Laurie Notaro Books in Order

Laurie Notaro leaves all-night partying behind for marriage, mortgages, and the bewildering responsibilities of adulthood. These personal essays follow wedding nerves, household repairs, family pressures, and humiliating encounters as she discovers growing older does not guarantee competence.

Laurie Notaro recounts misadventures with badly paid jobs, disastrous boyfriends, hangovers, family judgments, and high school reunions. Drawn from her newspaper writing, these autobiographical essays follow a woman and her friends stumbling through the expectations of ordinary life.

Married, mortgaged, and employed in a corporate office, Laurie Notaro confronts difficult bosses, family trips, and growing pressure to have children. Her personal essays explore the indignities of her thirties and her frequently unsuccessful attempts to remain agreeable.

Holiday parties, terrible presents, crowded stores, and family expectations supply the disasters in this collection of Christmas essays. Laurie Notaro recounts seasonal mishaps ranging from late-night shopping emergencies to a party misunderstanding that brings paramedics to the festivities.

Laurie Notaro chronicles her growing impatience with everyday life, from customer service battles to confusing online auctions. These autobiographical essays turn aging, spam, public behavior, and her own embarrassing reactions into accounts of increasingly hard-won self-control.

After moving to a small Washington town, lonely freelance writer Maye enters its peculiar Sewer Pipe Queen Pageant to make friends. With help from a former winner, she becomes entangled in a mystery buried beneath the community’s eccentric traditions.

Laurie Notaro recounts encounters with laser hair removal, alarming neighbors, dubious hired help, and her own fear of parasites. These personal essays follow the humiliations and health anxieties that turn everyday errands and ordinary decisions into unexpected ordeals.

After losing her fiancé and job, Lucy Fisher dies before she can rebuild her life. Trained as a ghost, she must complete an assignment to reach the afterlife while discovering why her former world fell apart without her.

Trying to fit into her clothes, family, and neighborhood, Laurie Notaro instead finds new ways to embarrass herself. Her essays recount ill-advised performances, alarming emails from her mother, marital misunderstandings, and the peculiar activities of her sleep-medicated self.

After being barred from a Eugene post office for buying too many two-cent stamps, Laurie Notaro needs to send her nephew a care package. She returns to the drugstore postal counter, uncertain whether its formidable clerk will let her stay.

Laurie Notaro examines modern rudeness through personal mishaps involving tattoos, writing groups, food trends, and compulsive fabric purchases. Her essays find absurdity in social expectations while acknowledging that the person causing the problem is sometimes Notaro herself.

These previously unpublished essays revisit Laurie Notaro's youth, when a single night could consume an entire paycheck and cheap holidays meant sharing overcrowded motel rooms. The collection follows friendships, reckless decisions, and experiences that later became personal legends.

In 1927, Elsie Mackay, Mabel Boll, and Ruth Elder compete to become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Their ambitions collide with aviation’s dangers as they pursue a place in history through uncertain and sometimes disastrous flights.

Laurie Notaro chronicles her attempts to keep a household functioning despite hoarding tendencies, cooking experiments, and persistent failures of organization. These personal essays follow homemade treats, unwanted neighborhood livestock, and other domestic projects that rarely proceed as intended.

Past fifty, Laurie Notaro considers the unexpected freedoms and indignities of middle age. Her essays explore going gray, accumulating experience, and discovering that being overlooked can confer surprising advantages on a woman still capable of causing trouble.

In 1931, two women's bodies are discovered inside trunks shipped from Phoenix to Los Angeles, while Winnie Ruth Judd disappears into the crowd. The ensuing manhunt and sensational trial expose the troubled relationships behind an apparently respectable young woman's life.

Caught between caring for elderly parents and confronting her own approaching retirement, Laurie Notaro recounts the indignities of growing older. Travel mishaps, workplace grievances, reunions, and uncomfortable bodily changes become occasions to question expectations of respectable middle age.