One of America’s most popular essayists battles midget abilities, speech therapists and the French language.
David Sedaris’s fourth collection contains some of his sharpest and most bittersweet writing. “Go Carolina” recounts his childhood battles with a speech therapist, dispatched to cure his sibilant s, and “Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities” recalls his brushes with a midget guitar teacher, who encourages young David to think of his instrument as a beautiful women. This being North Carolina in the 1960s, young David isn’t about to explain that the beautiful woman angle doesn’t do it for him, although he does suggest “Oliver” might be a fitting name for his instrument.

Sedaris is at his best when out of his element, as in the string of essays devoted to his back-breaking attempts to learn the French language. In “See You Again Yesterday,” he bluffs his way through summers in Normandy with a growing vocabulary of disconnected and poorly chosen nouns, rapidly exhausting the semantic possibilities of “bottleneck” and “ashtray.” In the title story, a tyrannical Parisian teacher does her best to crush the spirits of a class of foreign students. The author’s breakthrough comes when he can comprehend every word of the abuse she hurls his way.

Like any good humorist, Sedaris writes to be read. His performances here lend the stories a touch of authenticity and the occasional uncanny edge. It’s one thing to read Sedaris describe his childhood obsession with singing commercial jingles in the voice of Billie Holliday, and another entirely to hear him actually do it (and surprisingly well, at that). The lightly abridged version contains 23 of the book’s stories, including a handful performed in front of a vocally appreciative audience.