Author Laurie Notaro on Her New Book and Coming Back to Phoenix

By Wynter Holden Mon., Jul. 25 2011 at 12:00 PM

I saw the baby when I first came in the house and that was it. The boob was out there for fifteen minutes! I'm not the only one who noticed that. The boob was out for so long that the sun went down and I probably went home and went to sleep before the baby showed up. Finally, I confronted my friends about it a few weeks ago. I asked everyone, "Was I the only the one who said anything about the boob?" My friend said, "Oh, no. I saw the boob. I just chose not to act on it."

I never want to be that close to anyone else's boob. Ever! I can barely handle that kind of reflection in the mirror, much less from someone whose name I don't even know.

Wow. Is public indecency and other bizarre behavior normal for the people up there in Eugene?

If you stand still for five seconds, someone's going to run you over with a unicycle or trip you on stilts. Then again, there are weird people in Phoenix, too. I lived in the same neighborhood as a lady who has like 500 cats.

I don't want to give anyone the wrong idea. The people are generally super nice. You could spend an hour at a one-way stop sign, because everyone's trying to be nice and let the other people go in front of them.

What, if anything, do you miss about Phoenix?

I really miss my family, and my husband's family is here too. I love Phoenix. I don't love the 107 degrees, though. My kidneys are already the size of raisins and I'm shedding like a snake. My skin turned white and started to flake off already, and I've only been in town for like five hours.

I also miss Mexican food so much; I'm hitting every Mexican place I can before I go back to Eugene.

TheCulinaryGeek via Flickr

Phoenix Mexican Food Rule #1: If it has tofu, it ain't a taco.
Is there no good Mexican grub in Oregon?

Every tortilla comes out of a bag. And for some unknown reason, everyone wants to put tofu on everything. If you stand still long enough, they will just stuff you with tofu or Tofurky or soysage; all of the shit crap vegan stuff that I have to deal with up there.

Fess up. Have you ever eaten or made vegan meals?

The Thanksgiving before last, I had to make not only vegetarian options, but vegan, gluten-free and lactose-free options. That was like the Olympics of Thanksgiving.

Are there any humiliating tales that didn't make it into It Looked Different on the Model...?

Yes, it's called my next book. I have 70 ideas already ... the book is tentatively supposed to come out next May. This book is going to be different. The episodes are going to be much shorter and categorized. It's a lot of the incidents that are really terrible, but really funny, and too short to make it into the other books. It's almost like a life lesson book. Like I wanted my disasters to be warnings to others.

Get an earful of Laurie Notaro's witty barbs at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, July 26, at Barnes & Noble, or Thursday, July 28, at Changing Hands in Tempe.

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Changing Hands Bookstore

6428 S. McClintock Drive, Tempe, AZ

Category: General

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helentroy4

Great to hear that Laurie is coming out with her new book! I loved Laurie's work from way back when at Arizona State. She always had the nerve to write about things that I might not have had the courage to unless I was really really mad. We have mutual friends who will never know why we got up from their dinner table and went outside mid another person's conversation because I was too chickenshit to tell them why. So instead of just coming out and saying "your disgusting former brother in law buttered his bread TWICE after licking the knife and putting it back in the butter TWICE and I was ready to blow chunks" we opted for the polite removal of ourselves at their table.Labeled malcontents by the two women, knowing nothing of the germs that now infested their own butter, we lost very good friends because polite company dictated that we not mention the faux pas. It sucks to get your mail refused and returned and your phone calls rejected when you finally wish to tell them what was what and why we did what we did.The sad joke was on us. It would have been so much better had we gone out with guns blazing.