A laugh-out-loud spin on the realities, perks, opportunities, and inevitable courses of midlife.
Laurie Notaro has proved everyone wrong: she didn’t end up in rehab, prison, or cremated at a tender age. She just went gray. At past fifty, every hair’s root is a symbol of knowledge (she knows how to use a landline), experience (she rode in a car with no seat belts), and superpowers (a gray-haired lady can get away with anything).
Though navigating midlife is initially upsetting—the cracking noises coming from her new old body, receiving regular junk mail from mortuaries—Laurie accepts it. And then some. With unintentional abandon, she shoplifts a bag of russet potatoes. Heckles a rude driver from her beat-up Prius. And engages in epic trolling on Nextdoor.com. That, says Laurie, is the brilliance of growing older. With each passing day, you lose an equivalent amount of fear.
And the #1 New York Times bestselling author has never been so fearlessly funny as she is in this empowering, candid, and enlightening memoir about living life on the other side of fifty.
Ten thousand feet in the sky, aviatrixes from London to Paris to New York-fueled by determination and courage-have their eyes on the century's biggest prize. The year is 1927, and Amelia Earhart has not yet made her record-breaking cross-Atlantic flight. Who will follow in Charles Lindbergh's footsteps and make her own history? Three women's names are splashed daily across the front page: Elsie Mackay, daughter of an Earl, is the first Englishwoman to get her pilot's license. Mabel Boll, a glamorous society darling and former cigar girl, is ardent to make the historic flight. Beauty pageant contestant Ruth Elder uses her winnings for flying lessons and becomes the preeminent American girl of the sky. Inspired by true events and real people, Notaro vividly evokes this exciting time as her determined heroines vie for the record. With meticulous research and atmospheric prose, Notaro brings Elsie, Mabel, and Ruth to life, pulling us back in time as the pilots collide, struggle, and literally crash in the chase for fame and a place in aviation history.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Laurie Notaro isn't exactly a domestic goddess-unless that means she fully embraces her genetic hoarding predisposition, sneaks peeks at her husband's daily journal, or has made a list of the people she wants on her Apocalypse Survival team (her husband's not on it). Notaro chronicles her chronic misfortune in the domestic arts, including cooking, cleaning, and putting on Spanx while sweaty (which should technically qualify as an Olympic sport). Housebroken is a rollicking new collection of essays showcasing her irreverent wit and inability to feel shame from defying nature in the quest to make her own Twinkies, to begging her new neighbors not to become urban livestock keepers, to teaching her eight-year-old nephew about hoboes.
Everyone's favorite Idiot Girl, Laurie Notaro, is just trying to find the right fit, whether it's in the adorable blouse that looks charming on the mannequin but leaves her in a literal bind or in her neighborhood after she's shamefully exposed at a holiday party by delivering a low-quality rendition of "Jingle Bells." Notaro makes misstep after riotous misstep as she tries (and catastrophically fails) to gain some ground—delightfully whipping up butter-laden cupcakes for the local vegan kids, finding herself banned from the post office for wanting too many two-cent stamps ("The post-office lady looked at me like I had just asked her if she wanted to buy my sex tape"), and discovering what appears to be a corpse on her front lawn seconds before her sister is due to visit ("I had approximately three to four minutes to move the carcass from my yard into my neighbors' yard so my sister would think it was their dead person"). She shares tales of marriage and family, including stories about the dog-bark translator that deciphers Notaro's and her husband's own "woofs" a little too accurately, the emails from her mother with "FWD" in the subject line ("which in email code means Forecasting World Destruction"), and the dead-of-night shopping sprees and Devil Dog–devouring monkeyshines of a creature known as "Ambien Laurie."
At every turn, Notaro's pluck and irresistible candor sets the New York Times bestselling author on a journey that's laugh-out-loud funny and utterly unforgettable.
Bestselling author Laurie Notaro unleashes her wrath on everything from e-mail spam to eBay to the perils of St. Patrick's Day, with hilarious results.
Here are more scathingly funny tales from the wild side! Laurie Notaro survived the debauched ride of her twenties and the bumpy ride to matrimony. Now she's ready to take on the thirtysomething years...and almost middle age has never been more hilarious.
The New York Times bestseller from author Laurie Notaro sheds hilarious light on everyday life, from hourly-wage jobs that require zero skill to horrific high school reunions.
The first novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club is a rollicking tale of small-town peculiarity, dark secrets, and one extraordinary beauty pageant.
When her husband is offered a post at a small northwestern university, Maye Roberts is only too happy to pack up and leave the relentless Phoenix heat for the lush green quietude of Spaulding, Washington. While she loves the odd little town, there is one thing she didn’t anticipate: just how heartbreaking it would be to leave her Phoenix friends behind. And when you’re a childless thirtysomething freelance writer who works at home, making new friends can be quite a challenge.
After a series of false starts nearly gets her banished from town, Maye decides that her last chance to connect with her new neighbors is to enter the annual Sewer Pipe Queen Pageant, a kooky but dead-serious local tradition open to contestants of all ages and genders. Aided by a deranged former pageant queen with one eyebrow, Maye doesn’t just make a splash, she uncovers a sinister mystery that has haunted the town for decades.
