Hello my literature friends, welcome back for another week of chaotic writing goodness. Thanks for being here with me. If you like what you read, feel free to share it amongst your friends! Maybe they're looking for reading chaos sprinkled with memes, too.
Anyways, sentiment aside, I’m talking about chaos because I am deliberately changing my blog plans. I have a schedule with an interior logic that I mostly adhere to, but because I’m chaotic and it’s my blog and I can do whatever I want, I decided to completely change it up this week.
Like I mentioned Friday in my weekly roundup, I’m in heavy teaching mode right now. And it occurred to me that you, my internet friends, might be interested in some of the insights I share in class. Maybe I’m delusional, but hey! It’s worth a shot and you can let me know whether this type of thing appeals to you or not.
Enter: Reading like a Writer. Or, how to ruin every book you will ever read.
One of the first things we’re taught in an MFA program is how to read like a writer. It’s something a little nebulous, but you probably already have some of the skills from just being an avid reader. But today, I thought I’d take you through a piece I used in my memoir class and dissect why it works. So buckle up everyone, class is in session.
First, no writing class is complete without the reading. And since I’m springing this on you, here’s your assignment: to read this wonderfully ludicrous piece by David Sedaris, author of Me Talk Pretty One Day, and other general enjoyable absurdities. We’re reading the title essay, found here.
Ok, have you done the reading yet? Great! If not, spoilers ahead.
I was first introduced to David Sedaris, and this essay collection in particular, as a senior in high school. My AP Lit teacher read aloud essays from Sedaris’s work if we had finished all of our other classwork. Needless to say, his performance and our stress addled brains meant that we found this utterly hilarious and it is a high school memory I still treasure.1
So, what did you notice? The length? The topic? How much you laughed? (I really hope you laughed.) I hope you noticed that David Sedaris is a great humorist and does so effortlessly.
Why is that though? I’d argue that Sedaris establishes a few things up front:
The narrowness of the scope. Aka, he’s telling a story about one specific thing, his French language classes, and not trying to tell us War and Peace. Our expectations are therefore limited from the get-go.
The ‘fish out of water’ premise. From the first line, we know that Sedaris is “[a]t the age of forty-one…returning to school and having to think of myself…as a true debutant.”2
We’re already expecting from the first paragraph that we’re going to get a somewhat absurd story. The mere implication of a forty-one year old man in a classroom tips us off.
But further on, what’s this? Sensory details?
"If you have not meismslsxp by this time, you should not be in this room. Has everybody apzkiubjxow? Everyone? Good, we shall proceed." She spread out her lesson plan and sighed, saying, "All right, then, who knows the alphabet?"3
Sensory details are what makes writing sing - and Sedaris is throwing in auditory details right here. We now empathize with him as a language learner trying to understand a language that he doesn’t know - that gobbledygook is what foreign languages *do* sound like to beginner ears. This is the part that stays with me - because I first heard this essay and not read it, I have a vivid image of my English teacher making absurd noises, therefore making the story all the funnier.
Now, this is where we get a bit meta. This essay is what is called memoir. Maybe you’ve heard of it, maybe not. Either way, that’s ok. Memoir, unlike autobiography, is not telling your whole life story. No, it’s telling only a small bit of it, and usually in a very literary way.
The rub with memoir is that other ‘mem’ word - memory. Human memories are fickle things, and how do we get around that without deceiving our reader? What if we *don’t* remember every single detail about a particular life event? Sedaris deals with this up front:
I've spent some time in Normandy, and I took a monthlong French class last summer in New York. I'm not completely in the dark, yet I understood only half of what this teacher was saying.4
Sedaris is telling us up front that his memory is unreliable here - because he couldn’t understand all of what was being said. As a reader, I can relate. My own interactions in France include many similar misadventures. Conversely, by admitting that he cannot be fully telling the truth, Sedaris has earned my trust. I know I’m just getting a story, then, not a factual recitation of his French classes. Sedaris is not a journalist, after all, and we’re not fact checkers.
Further on, there’s another neat trick he pulls with his language usage. Let’s take a look:
My only comfort was the knowledge that I was not alone. Huddled in the smoky hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overheard in refugee camps.
"Sometimes me cry alone at night."
"That is common for me also, but be more strong, you. Much work, and someday you talk pretty. People stop hate you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay?"5
So, what’s going on here? Two things:
Sedaris is approximating the conversations with his fellow students in their elementary French, thereby illustrating how limited their vocabulary was and
He writes these conversations in English. They didn’t happen in English - they happened in French. But to a (presumably) American or English speaking audience, that wouldn’t fly, so English translation it is. Plus, it’s funnier to see how grammatically strained their admissions are.
Why is this important? Here’s my two cents:
Our brains do weird things to our memories. Much like Inside Out illustrates to us, our brains choose which memories to store into our long term memory, and which memories to chuck into the garbage bin. I’m no scientist, but I’m pretty sure I’m right.
In my case, all of my memories from my time in France are in English. I *know* this is false. I spoke English with friends, but every interaction I had with my host family was in French. And yet I remember them in English! What brain trickery is this?!
Because Sedaris is framing his essay as a deliberate retelling of his experiences, he can play around with memory. We know the conversations weren’t happening in English, yet can laugh along with how they might have sounded in French. He’s also capturing the insanity of learning a new language - and all the mistranslations and mental gymnastics our brains go through to do so. It makes the climax of Sedaris’s story all the sweeter when he realizes that he actually *can* understand what’s going on:
Over time, it became impossible to believe that any of us would ever improve. Fall arrived, and it rained every day. It was mid-October when the teacher singled me out, saying, "Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section." And it struck me that, for the first time since arriving in France, I could understand every word that someone was saying.
Understanding doesn't mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Far from it. It's a small step, nothing more, yet its rewards are intoxicating and deceptive. The teacher continued her diatribe, and I settled back, bathing in the subtle beauty of each new curse and insult.
"You exhaust me with your foolishness and reward my efforts with nothing but pain, do you understand me?"
The world opened up, and it was with great joy that I responded, "I know the thing what you speak exact now. Talk me more, plus, please, plus."6
Is this story entirely accurate? Probably not - but who cares! I get the point either way - and I haven’t even touched on the insanity of Sedaris’s French teacher. Through his retelling, I understand what it’s like to be in this particular French classroom with this particular French teacher. We can assume that Sedaris heightened some of these exchanges for comedic effect, but I’m also convinced that this is what it felt like for him at the time. Sedaris has told this story with enough truth that I believe him.
To conclude today’s lesson, Sedaris does a great job of choosing sensory details to not only enhance the situational oddity but also to gain our empathy as readers, playing on the fickleness of memory, and playing up the language details to emphasize his point. There’s a mini story arc, too, a real beginning, middle and end, even though the story is no more than 3 pages long. It’s proof positive that you can still tell a great story without needing to break the bank.
I have used one too many cliches today, so I’ll wrap this up. I hope this was helpful to you on your journey to become a chaotic reader, and I wish you the best in your reading journeys. Let me know if you’d like to see more of these literature breakdowns, and I can throw them into the rotation along with *squints at notes* whatever else pops into my brain. Ta-ta-for-now!
Shout out to Mr. Scanlon.
https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a1419/talk-pretty-0399/
Yay!! I’m actually using footnotes properly!! Don’t expect this to last.
Ibid.
Still ibid.
Rinse, repeat.
Once more for good measure:
https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a1419/talk-pretty-0399/
I overcite, if you haven’t already noticed by now.