We Thought You Would Be Prettier: True Tales of the Dorkiest Girl Alive

Author: By Laurie Notaro

Villard

There’s nothing quite like the disappointment of having your complete mental picture of someone be totally destroyed by meeting that person face-to-face. Over the phone, she was a supermodel or wholesome elementary school teacher, but when you see her in real life… she just doesn’t quite measure up. But you have to put on your best face and just go with the flow. Try not to stare too much at the hairs growing out of her warts, which seem to sprout up from the most unexpected places.

Laurie Notaro knows that disappointment—from the other side. Because she’s the one. She’s the person going around disappointing acquaintances with her appearance, as elaborated upon in her essay, “My Big Mouth.” When she shows up at the bed and breakfast inn where she’d made reservations, the owner takes one look at her disheveled appearance and supplies the title for Notaro’s most recent collection of essays, We Thought You Would Be Prettier: True Tales of the Dorkiest Girl Alive.

It’s been a year since Notaro’s last collection of essays, a collection I’ve been eagerly awaiting since I Love Everybody (And Other Atrocious Lies), the follow-up to Autobiography of a Fat Bride, which rode the coattails of The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club. This nifty little trio of Notaro’s stream-of-conscious spouting of her vile-nature-made-humorous are each available in affordable paperback originals so that you can easily transport them to and from work whilst riding public transportation—the best setting for reading these bite-sized essays. After all, you don’t want an overdose.

On the bus, in the waiting room, or at the laundromat, you can humiliate yourself by laughing aloud in front of strangers as you snortle in recognition. [Because Laurie Notaro is the only person alive who is more inappropriate than you, then writes down all her evil little thoughts and embarrassing actions. Her writing makes her seem like a Saturday Night Live character, except that this is her real life.] She really does tell waitresses that baby ducks are being devoured by turtles in the restaurant’s pond. She really does return to the pet food store on a daily basis, buying 20-lb bags of food so that she can gross herself out by looking at the hairdo of one of the employees. And she most certainly does not put it past herself to tell her neighbor that her cat most likely died because a neighborhood junkie swung it around his head by the tail.

If you think you’ve had a bad day, you should try one of hers. How about going on a trip to New York, being told by everyone that you’re an idiot and being reminded by several people to keep guard of your wallet, only to discover you’ve left your wallet in the cab, right after the driver warns you to keep hold of it? Or what about going to traffic school as a Karmic payback for hitting a bicyclist ten years earlier? How about feeling like you’re turning into your own mother, then being able to pinpoint the exact moment the transformation began? Those are the kinds of days Notaro has. And she crankily writes about them with ample mania and hyperbole so that you can laugh at what a dork she is, and maybe even laugh a little bit at your own self.  VS

Tea Benduhn is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-nominated ""Gravel Queen." And even though you'd think this would've put her on easy street, she still humbly keeps a day job as the PR manager for Harry W. Schwartz Books.