74 pages • 2 hours read
Me Talk Pretty One Day
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Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part One
Chapter 7 Summary: The Learning Curve
Sedaris is hired as a poorly paid writing instructor despite having no prior experience teaching writing. His teaching style is comprised of activities such as Celebrity Corner where students share celebrity related news or Pillow Talk where students share stories of romance and sexual encounters. When he does not know what to do, he shows taped episodes of One Life to Live. Soon, student complaints about his teaching style make their way to administration. Sedaris speculates that one of the complaints comes from an older student he refers to as “the returning student.” In one class, “the returning student” confronts Sedaris’s unsatisfactory critique of her work by demanding that he explain his authority. Sedaris responds, “I am the only one who is paid to be in this room” (93). Another student asks how much he is paid. When he responds, the students all burst into laughter.
Chapter 8 Summary: Big Boy
Sedaris goes to Easter Sunday dinner with his sister Amy at their mutual friend, John’s place in Chicago. There, he encounters a large brown turd in the bathroom. He attempts to flush the turd unsuccessfully, sending him on a panicked spiral to rid the evidence or else be mistakenly identified as the one who left the turd there in the first place. He considers several solutions such as throwing the turd out the window (impossible because of the people picnicking outside) or taking a shower to thwart suspicion about the length of time he has been spending in the bathroom. When someone knocks on the door, he manages to successfully break apart the turd with the plunger and flush it. However, the length of time he has spent in the bathroom has already incriminated him.
Chapter 9 Summary: The Great Leap Forward
When young Sedaris is not coveting the townhouses that he cannot afford in New York City, he is working as a personal assistant for a wealthy Colombian woman, Valencia. Valencia has him perform outrageous tasks such as pursuing an exotic bird for a cash reward. After failing to capture several pigeons Valencia insists are the missing bird, Sedaris is gradually laid off. One day, while helping Valencia’s friend move into an apartment, he gets a job offer from a man named Patrick, who decides to hire him as a mover with his company. While working with Patrick, he learns of his Marxist communist views, which shed light on the wealth disparity they encounter as movers helping people across different social strata move to their new places.
Chapter 7-9 Analysis
In chapters 7-9, Sedaris experiences various forms of social conflict. These social conflicts range from minor social errors such as dealing with an unflushed turd in a bathroom during a dinner party to graver tensions such as Sedaris’s relationship to wealth in New York City. As sardonic humor and tone characterize many of the essays in this book, the range of social conflicts Sedaris experiences are all elevated to the same level of high drama for comedic effect.
Each chapter deploys amplification of a circumstance, leading to a portrayal of the absurdity of the situation as well as Sedaris’s imagination. In chapter 7, Sedaris issues an ill-informed writing assignment to his students, prompting them to write a letter to their mother in prison. When one student confesses she has family in prison and that the assignment upsets her, Sedaris amplifies his error by imagining a scenario where the student’s incarcerated father receives a letter from her in the mail. In the scenario, the father reads his daughter’s written account of her writing class and declares that Sedaris is an “asshole” (87). In chapter 8, Sedaris imagines a variety of solutions to resolve the turd that would not flush in the bathroom. After scheming to throw the turd out the window, he runs through several scenarios in which he would get caught, finally declaring, “I was trapped” (98). The sentiment is an exaggeration of his circumstance, a gesture to the absurdity of his thought process. In chapter 8, Sedaris imagines the arduous task of moving boxes up and down several flights of stairs, “I’d pretend to be an ant assigned to transport sandwich crumbs back to my colony” (112). By amplifying the significance of his labor through this comparison, he attempts to ascribe greater meaning to menial and monotonous work.
Wealth is a major theme of chapters 7 and 9, which highlight several of Sedaris’s underpaid jobs. As a writing instructor, Sedaris notes that his position became available when “the scheduled professor found a better-paying job delivering pizza” (84). While this may be true, Sedaris’s comparison of teaching (what one considers to be highly skilled work) with menial labor suggests that the former work is undervalued. The low pay of teaching situates Sedaris in a comical position where he lacks training and authority in the classroom that comes with experience. His salary is also the punchline at the end of chapter 7 when he reveals to his students how much he makes, and they regard the number (hidden from the reader) with loud laughter.
Chapter 9’s title, “The Great Leap Forward” refers to a social economic plan installed by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China. The plan favored agricultural collectives with the promise of social and economic progress that inevitably failed. The aspirations and failure of the plan mirrors Sedaris’s hopes for wealth in the chapter. Sedaris aspires to own a townhouse in New York City and finds himself no closer to it in the end despite myriad job hurdles.
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