Class and Belonging Theme Analysis

In Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris reckons with class and status, often trying to figure out how he fits into society at large. This is especially apparent in his youth and young adulthood, when class disparities feel particularly glaring because he is still in the process of establishing himself both financially and, to a certain extent, culturally. During his first few years living in New York City, for example, he acutely feels the distance between his working-class lifestyle and the wealthy, privileged existence he yearns for. However, as he grows older, his class-consciousness begins to give way to something more meaningful—namely, the desire to find a place where he can enjoy a sense of belonging. In other words, he gradually learns that, though it would perhaps be nice to have lots of money, what matters most to him is leading a life that gives him a feeling of acceptance. In turn, Sedaris’s examination of wealth and class in Me Talk Pretty One Day leads to a message about the importance of finding a sense of belonging, regardless of socioeconomic factors.  

Relatively early in Me Talk Pretty One Day, it becomes clear that Sedaris was raised in the midst of a certain kind of class-consciousness. When his family moves from New York to North Carolina, his parents go out of their way to keep him and his siblings from identifying with what they see as North Carolina’s “backward way of life.” This underscores their classist outlook on southern culture and, more generally, on working-class communities. Telling their children not to say things like “y’all” or “ma’am,” they go to great lengths to prevent Sedaris and his siblings from using the regional way of speaking. “We might not have been the wealthiest people in town, but at least we weren’t one of them,” Sedaris writes, outlining his parents’ belief that southerners who speak a certain way are worth less respect. From an early age, then, Sedaris learns to divide the world up into factions, breaking people up into categories according their socioeconomic standing.

This preoccupation with class and status later brings itself to bear on Sedaris’s life when he moves to New York City as a young adult. Instead of feeling like one of the wealthier members of his surrounding community, he can’t deny the fact that there are people in the city who are exorbitantly rich. He, on the other hand, is a young man with hardly any money to his name, despite the fact that he comes from a financially comfortable family. Lacking money in the city makes him feel a “constant, needling sense of failure,” since he is “regularly confronted by people who [have] not only more but much, much more” than him. While taking walks in the evenings, he likes to look into the windows of beautiful townhouses and wonder what it would be like to live in such luxury. As luck would have it, he gets to experience this wealth vicariously when a rich woman named Valencia hires him to be her personal assistant, allowing him to spend several days a week in her enviable townhouse. Unfortunately for him, though, this experience is quite unpleasant, largely because Valencia likes to pretend that she’s struggling financially even when it’s obvious that she’s rich. According to Sedaris, Valencia must have gotten the idea that “broke people” have better lives than anyone else, since she seems to believe that people without money are “nobler or more intelligent” than rich people. With this in mind, she haggles for money, underpays Sedaris, and generally romanticizes the idea of poverty. In turn, it becomes clear that people tend to want whatever they don’t have—even if that means idealizing financial insecurity.

Eventually, Sedaris begins to prioritize happiness over status and wealth. For instance, rather than continuing to work for Valencia so he can indirectly experience a wealthy lifestyle, he decides to work with a group of kindhearted professional movers. These men have very little money and most likely come from socioeconomic backgrounds that Sedaris’s parents would frown upon, but he realizes that he’d rather be with people who accept him and treat him nicely than spend his life around insensitive people like Valencia. “My place was not with Valencia but here, riding in a bread truck with my friends,” he writes, ultimately prioritizing a sense of belonging and acceptance over wealth and the dream of upward mobility. As he gets older, he gradually abandons his focus on wealth, moving to Paris and finding pleasure not in an extravagant lifestyle, but in the slow project of learning the French language—or, in other words, learning how to fit into a social environment he finds himself drawn to. As a result, readers see that money and wealth are faulty indicators of happiness and that contentment often has little to do with a person’s ability to climb a financial or social ladder.