Every glimpse we get of Sedaris's family and acquaintances delivers laughs and insights. He thwarts his North Carolina speech therapist ("for whom the word pen had two syllables") by cleverly avoiding all words with s sounds, which reveal the lisp she sought to correct. His midget guitar teacher, Mister Mancini, is unaware that Sedaris doesn't share his obsession with breasts, and sings "Light My Fire" all wrong--"as if he were a Webelo scout demanding a match." As a remarkably unqualified teacher at the art Institute of Chicago, Sedaris had his class watch soap operas and assign "guessays" on what would happen in the next day's episode.

It all adds up to the most distinctively skewed autobiography since Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia. The only possible reason not to read this book is if you'd rather hear the author's intrinsically funny speaking voice narrating his story. In that case, get Me Talk Pretty One Day on audio. --Tim Appelo --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Amazon.com Audiobook Review
"It's a pretty grim world when I can't even feel superior to a toddler." Welcome to the curious mind of David Sedaris, where dogs outrank children, guitars have breasts, and French toddlers unmask the inadequacies of the American male. Sedaris inhabits this world as a misanthrope chronicling all things petty and small. In Me Talk Pretty One Day Sedaris is as determined as ever to be nobody's hero--he never triumphs, he never conquers--and somehow, with each failure, he inadvertently becomes everybody's favorite underdog. The world's most eloquent malcontent, Sedaris has turned self-deprecation into a celebrated art form--one that is perhaps best experienced in audio. "Go Carolina," his account of "the first battle of my war against the letter s" is particularly poignant. Unable to disguise the lisp that has become his trademark, Sedaris highlights (to hilarious extent) the frustration of reading "childish s-laden texts recounting the adventures of seals or settlers named Sassy or Samuel." Including 23 of the book version's 28 stories, two live performances complete with involuntary laughter, and an uncannily accurate Billie Holiday impersonation, the audio is more than a companion to the text; it stands alone as a performance piece--only without the sock monkeys. (Running time: 5 hours, 4 cassettes) --Daphne Durham --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Despite the novel's success, Lee, as is widely known, never published another book; instead, she retreated to her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., where she has given few interviews since 1964. In the eyes of the public, she has long become nearly as invisible as her indelible shut-in, Boo Radley, though she recently gave an interview to the New York Times and wrote a short essay for O magazine.

Now we have Charles J. Shields's Mockingbird, the first book-length treatment of her life. An unauthorized biography, it relies largely on interviews and "other sorts of communication" with Lee's acquaintances to trace her life from childhood through the publication of the novel and the years following, during which Lee struggled to write a second book. Mockingbird is less a biography than, as its subtitle claims, "a portrait," and like all portraits, it is highly subjective. More dogged than shrewd, it is hardly the definitive treatment Lee merits, nor is it a particularly perceptive argument about the place of To Kill a Mockingbird in American literature. (Shields has also written biographies for young adults.) However, it usefully and often entertainingly compiles and organizes information about Lee's life and offers a plausible answer to the question that preoccupies so many readers: Why did Lee never write another book -- and why did she retreat from the public?

For Shields, the answer lies in Lee's birthplace and in her paradoxical personality. Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, a small town in which everyone knew each other's business. She was a saucy yet shy child. Her father, like Atticus Finch, was a lawyer with a civic-minded bent that he instilled in his three daughters and one son -- though, as Shields points out, Lee's father was long a supporter of segregation. Her mother was an invalid, who, it seems, suffered either from manic depression or an undiagnosed mental illness; she did very little mothering of Nelle, who was largely left to a maid's ministrations (much as Scout is in To Kill a Mockingbird).

In what proved to be a crucial event, the shy but saucy Lee met Truman Capote one summer when the 5-year-old boy was living with his aunts next door. Bonded by what Capote called their "apartness," the children began to write stories on an Underwood typewriter Lee's father gave them.

The portrait that emerges from Shields's research in Mockingbird is of a tomboyish young woman with little tolerance for pretension; she was remembered by one classmate as a "deflater of phoniness." In 1949, after giving up on getting a law degree at the University of Alabama (where she made few friends but sharpened her wit writing a column for the university newspaper titled "Caustic Comment"), Lee moved to New York to follow in Capote's footsteps. Capote had already published a novel and -- always the more outgoing of the two -- he introduced her around town, but many of his friends found her dull. "Here was this dumpy girl from Monroeville. We didn't think she was up to much. She said she was writing a book and that was that," one recalled. Lee struggled to make a living until, with the financial assistance of Joy and Michael Brown, two artists whom she met through Capote, she sat down to write the novel that became To Kill a Mockingbird.

Shields deftly shows that Lee's editor, Tay Hohoff, was instrumental not only in getting the novel published but in shaping it into the book it is today. As Hohoff put it, "The editorial call to duty was plain." Lee needed "professional help in organizing her material and developing a sound plot structure."

Mockingbird is best where it deflates rumor and hearsay and fills in a more accurate picture of the woman. Shields makes a convincing case that Lee, a standoffish, stubborn woman invested in precision, became too "overwhelmed" by the success of her first novel to finish any of her subsequent efforts. (Her sister told a reporter that Lee's second book, about hunting deer, was stolen shortly before completion, but the story rings false.) For Lee, he observes, writing was always about capturing the everyday nuances of Southern small-town life she knew so well -- and, in her own way, loved; when she became famous, her relationship to that world was permanently altered.

Shields persuasively demonstrates that, despite widespread rumors, it's highly unlikely that Capote had anything to do with To Kill a Mockingbird. Rather, Shields shows that Lee actually contributed more to Capote's In Cold Blood than is commonly thought, writing several hundred pages of notes on which Capote heavily relied.

Even so, Mockingbird fails to offer as nuanced a portrait of Lee as one would hope for or to cast much literary insight on To Kill a Mockingbird. In the absence of reliable data from which to forge a coherent narrative, Shields follows his research down many a cul de sac and pads out trivial details (a whole page is dedicated to the movies that were nominated for various Oscars in 1962) while giving short shrift to complicated questions: Is To Kill a Mockingbird a great novel or a sentimental, didactic one? Was Lee really a brilliant writer or an average one who, with great diligence and the support system of a talented editor and agent, was able to shape a highly autobiographical story that hit a cultural nerve in the years leading up to the civil rights movement?

Readers who love To Kill a Mockingbird will want to read this book for its tidbits of engaging info. But in the end, this is less a rigorous biography than a pleasant evocation of how one fiercely private woman was perceived by those around her. As such, it reminds us that a biography is, always, a fiction in its own right.

Reviewed by Meghan O'Rourke
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.