Me Talk Pretty One Day

While the crossword puzzle may be a casual pastime for most people, Sedaris takes it very seriously. He starts doing crossword puzzles after witnessing a former boyfriend doing them. Believing that his former boyfriend, being exceedingly handsome, cannot not be both good-looking and smart, he is dismayed to discover that his boyfriend would do the crossword puzzle with great ease. To prove his intelligence, Sedaris wills himself to learn trivia and other miscellaneous world facts in the hope that they might appear as clues in one of his crossword puzzles. His compulsion to do well is so extreme that he makes late night long-distance calls to the U.S. while in France to get the answer to a crossword puzzle clue. He begins to study a reference book called The Order of Things, gifted to him by Amy, when he stumbles upon a list of phobias. He wonders if his obsession with crossword puzzles, specifically the connection between their completion and his self-worth, is a phobia. He jokes that since he cannot find the word for it yet, he would likely discover it in a crossword puzzle one day with the clue, “You, honestly” (203).