My first exposure to Laurie Notaro was The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life — which I read on Pamie.com’s recommendation when I was a teenager. At the time, Notaro would have been in her 30s, and that book was full of silly stories about single girls in their 20s, battling hangovers at their minimum wage jobs. I loved it. Now, I’m 31, Notaro’s in her 50s, and her stories mostly revolve around making her husband crazy, and getting old and […]
The Real Housewives of Eugene, OR
Laurie Notaro, along with Jen Lancaster, Jenny Lawson and numerous other, is a very funny lady who openly shares her humorous life with an audience. It’s been awhile since she’s published a memoir although she appears to have written a novel last year! In Housebroken Laurie is in her 50s, but she hasn’t matured much since we last met, she is still a bit of a hoarder who forces various neighbors try her homemade Twinkies after the Twinkie shortage panic of 2012 . Laurie is a bit of […]
Splash!
My first Cannonball, hooray! Housebroken is another collection of humor essays from Laurie Notaro. Throughout the years I’ve read all of her books. Some are hilarious, some are so-so. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Housebroken quickly became one of my favorites of hers. I found myself laughing out loud multiple times. Notaro’s essays usually focus on domestic issues with her husband or family, or sometimes on the strange people she encounters in her day-to-day life (she now lives in Eugene, Oregon, which it […]
It looks like larva no matter how you cook it.
Laurie Notaro’s 8th book of essays, “The Potty Mouth at the Table,” is ostensibly about manners, but really it ranges from her weird obsession of buying fabric online to her friend coping with terminal cancer. As with any book of essays, there are some hits and some misses but overall it is a decent bit of fluff from a pretty great writer. Unfortunately it’s not her best work and I hope she gets her mojo back with her next book. I had to pull […]