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On David Sedaris

Here is the start of an amazing story, "Me Talk Pretty One Day":


At the age of forty-one, I am returning to school and having to think of myself as what my French textbook calls "a true debutant." After paying my tuition, I was issued a student ID, which allows me a discounted entry fee at movie theaters, puppet shows, and Festyland, a far-flung amusement park that advertises with billboards picturing a cartoon stegosaurus sitting in a canoe and eating what appears to be a ham sandwich.


Sedaris thinks about the rhythm of his sentences. The punchline--"debutant," "ham sandwich"--is at the very end. But here's the thing that is really special about him. Most people would write a cute "culture clash" essay about France: "Look, Paris is really crazy!" But Sedaris understands that he has a real opportunity to write about something much more interesting, i.e., social anxiety:


I remind myself that I am now a full-grown man. No one will ever again card me for a drink or demand that I weave a floor mat out of newspapers. At my age, a reasonable person should have completed his sentence in the prison of the nervous and the insecure--isn't that the great promise of adulthood? I can't help but think that, somewhere along the way, I made a wrong turn. My fears have not vanished. Rather, they have seasoned and multiplied with age. I am now twice as frightened as I was when, at the age of twenty, I allowed a failed nursing student to inject me with a horse tranquilizer, and eight times more anxious than I was the day my kindergarten teacher pried my fingers off my mother's ankle and led me screaming toward my desk. "You'll get used to it," the woman had said.....I'm still waiting.


The humor comes from burying the lede: the casual references to "weaving a floor mat," "the failed nursing student," "the horse tranquilizer," "my mother's ankle." Then there is the writer's insight: I'm just as hopeless as I was at five. And there is an inference; Sedaris doesn't say it, because he doesn't have to say it. I'm hopeless--and I know that you're hopeless, too.


The story is therapy--and it's cheaper than "real" therapy. I'm grateful for that.
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