David Sedaris books: Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

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Titles: Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Author: David Sedaris
Genre: Nonfiction
Pages: 272, 257
Counts for Year: 10, 12

I had Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day on my to-read shelf for a long time. A friend recommended it to me and I just never got to it, and now, of course, I wish I had, because it was a very good book. The book consists of a series of essays, many of them originally written for The New Yorker, in which Sedaris shares about his life. The book is split into two parts: the first part deals mostly with his childhood, the second part, with his living in France with his boyfriend, Hugh. I’ll be honest and say I much preferred the first part of the book, in which he shared about his growing up in North Carolina and upper New York State and the start of his life as a writer in New York.

The best essay in the collection, in my opinion, is called “You Can’t Kill The Rooster,” in which he writes about his brother Paul, who calls himself “The Rooster,” — “when’s he’s feeling threatened,” Sedaris explains.

Asked how he came up with that name, he says only, “Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can’t kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up sometimes, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what I’m saying?”

While the use of vulgarity might be shocking to some, I couldn’t help but laugh, because of Sedaris’ earlier description of his brother’s voice:

The Raleigh accent is soft and beautifully cadenced, but my brother’s is a more complex hybrid, informed by his professorial relationships with marble-mouthed, deep-country work crews and his abiding love of hard-core rap music. He talks so fast that even his friends have a hard time understanding him. It’s like listening to a foreigner and deciphering only shit, motherfucker, bitch and the single phrase You can’t kill the Rooster.

But by the end of the piece, we see a somewhat softer side of the Rooster, which makes Sedaris’ portrait of his brother complete. That’s the important point. No matter his bravado, of which there is much, there’s a lamb beneath this lion.

After reading this book, I went to the library to find whatever I could by Sedaris. Our library only carried two of his books, this one and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, another collection of essays.

In this one, we meet more of Sedaris’ family, but the star in my opinion was still the Rooster, who gets married in one of the essays. But beyond that, by the end of the book, I could see the original luster that I had first observed in Sedaris’ writing was beginning to wear off on me and I knew it was time for me to stop reading him, at least for a while.

Final analysis:

• Me Talk Pretty One Day: 9/10, mainly because of the essay on the Rooster, but also for his trenchant observations of his own early family life.
• Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim: 8/10, because while still good, it wasn’t as good as Me Talk Pretty One Day.

I couldn’t help but laugh after deciding that I needed to “go off” Sedaris for a while that my wife pointed out this funny post on Stuff White People Don’t Like.

If you’ve reviewed either or both of these books and would like me to link to your reviews, let me know at unfinishedperson@gmail.com.

Others’ reviews of Me Talk Pretty One Day:

• Age 30: A Year of Books
• books i done read

Others’ reviews of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim:

• books i done read
• things mean a lot

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Filed under Authors P-T, Book reviews, Books, Nonfiction, Titles A-E, Titles K-O

Tags: book reviews, Books, david sedaris, me talk pretty one day, memoir, Nonfiction