Me Talk Pretty One Day is a collection of essays, loosely concerned with David Sedaris’ upbringing, family, formative humiliations, and eventual move to France. I say loosely because, while the essays are distinct and can be read independently, they are not random. They are connected by chronology, temperament, and a particular way of looking at the world. It is less a neat memoir, and more a book about the small lessons life has handed him, usually against his will and in front of witnesses.

Sedaris writes in a series of what I like to call Trump-isms. Sometimes someone will say something perfectly ordinary to me, and I will have a chain of eighteen interconnecting thoughts in my head, then verbalise only the nineteenth. To me, it all makes sense. To the other person, however, I have simply opened my mouth and released the ramblings of Donald Trump.

Am I saying this partly so I can put my name in the same sentence as Sedaris, Irby, Bryson, and Bourdain? Maybe. But I do think it applies here. Sedaris’ writing often feels as though we have entered the thought process halfway through. The connection between one idea and the next is not always immediately obvious, but it always exists. A childhood memory leads to a social observation, which leads to a small humiliation, which somehow leads back to the original point.

That is the trick of the whole thing. His essays feel loose, but they are, in reality, very tightly controlled. They read like stories someone tells you at a dinner party; fluid and organic, spontaneous and full of detours that seem to occur to him in the moment. But if you listen to Sedaris perform his work live, you realise how constructed it all is. Every pause, breath, and inflection seems to have been measured.

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This is also where the collection occasionally becomes repetitive. Not necessarily in subject, but in rhythm. Read one essay and the structure feels organic and natural. Read several back to back and you start to hear the metronome dictating the rhythm: there’s an odd opening premise, then a humiliating anecdote, the family eccentricity, the cruel little aside, the clean final turn. But it’s predictable in the way a stand up comedy set is predictable: just because you know there will be a set-up, a pause, and a punchline, doesn’t mean it’s not funny. A tesco meal deal is predictable too, and I have still approached one with the optimism of a Victorian orphan.

And so when a joke does catch you off guard, it lands even harder. Sedaris is at his best when the essay seems to be drifting, only for you to realise he has been steering the whole time. The humour is not just in the punchline, but in the route he takes to get there.

The book has aged in a way that reminded me slightly of Anthony Bourdain. There are moments that are clearly dated, occasionally politically incorrect. But there is also a strange charm to it, partly because Sedaris never seems especially malicious in his cruelty. He is sharp, and sometimes mean, but usually no less mean about himself than he is about anyone else. That does not excuse every line, and there were moments where I felt the age of the book quite clearly, but I also trusted the voice more than I might have in another writer. Sedaris gets away with more than he probably should because he rarely sounds like he is sneering from a safe distance. He is usually in the mess too, looking just as ridiculous as everyone else.

What Sedaris understands best is humiliation. Not grand suffering, the low-grade embarrassment of being alive around other people, and all of these anecdotes are filtered through the same basic anxiety: the horror of being seen, misunderstood, corrected, or laughed at before you have decided whether the situation is funny yourself.

That is probably why Me Talk Pretty One Day works as well as it does. It is not profound in the heavy-handed sense, and it is at its weakest when read too quickly, as though the essays are chapters in a novel rather than individual performances. But taken piece by piece, it is extremely funny, deceptively controlled, and often much sharper than it first appears. Sedaris writes like a man rambling through a story he has told a hundred times before, which sounds like an insult until you realise that is exactly why it works.

For more regular reading updates, shorter thoughts, and proof that I buy books faster than I read them, follow me on Instagram @adamkhanco.