9780812969009
I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies): True Tales of a Loudmouth Girl share button
Laurie Notaro
Format Paperback
Dimensions 5.20 (w) x 8.00 (h) x 0.55 (d)
Pages 227
Publisher Random House Publishing Group
Publication Date June 2004
ISBN 9780812969009
Book ISBN 10 0812969006
About Book

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 she’s 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, she’s 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 Laurie’s 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 there’s 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.

Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Fans of Notaro's chronicles of the idiosyncrasies of her life as a 20-something (The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club) and new wife (Autobiography of a Fat Bride) will cheer the arrival of this collection of all-new material updating them on the meticulously analyzed exploits of Notaro's mid-30s. Among these navel-gazing essays are the story of how, one day when Notaro had a cold, she blew bubbles out her nose upon meeting a new boss; a repetitive whine about the specific types of spam e-mail her sister sends her; details of her passing of some kidney stones; and even quotations from a "sucky" review of one of her books from Kirkus Reviews. No event is too inconsequential for Notaro to recount at length; no relative, friend, or acquaintance too insignificant, and yet reading this entire collection front to back won't leave readers with a single memorable character or episode. Notaro is at her best when she broadens her horizons beyond the quotidian mishaps of modern life and sets herself apart from her corporate colleagues (during a brief stint as a newspaper columnist) and the baby contagion luring her friends, one by one, to the perils of motherhood (she is 30-something, after all). On the whole, however, Notaro's is a comic gift in search of a subject. Agent, Jenny Bent. (On sale June 8) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.