74 pages • 2 hours read
David SedarisMe Talk Pretty One Day
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 14-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part Deux
Chapter 14 Summary: See You Again Yesterday
Sedaris recalls his initial courtship with his partner, Hugh. The two meet when Sedaris borrows Hugh’s twelve-foot ladder. Sedaris believes that only wealthy people in New York City can possess a twelve-foot ladder, which is confirmed when he arrives at Hugh’s SoHo loft and learns that he also owns a place in Normandy, France. Sedaris is determined to make Hugh his boyfriend by channeling the determination of soap opera characters. He eventually succeeds.
Hugh invites Sedaris to go with him to Normandy one summer, which Sedaris declines out of fear of how he might be treated as an American in France. Resolving to overcome this fear, he travels to France with Hugh the following summer, knowing only the French word for “bottleneck.” In the following summers, he gets into the practice of learning new words each day though his vocabulary consists of mainly uncommon words such as “exorcism” (162) and “face swelling” (163). By the end of his sixth trip to France, he has collected enough French vocabulary with the help of locals in the surrounding village to reach a satisfactory level of fluency.
Sedaris concludes the chapter by remarking upon how the rapid changes to New York City has led him to fantasize about moving to France permanently with Hugh. There, he argues, he can achieve a level of comfort in the country “where, when frustrated, I can lie, saying I never wanted to come here in the first place” (164).
Chapter 15 Summary: Me Talk Pretty One Day
At the age of forty-one, Sedaris returns to school to study French in Paris. Before this, he had only summers in Normandy and a French class he took in New York City for base knowledge. In Paris, his French class is led by a verbally abusive teacher who instills fear into the diverse group of students. She interrogates a cheery Yugoslavian student about her country’s war and uses the English she knows to tell Sedaris, “I hate you” (170). The panicked students in the class study harder to avoid her abuses. Sedaris puts in extra effort on every assignment despite the increasing harshness of her critiques. One day, his teacher says to him, “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section” (171). Despite the cruelty of her insult, Sedaris is surprised to find that he understands every word. He acknowledges that understanding a language is only a small step to fluency; he must do more work to fully participate in French life, and he’s willing to endure her insults in the meantime.
Chapter 16 Summary: Jesus Shaves
Sedaris’s French class discusses the use of the personal pronoun “one” in relation to Bastille Day and Easter. When a Moroccan student asks for others to define Easter, the class struggles with its limited French to describe the religious events that inform the holiday, haphazardly interpreting Jesus as one who “live[s] with your father” and whose death means “we be sad” (176). Sedaris considers his religious life growing up Greek Orthodox and Protestant where all holidays have become a hybrid mix of the two religious practices. He recalls, for instance, his family tradition of raising red eggs in the air, a blend of whimsical Easter egg painting with the symbolic drinking of Christ’s blood. When tasked to explain Easter to the class, he offers that a rabbit delivers chocolate. His teacher informs him that in France, it is a bell that makes those deliveries. This knowledge troubles Sedaris, leading him to question his other beliefs, such as faith in his own improvement in the French language, trust that his French teacher is a nice person beneath her cruelty, and belief in God. He concludes by stating that he is open to all belief, but humorously reveals that the one belief he cannot get behind is the idea of a bell delivering chocolate.
Chapters 14-16 Analysis
Chapters 14-16 take place primarily in France, a country that Sedaris becomes familiar with through his partner, Hugh. Sedaris’s entry into France incites within him a new social consciousness where he is suddenly aware of his status as an American citizen. He confronts his own stereotypes of French snobbery, realizing that American exceptionalism has fed into these assumptions. He says, “Everyday we’re told we’re 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!’” (156)
This awareness is also connected to Sedaris’s growing humility as an awkward student of the French language. Whereas his proficiency in English has permitted him his characteristic wit, he struggles to fit his unique interests and personality into his acquisition of French. In one of his earlier trips to France, he notes, “I’d manage to retain three hundred nouns, none of which proved to be the least bit useful” (163). Thinking that he can personalize his language study, his vocabulary consists for some time of mainly medical terms and gossip magazine phrases. When it becomes clear that it is not enough, he pushes himself into more rigorous study, leading him to take a French class in Paris.
Chapter 15, “Me Talk Pretty One Day” shares its title with the name of the book. It references a scene in the chapter where Sedaris and his French classmates are gathered outside of class, collectively lamenting their teacher’s difficulty. One classmate attempts to console another in broken French, “Much work and someday you talk pretty” (171). The chapter and book title revises the classmate’s grammatically awkward sentiment to express a desire for fluency, communication, and connection for the future. While sardonic humor characterizes Sedaris’s voice, the reference to this sentiment in the chapter and book title suggests a subtle tenderness behind his sometimes cutting, observational humor.
Chapter 16 explores faith, a subject that the title “Jesus Shaves” puns on, establishing a humorous tone to the chapter’s ensuing discussion. In the chapter, Sedaris’s French class attempts to explain a Christian tradition to a Moroccan Muslim student. The explanation goes awry, partly due to the lack of fluency in French vocabulary but also a general lack of understanding of the practice despite its ritualistic influence in the students’ lives. Sedaris describes the inadequacy of their explanation as something “that would have given the Pope an aneurysm” (177). Sedaris attempts to connect religious ritual back to belief through the culturally variant symbols of Easter in the rabbit and the bell. In considering their difference, he begins to enlarge his beliefs about people’s goodness and God, stating with hope, “my heart expanded to encompass all the wonders and possibilities of the universe” (179). This warm sentiment is thwarted by the concluding punchline where Sedaris confesses that everything is possible except for the French bell, which he says is just “fucked up” (179).
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