Synopses & Reviews
Here are more scathingly funny tales from the wild side! Laurie Notaro survived the debauched ride of her twenties and the bumpy road to matrimony. Now shes ready to take on the thirtysomething years . . . and
almost middle age has never been more hilarious.
Laurie is married, mortgaged, and now—miraculously—employed in the corporate world, discovering that bosses come in all shapes, sizes, and degrees of mental stability. After maxing out her last good credit card at Banana Republic, shes dressed for success and ready to face the jungle: surviving feral, six-foot-plus Gretchen (“Three Thousand Faces of Eve”) before battling the overbearing, overstuffed (in way-too-small pants) new mom Suzzi, who ruthlessly cancels Lauries newspaper column and learns that payback can be a bitch. Laurie also explores the backstabbing world of preschoolers at a Halloween party, the X-rated madness of a family trip to Disneyland, and the pressure from her QVC-addicted mother and the rest of the world to reproduce. But while losing more friends to babies than to booze, she realizes theres a plus side: at least for a couple of months she gets to be the thinner friend.
I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) is Laurie Notaro at her deliciously quirky best. Can a woman prone to what her loved ones might term “meltdowns” (she considers them “Opportunities to Enlighten”) put a smile on her face and love everybody? Take a guess.
Review
"[A] hilarious follow-up to her book The Autobiography of a Fat Bride....Notaro offers up a humorous slice of her life with each chapter." The Oregonian
Synopsis
Just as Idiot Girls explored Laurie Notaro's debauched ride of her twenties, and Fat Bride looked at her shaky transition to the thirties, I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) stares down the mid-thirties. Or, in other words, what Laurie's mother takes an almost sinister pleasure in calling, "Way past middle age, you know, unless you're Methuselah a demon or a Styrofoam cup." In side-splitting essays, Laurie describes the horror of entering the corporate work force, the total gross-out of high-protein diets, her grandmother's obsession with Lifetime TV, her husband's obsession with Kate Winslet, and the total exhilaration and totally unexpected self-consciousness brought on by the publication of her first book. So there you have it. Laurie at totally not middle age, honest and truly, except in her mother's eyes. Laurie, still, essentially, in the bloom of youth, but experiencing the puzzling and disturbing occurrence of getting a pimple in the crease of one of her newly discovered wrinkles. The first of Laurie's books to consist of entirely original material none of it has appear in column form I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) is without doubt her strongest and funniest yet.
Synopsis
In side-splitting essays, Notaro describes such things as the horror of entering the corporate work force, the total gross-out of high-protein diets, and the total exhilaration and self-consciousness brought on by publishing her first book.