Me Talk Pretty One Day

Sedaris names two types of French non-native speakers—those who speak the “Easy Kind” and those who speak the “Hard Kind.” The former refuses to learn French and gets by in France by shouting in American English, a behavior he unfavorably critiques. He identifies as part of the latter group whose attempts to speak French are overrun by grammatically incorrect words and phrases.

One of Sedaris’s biggest struggles with French is the gendering of nouns as masculine and feminine, which he argues does not usually follow a gender normative logic. He struggles to understand why a chicken or a vagina is masculine, for example. It reminds him of his childhood games with his siblings where they would act out dramas by animating their food, gendering them based on the characters they take on.

Realizing that using nouns in plural form evade gendering, Sedaris begins to use plurals for all French nouns, much to Hugh’s annoyance. Hugh is outraged when Sedaris returns home from the market one day with four pounds of tomatoes. Hugh suggests that Sedaris not go to the market alone for fear that he will once again overuse plurals to buy more than one item of what they need. Sedaris concludes by saying that he is sure Hugh will eventually get used to it; if his use of plurals persists, he will likely get Hugh more than one CD player for his birthday.

Hugh’s memories of his youth seem far more interesting and adventurous than Sedaris’s suburban North Carolina upbringing. As Hugh’s father was a career officer for the U.S. State Department, Hugh was accustomed to having to move frequently as a youth, living at various times in the Congo, Ethiopia, and other countries in Africa. While Hugh relays some unpleasant memories of his transient youth, such as encountering a hung man at his local theater in Ethiopia or being evacuated from a teen club by soldiers, Sedaris is still envious of Hugh’s childhood. Hugh reveals that at one point in his high school life, his parents moved to Somalia, leaving their son behind in Ethiopia as there were no English-language schools for Hugh. During this time, Hugh lived with a family friend who treated him like a stranger. As a result, he grew accustomed to never mentioning his birthday to anyone. Hugh had to negotiate his stay in Ethiopia with a guidance counselor when his surrogate family considered moving to Germany. While the narrative of such a lonely upbringing would typically conjure sympathy, Sedaris can only display further envy. In contrast to Hugh, Sedaris’s childhood consists of more mundane markers of American suburban life, such as eating hush puppies in Morehead City. He decides to imagine his life with Hugh’s memories, fantasizing about visiting Ethiopian slaughterhouses and greeting his pet monkey.