Don't get David Sedaris started: “I moved to France so I could smoke in restaurants. I've said it often. I just got a letter from a woman saying "It's because of people like you that I can't go to restaurants in France.'

        “I have two words for her. Do you print those two?”

        “What two are they?” I ask.

        He answers with a famous phrase.

        “Uh, no,” I reply.

        That might be one of the stories you hear today when he reads from Me Talk Pretty One Day (Little, Brown and Company; $14.95), his best selling memoir. It's just been released in paperback.

        Mr. Sedaris, humorist, National Public Radio commentator and sometimes playwright, talks about his move to France with partner Hugh Hamrick, his hideous adventures learning French (for the first month, the only words he knew were “bottleneck” and “ashtray”) and his even more hideous adventures with a speech therapist trying to cure his lisp.

BOOK SIGNING

David Sedaris reads and signs Me Talk Pretty One Day 7 p.m. today at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Edwards and Madison roads, Norwood, 396-8960.

        Oh, and a lot about his least favorite things: Planet Hollywood T-shirts; cowboy boots; his year as a teacher; family vacations in North Carolina; guitar lessons; the need to assign gender to every French word.

        He's making fun, laughing at things, but he's also laughing at himself. Maybe as hard as the reader.

        Here's some advice for people who hate audio books: Get this one ($24.98 for four cassettes, $29.95 for five CDs with live performances of other material mixed in). There's nothing like hearing that wry, sardonic (and now almost lispless) voice explain how he developed a massive vocabulary finding synonyms for words beginning with S so he could drive his speech therapist crazy.

        Or how he developed a gigantic French vocabulary (though he barely speaks it) by memorizing 10 new words a day. “By the end of the month, I'd managed to retain 300 nouns, none of which proved a bit useful.” That might be because he picked them out of the dictionary at random — exorcism, facial swelling, death penalty, slaughterhouse, sea monster.

        Sounds like just the person who needs to answer, say, six questions.

        I'll wear cowboy boots when . . .

        Hell freezes over.

        In my film bio, I want ----- to play me . . .

        Matthew Broderick. He's who I wanted to play me in Me Talk Pretty One Day,and he's agreed to do it. The contract isn't signed, but he said yes.

        People are always surprised when I tell them . . .

        That I'm still alive. They're sure the drinking and smoking would have gotten me by now.

        One thing I still need to accomplish . . .

        Learn how to write a real play. I've written seven, but really, they're more like shows. I mean a real play like A Doll's House or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

        What surprised me most about moving to France . . .

        Frozen food. There are whole, huge stores that sell nothing else. Just frozen food.

        You forgot to ask . . .

        How much my new apartment (in Paris) cost. I love it when people ask, but you didn't, so I'm not going to tell you.

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