Laurie Notaro meditates on one of her boogers a little longer than one might expect in her latest book, I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies): True Tales of a Loudmouthed Girl. What starts out as a quip about her runny nose during a conversation with her boss turns into quite an escapade—but as Notaro fans know, nothing mundane is ever left unexamined by this Phoenix humor columnist. Everything from airplane lavatories to people who wear thumb rings is material for guffaws.
In her third book, she writes about her life and times with the same quirkiness of the previous books: Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthood and The Idiot Girls' Action Adventure Club. This time, however, she's moved from dating and weddings into near-midlife and midcareer, and is facing slightly different, but somehow still pretty much the same, middle-class chick issues.
The world according to Notaro is a ridiculous one, and who can complain about that? She never meets a day that doesn't have heaping helpings of absurdity in it, and when you're in the mood for light diversions, she offers them up in plenty:
Did you know that kidney stones are worth their weight in gold?
Well, of course you do. Apparently, every person in the world knows this but me, judging by the way my doctor was looking at me.
"You did WHAT with the kidney stones?" he asked for the second time in twenty seconds.
"I said I flushed them," I repeated.
My doctor just stared at me, then shook his head, as if he had just seen me pull my finger out of my nose.
"Can you tell me why?" he asked
"Absolutely, " I nodded. "If something leaves my body, I pretty much figure that my relationship with it has reached the end. Besides, I just got the last in the Planet of the Apes action figures on eBay, and there's no more room in the display shelf for any other collectibles."
So goes the world of Laurie Notaro—quips and tall tales that get you giggling despite sometimes slightly stale topics: Hating (insert beautiful starlet here, in this case, Kate Winslet) because she's beautiful; being childless in her 30s; having a crabby boss; the absurdity of Disneyland. But she's got such an ease and directness with the language that you feel like you're having a rollicking conversation.