Shea or Archbishop DiMaggio. “A cardiac arrest, not two minutes into the Eucharist!” What does one say in that situation?

“Oh, sorry, I honestly just liked the robe. It takes ten pounds off!”

The next day at the airport, awaiting my flight back to London, I saw a priest wearing the very outfit I had beside me in my suitcase. He was heavyset and bearded, his black hair gathered in a short ponytail. What’s it like to know that you can never marry or even date someone?, I wondered. More than that, what’s it like to have faith? To look at a solid argument against your God and say with absolute conviction, “I think I prefer it my way, thank you.”

My Greek grandmother was like that—kept a crucifix the size of a hand mirror in her bedroom and kissed it until her lips wore the plating off Jesus’ stomach. Cried when she saw Billy Graham on TV, even though she didn’t understand what he was saying. “Jesus blessie,” she’d whisper, crossing herself whenever we passed a church, any church. Tie two sticks together and her eyes would water. My father had maybe a third of her faith, and his children, for whatever reason, none.

I wanted to tell the priest at the airport that I had just met his boss, the Pope, that I’d shaken his hand and been given a rosary in a leather pouch. Without seeming creepy, I then wanted to ask what he was wearing beneath his cassock—underwear and a T-shirt? Cutoff shorts? Dress slacks? Jeans? Is it every man for himself, or are there rules?

I hated to think I was missing something. ♦

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Me Talk Pretty One Day

David sedaris.

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David Sedaris Quotes in Me Talk Pretty One Day

No one else had been called, so why me? I ran down a list of recent crimes, looking for a conviction that might stick. Setting fire to a reportedly flameproof Halloween costume, stealing a set of barbecue tongs from an unguarded patio, altering the word hit on a list of rules posted on the gymnasium door; never did it occur to me that I might be innocent.

The question of team preference was common in our part of North Carolina, and the answer supposedly spoke volumes about the kind of person you either were or hoped to become. I had no interest in football or basketball but had learned it was best to pretend otherwise. If a boy didn't care for barbecued chicken or potato chips, people would accept it as a matter of personal taste, saying, “Oh well, I guess it takes all kinds.” You could turn up your nose at the president or Coke or even God, but there were names for boys who didn't like sports. When the subject came up, I found it best to ask which team my questioner preferred. Then I’d say, “Really? Me, too!”

“One of these days I'm going to have to hang a sign on that door,” Agent Samson used to say. She was probably thinking along the lines of SPEECH THERAPY LAB, though a more appropriate marker would have read FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA. We knocked ourselves out trying to fit in but were ultimately betrayed by our tongues. At the beginning of the school year, while we were congratulating ourselves on successfully passing for normal, Agent Samson was taking names as our assembled teachers raised their hands, saying, “I've got one in my homeroom,” and “There are two in my fourth-period math class.” Were they also able to spot the future drunks and depressives?

“Seriously, though, it helps if you give your instrument a name. What do you think you'll call yours?”

“Maybe I'll call it Oliver,” I said. That was the name of my hamster, and I was used to saying it.

Then again, maybe not.

“Oliver?” Mister Mancini set my guitar on the floor. “ Oliver ? What the hell kind of name is that? If you’re going to devote yourself to the guitar, you need to name it after a girl, not a guy.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Joan. I’ll call it…Joan.”

“So tell me about this Joan,” he said. “Is she something pretty special?”

Joan was the name of one of my cousins, but it seemed unwise to share this information. “Oh yeah,” I said, “Joan’s really…great. She’s tall and…” I felt self-conscious using the word tall and struggled to take it back. “She’s small and has brown hair and everything.”

You certainly couldn’t accuse him of being unsupportive. His enthusiasm bordered on mania, yet still it failed to inspire us.

[…] I broadened my view and came to see him as a wee outsider, a misfit whose take-it-or-leave-it attitude had left him all alone. This was a persona I’d been tinkering with myself: the outcast, the rebel. It occurred to me that, with the exception of the guitar, he and I actually had quite a bit in common. We were each a man trapped inside a boy’s body. Each of us was talented in his own way, and we both hated twelve-year-old males, a demographic group second to none in terms of cruelty. All things considered, there was no reason I shouldn’t address him not as a teacher but as an artistic brother.

I knew then why I’d never before sung in front of anyone, and why I shouldn’t have done it in front of Mister Mancini. He'd used the word screwball , but I knew what he really meant. He meant I should have named my guitar Doug or Brian, or better yet, taken up the flute. He meant that if we’re defined by our desires, I was in for a lifetime of trouble.

Either one of these things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations. The moment I took my first burning snootful, I understood that this was the drug for me. Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit? These are questions for insecure potheads. A speed enthusiast knows that everything he says or does is brilliant.

Immediately following the performance a small crowd gathered around my father, congratulating him on his delivery and comic timing.

“Including your father was an excellent idea,” the curator said, handing me my check “The piece really came together once you loosened up and started making fun of yourself.”

Our parents discouraged us from using the titles “ma’am” or “sir” when addressing a teacher or shopkeeper. Tobacco was acceptable in the form of a cigarette, but should any of us experiment with plug or snuff, we would automatically be disinherited. Mountain Dew was forbidden, and our speech was monitored for the slightest hint of a Raleigh accent. Use the word “y’all,” and before you knew it, you'd find yourself in a haystack French-kissing an underage goat. […]

We might not have been the wealthiest people in town, but at least we weren’t one of them .

There was no electricity for close to a week. The yard was practically cleared of trees, and rain fell through the dozens of holes punched into the roof. It was a difficult time, but the two of them stuck it out, my brother placing his small, scarred hand on my father's shoulder to say, “Bitch, I'm here to tell you that it's going to be all right. We'll get through this shit, motherfucker, just you wait.”

I was given two weeks to prepare, a period I spent searching for a briefcase and standing before my full-length mirror, repeating the words “Hello, class, my name is Mr. Sedaris.” Sometimes I’d give myself an aggressive voice and firm, athletic timbre. This was the masculine Mr. Sedaris, who wrote knowingly of flesh wounds and tractor pulls. Then there was the ragged bark of the newspaper editor, a tone that coupled wisdom with an unlimited capacity for cruelty. I tried sounding businesslike and world-weary, but when the day eventually came, my nerves kicked in and the true Mr. Sedaris revealed himself. In a voice reflecting doubt, fear, and an unmistakable desire to be loved, I sounded not like a thoughtful college professor but, rather, like a high-strung twelve-year-old girl; someone name Brittany.

I jotted these names into my notebook alongside the word Troublemaker , and said I’d look into it. Because I was the writing teacher, it was automatically assumed that I had read every leather-bound volume in the Library of Classics. The truth was that I had read none of those books, nor did I intend to. I bluffed my way through most challenges with dim memories of the movie or miniseries based upon the book in question, but it was an exhausting exercise and eventually I learned it was easier to simply reply with a question, saying, “I know what Flaubert means to me, but what do you think of her?”

As Mr. Sedaris I lived in constant fear. There was the perfectly understandable fear of being exposed as a fraud, and then there was the deeper fear that my students might hate me.

“Who are you ,” she asked. “I mean, just who in the hell are you to tell me that my story has no ending?”

It was a worthwhile question that was bound to be raised sooner or later. I’d noticed that her story had ended in mid-sentence, but that aside, who was I to offer criticism to anyone, especially in regard to writing? I’d meant to give the issue some serious thought, but there had been shirts to iron and name tags to make and, between one thing and another, I managed to put it out of my mind.

One more flush and it was all over. The thing was gone and out of my life. […] And I was left thinking that the person who'd abandoned the huge turd had no problem with it, so why did I? Why the big deal? Had it been left there to teach me a lesson? Had a lesson been learned? Did it have anything to do with Easter? I resolved to put it all behind me, and then I stepped outside to begin examining the suspects.

In the evenings, lacking anything better to do, I used to head east and stare into the windows of the handsome, single-family town houses, wondering what went on in those well-appointed rooms. What would it be like to have not only your own apartment but an entire building in which you could do whatever you wanted? I’d watch a white-haired man slipping out of his back brace and ask myself what he'd done to deserve such a privileged life. Had I been able to swap places with him, I would have done so immediately.

Somewhere along the way she’d got the idea that broke people led richer lives than everybody else, that they were nobler or more intelligent. In an effort to keep me noble, she was paying me less than she’d paid her previous assistant. Half my paychecks bounced, and she refused to reimburse me for my penalty charges, claiming that it was my bank’s fault, not hers.

Moving people from one place to another made me feel as though I performed a valuable service, recognized and appreciated by the city at large. In the grand scheme of things, I finally had a role to play. My place was not with Valencia but here, riding in a bread truck with my friends.

I was mortified, but Bonnie was in a state of almost narcotic bliss, overjoyed to have discovered a New York without the New Yorkers. Here were out-of-town visitors from Omaha and Chattanooga, outraged over the price of their hot roasted chestnuts. […] The crowd was relentlessly, pathologically friendly, and their enthusiasm was deafening. Looking around her, Bonnie saw a glittering paradise filled with decent, like-minded people, sent by God to give the world a howdy. Encircled by her army of angels, she drifted across the avenue to photograph a juggler, while I hobbled off toward home, a clear outsider in a city I’d foolishly thought to call my own.

My father has always placed a great deal of importance on his daughters’ physical beauty. It is, to him, their greatest asset, and he monitors their appearance with the intensity of a pimp. What can I say? He was born a long time ago and is convinced that marriage is a woman’s only real shot at happiness.

Before beginning school, there’d been no shutting me up, but now I was convinced that everything I said was wrong. [...]

My only comfort was the knowledge that I was not alone. Huddled in the hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overheard in refugee camps.

“Sometime me cry alone at night.”

“That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. Much work and someday you talk pretty. People start love you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay.”

In communicating any religious belief, the operative word is faith , a concept illustrated by our very presence in that classroom. Why bother struggling with the grammar lessons of a six-year-old if each of us didn't believe that, against all reason, we might eventually improve? If I could hope to one day carry on a fluent conversation, it was a relatively short leap to believing that a rabbit might visit my home in the middle of the night, leaving behind a handful of chocolate kisses and a carton of menthol cigarettes. So why stop there? If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt? I told myself that despite her past behavior, my teacher was a kind and loving person who had only my best interests at heart. I accepted the idea that an omniscient God had cast me in his own image and that he watched over me and guided me from one place to the next. The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and the countless miracles—my heart expanded to encompass all the wonders and possibilities of the universe.

A bell, though—that’s fucked up.

I asked myself, Who wants to be handcuffed and covered in human feces? And then, without even opening my address book, I thought of three people right off the bat. This frightened me, but apparently it’s my own private phobia. I found no listing for those who fear they know too many masochists. Neither did I find an entry for those who fear the terrible truth that their self-worth is based entirely on the completion of a daily crossword puzzle. Because I can’t seem to find it anywhere, I’m guaranteed that such a word actually exists. It will undoubtedly pop up in some future puzzle, the clue being “You, honestly.”

People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American. France isn’t even my country, but there I was, deciding that these people needed to be sent back home, preferably in chains. In disliking them, I was forced to recognize my own pretension, and that made me hate them even more.

My brain wants nothing to do with reason. It never has. If I was told to vacate my apartment by next week, I wouldn’t ask around or consult the real estate listings. Instead, I’d just imagine myself living in a moated sugar-cube castle, floating from room to room on a king-size magic carpet. If I have one saving grace, it’s that I’m lucky enough to have found someone willing to handle the ugly business of day-to-day living.

Hugh consoled me, saying, “Don’t let it get to you. There are plenty of things you’re good at.”

When asked for some examples, he listed vacuuming and naming stuffed animals. He says he can probably come up with a few more, but he’ll need some time to think.

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