Me Talk Pretty One Day Sedaris Summary

Essay 4: Sedaris Essay Me Talk Pretty One Day, published in 2000, is a best selling collection of essays by American humorist David Sedaris. Divided into two parts, David Sedaris 's work represents a collection of personal essays on the subject of his personal life. The first part consists of essays about Sedaris’s life before his move to Normandy, France while the second section, "Deux", tells of Sedaris’s move to Normandy with his partner Hugh. In Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris writes about his father’s passion for jazz music, his “Rooster” brother, Paul, and his “Shiny diamond” sister, Amy. In the story “Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities”, David Sedaris describes his father’s love for jazz music. The structural form of the story, that Sedaris creates, begins with a vignette of his own father’s passion for jazz. “My father loves jazz and has an extensive collection of records and reel-to-reel tapes he used to enjoy after returning home from work” (16), Sedaris writes. The reader gets the image of a middle-aged IBM
Throughout Amy 's life her father relentlessly monitors her physical appearance with the "intensity of a pimp" (133), he believes that a woman 's physical beauty is her greatest asset. Amy is naturally a strong independent woman and in response to her father 's "vigilance and pressure" (133) she decides not to be angry with her father, but simply to get even. Amy is naturally beautiful and she pretends to have gained weight and wears make-up to appear as a battered woman in a magazine photo shoot. Amy also subjects her father to practical jokes attempting to make him look like a fool. Sedaris uses irony and sarcasm throughout this dark essay. Amy emerges as a complex and obscure character that endlessly manipulates her well-meaning father, thus the reader sympathizes greatly with him and not with