[AUDIOBOOK]
Me Talk Pretty One Day
by David Sedaris (Author & Narrator)
As the Buddha is said to have remarked, life is full of suffering. Yet as the adage goes, life goes on. The work of David Sedaris brings these two principles together in a strangely beautiful kind of perfection. The author has a magnificent ability to transform everyday suffering into rich entertainment. This is gallows humor at its finest.
Me Talk Pretty One Day is a collection of short stories about events in the life of David Sedaris. They capture moments of almost unbearable dread with aching poignancy. The book begins with a story about David’s time spent with his first Speech Therapist in elementary school. Young David is cagey and aware that he is well on his day towards a rather difficult experience.
Sedaris is a wonderful example of a distinctive voice, both as an author and as a speaker. While these stories are fascinating in their own right there is something especially magical about the way David Sedaris reads his work. He possesses such an individual cadence and uncommon tone quality that his manner of speech gets embedded in your imagination.
You are kept in rapt attention as each new discomfort and disappointment is revealed. Every regret, oddity and unfortunate event draws the audience in with a mixture of sympathy and curiosity. It’s a chance to indulge in the best kind rubber necking.
David leaves you with a sense that he has triumphed over his pain even if that triumph doesn’t lead to any kind of mastery. It’s a wonderful chronology of the terrible insistence of life to keep going. It teaches the lesson that while life is full of pain, none of those terrible things are going to kill you. Even no matter how much you might prefer that they did.
He presents life stripped of its usual glamour. It is terribly, terribly plain. It is raw and cold and almost unbearably real. Yet it is compelling for its unrestrained blunt honesty.
David as presented in his stories is rather petty and shallow. He is full of flaws, fear and weakness. We are given access to the kind of everyday thoughts that we filter out in polite world. Yet each story ends with a kind of peace, a kind of hope that only comes from enduring. His triumphs are meager and short-lived, but they give him just enough of a boost to keep going.
Best of all, it is just laugh out loud funny.
Overall: A
