“THE INEVITABLE finally happened,” writes David Sedaris in his diary entry of April 6, 1999. “My French teacher faxed Andy at Esquire saying my articlehas had the effect of a bomb at the Alliance Française.” That piece, which became the title essay of Sedaris’s 2000 collection Me Talk Pretty One Day, tells of the French classes he took at that cultural institution’s Paris headquarters. It gives a starring role to his fearsome instructor, a fount of pronouncements translating to “You exhaust me with your foolishness and reward my efforts with nothing but pain” and “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.”
She even breaks the classroom’s French-only rule in order to chastise Sedaris all the more harshly: “‘I hate you,’ she said to me one afternoon. Her English was flawless. ‘I really, really hate you.’ Call me sensitive, but I couldn’t help taking it personally.” While she does, on occasion, single Sedaris out for lavish praise — “Bravo,” she once shouts, taking his hand and holding it up high, when he correctly answers a trick question about the passé composé — she also displays a penchant for hurling insults as well as pieces of chalk at her students, and she makes more than one declaration of hatred. “I had used falloir in the subjunctive rather than the imparfait,” he reflects after enduring another, “so I guess I deserved it.”
Traumatic though they may sound, Sedaris’s learning experiences under this manic figure, first written down in his diary which in turn provided material for the Esquire piece and others, fueled one of the bursts of popularity that has made him the best-known humorous essayist writing in English today. Still, as the class comes to its end, he confides in one entry that he wishes he’d never published his account. “I meant it at the time, but since then things have changed. She’s still moody, but I think she’s a good teacher. I can see that now, whereas I couldn’t before.” He regrets having “failed to mention her wit, and her skill as a teacher. That is what I have to apologize for, my laziness.”
Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.