Me Talk Pretty One Day Genetic Engineering Summary & Analysis

Lou Sedaris is a skilled and smart man, the kind of person David Sedaris thinks could have invented the microwave “under the right circumstances.” He’s extremely competent at fixing things, but Sedaris and his siblings have learned to steer clear of him when he’s working on something because they know he’ll bore them to tears with long-winded explanations about what he’s doing. One day, Sedaris finds an old IBM advertisement in which his father is sitting next to a large computer. He asks Lou about the picture, but his father launches into an explanation about the technology that IBM was advertising, failing to answer the only thing Sedaris is curious about, which is whether or not the people who took the picture of him allowed him to wear makeup.

One noteworthy aspect of Sedaris’s relationship with his father is that Sedaris is clearly capable of appreciating Lou even though he has very little in common with him. Whereas his father likes talking about science and technology, Sedaris would rather discuss things like makeup. And yet, despite the lack of overlap between their interests, Sedaris still respects and even—to a certain extent—admires his father.

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On vacation in a beach town in North Carolina one summer, Sedaris and his sisters focus on their attempts to become the tannest person in the family. Every year, they hold a contest at the end of vacation, but they all know Gretchen will win because she’s naturally darker than all of them. Still, they and their mother try to get as much sun as possible, lying on the beach for hours at a time. While taking a break from tanning one day, Sedaris goes for a walk on the beach and finds his father standing near the water and staring at a group of fishermen. Sedaris can’t help but notice how tan these men are from working in the sun every day, but his father interrupts these thoughts by calling him over and asking him if he could estimate how many grains of sand exist in the entire world.

When Lou interrupts Sedaris’s thoughts about tanning to ask him a comedically difficult question about the number of sand grains in the entire world, readers will once more note just how different Sedaris and his father truly are from each other. Needless to say, Sedaris has no interest in trying to calculate how many grains of sand there are on earth, but he most likely knows that it’s futile to tell his father that he’d rather think about how tan the nearby fishermen are. As a result, readers see the extent to which their relationship is based on their familial connection, not on their interests.

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Sedaris is deeply uninterested in his father’s question about the number of sand grains in the world, and he inwardly laments that his father is about to explain how he might go about answering such a question. Nonetheless, there’s nothing he can do to stop Lou from going on at length and drawing an elaborate equation in the sand. As he does this, the nearby fishermen stop working and listen to him, eventually asking if he’s a tax accountant. One possible reason they ask this, Sedaris thinks, is because they don’t have much money and are no longer able to live by the ocean, having been priced out of their beachfront properties when the town became a tourist destination.

Although it isn’t always the primary focus, the topic of socioeconomic class often comes up in Me Talk Pretty One Day, as Sedaris makes sense of where he and his family fit into the world’s broader economic structures. In this moment, he makes it clear that his family is fortunate enough to vacation in a place that is clearly too expensive for many people to live in. Moreover, he hints at the tense dynamic between families like his and people like these fishermen, whose lives have been upended by a sudden influx of wealth into the surrounding community—an influx of wealth brought on by people like the Sedarises.

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One of the fishermen asks Lou Sedaris, “If I got paid twelve thousand dollars in 1962 for a half-acre beachfront lot, how much would that be worth per grain of sand by today’s standard?” Without hesitation, Lou says that this is an interesting question and sets to work trying to solve it, drawing a new equation in the sand. As he lectures the fishermen in this manner, Sedaris stands there wondering if the light bouncing off the water will tan the underside of his chin and help him win the pageant with his sisters at the end of their vacation.

Lou Sedaris fails to register the fisherman’s thinly veiled criticism when he actually tries to answer the man’s question about the monetary value of a grain of sand. Instead of recognizing that this man is chastising him for coming into the area and making it harder for working-class families to survive, Lou focuses on actually trying to answer this facetious question. Meanwhile, Sedaris tunes out and thinks about an entirely different matter, once more proving just how little he identifies with his father’s interests (though he is, it seems, capable of recognizing the awkward social and class dynamics that his father is apparently unable pick up on).

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Me Talk Pretty One Day: Genetic Engineering Summary & Analysis