It Looked Different on the Model

May 9, 2011
Trying to fit inâsometimes literallyâcan be daunting, but Notaro's attempts are hilariously captured in this collection. In "Let It Bleed," Notaro (Spooky Little Girl) takes on the bane of women everywhere: trying on clothes in a dressing room, with lighting ranges from "cruel" to "barbaric." In "She's a Pill," it's not a physical hurdle Notaro must overcome but a mental one: her alter ago, "Ambien Laurie," who emerges when Notaro takes the sleeping pill that can cause people to act strangely in their sleepâNotaro binges on junk food like a zombie and watches dreadful movies. Her relationship with her staunchly Republican parents, who live in Phoenix, Ariz., and are still dismayed that Notaro moved to Eugene, Ore., is most notably described in "It's a Bomb," when she flies in for her mother's birthday. Notaro regresses to rebellious daughter and her parents to their old overbearing selves, complete with Notaro's obsessively clean mother telling her, "f you're going to shed , pick it up. Hair makes me gag." Notaro's humor is self-deprecating without ever swaying into self-pity, and her situations are both specific and universal.

June 15, 2011

Former humor columnist Notaro (Spooky Little Girl, 2010, etc.) gathers observations on the odds and ends of her transplanted life in a series of quirky domestic vignettes.

Some pieces focus on the trials and tribulations of being the author. These include falling tragically in love with a shirt for which she was "the wrong size, wrong age, and had the wrong wallet"; living with a pill-popping alter ego named "Ambien Laurie" who would ritually—and, unbeknownst to the waking Laurie—gorge on snack foods and go on midnight online shoe-shopping binges; and dealing with a frank dislike of being hugged or touched. Other stories focus on the foibles of her equally neurotic family. In one, Notaro pokes fun at her mother's e-mail forwards that "in e-mail code mean[t] 'Forecasting World Destruction'." In another essay, the author describes how in her mother and father's cheerfully dysfunctional home, parents are parents, children are children and no one is safe from character assault. A few pieces more directly deal with Notaro's attempts at coming to terms with Eugene, Ore., her new home, a city she sees as overrun by hippies, swingers, vegans and justice-seeking plant fairies who, "in the dead of night...delicately placed to deep green shrubs with brilliant red berries on either side of [her] door" to make up for the loss of two azaleas stolen by unrepentant tree thieves. Though clearly intended as funny, the book elicits only occasional laughter for the odd twists and turns the stories tend to take rather than for the actual subject matter.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2011
Along with cohorts Ambien Laurie and Laurie Circa 1994, Notaro endures both the indignities and the victories to be found in everyday life. Granted, hers take place in a world in which nefarious neighbors brazenly steal the plants right off her porch, and every e-mail from her mother begins Fwd: Fwd: Fwd. Though she manages to take things pretty much in stride, it isn't always easy for a Brooklyn girl plunked down in the middle of hippie-organic Eugene, Oregon, where recycling is a religion, and deep-fried anything is a sin on a par with greed, sloth, and gluttony. Yet whether she's bidding on a vintage stove on eBay or writhing out of an inaccurately sized designer blouse in a chic boutique, Notaro approaches each situation with her trademark blend of sharp cynicism, healthy skepticism, and self-effacing humanism. The result is an earthy collection of slices of life easily recognized by anyone who has ever gone toe-to-toe with a bossy postal clerk or a recalcitrant relative.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)