Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthood - Softcover

Notaro, Laurie

 
9780375760921: Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthood
Softcover
ISBN 10: 037576092X ISBN 13: 9780375760921
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The author of the New York Times bestseller The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club tackles her biggest challenge yet: grown-up life.

In Autobiography of a Fat Bride, Laurie Notaro tries painfully to make the transition from all-night partyer and bar-stool regular to mortgagee with plumbing problems and no air-conditioning. Laurie finds grown-up life just as harrowing as her reckless youth, as she meets Mr. Right, moves in, settles down, and crosses the toe-stubbing threshold of matrimony. From her mother's grade-school warning to avoid kids in tie-dyed shirts because their hippie parents spent their food money on drugs and art supplies; to her night-before-the-wedding panic over whether her religion is the one where you step on the glass; to her unfortunate overpreparation for the mandatory drug-screening urine test at work; to her audition as a Playboy centerfold as research for a newspaper story, Autobiography of a Fat Bride has the same zits-and-all candor and outrageous humor that made Idiot Girls an instant cult phenomenon.

In Autobiography of a Fat Bride, Laurie contemplates family, home improvement, and the horrible tyrannies of cosmetic saleswomen. She finds that life doesn't necessarily get any easier as you get older. But it does get funnier.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laurie Notaro has never written for Rolling Stone, Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, Lowrider, American Logger, Farm Show, or McSweeney's. She lives, and will probably die, in Phoenix, Arizona. Miraculously, this is her second book.

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The author of the "New York Times bestseller "The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club tackles her biggest challenge yet: grown-up life.
In Autobiography of a Fat Bride, Laurie Notaro tries painfully to make the transition from all-night partyer and bar-stool regular to mortgagee with plumbing problems and no air-conditioning. Laurie finds grown-up life just as harrowing as her reckless youth, as she meets Mr. Right, moves in, settles down, and crosses the toe-stubbing threshold of matrimony. From her mother's grade-school warning to avoid kids in tie-dyed shirts because their hippie parents spent their food money on drugs and art supplies; to her night-before-the-wedding panic over whether her religion is the one where you step on the glass; to her unfortunate overpreparation for the mandatory drug-screening urine test at work; to her audition as a "Playboy centerfold as research for a newspaper story, Autobiography of a Fat Bride has the same zits-and-all candor and outrageous humor that made Idiot Girls an instant cult phenomenon.
In Autobiography of a Fat Bride, Laurie contemplates family, home improvement, and the horrible tyrannies of cosmetic saleswomen. She finds that life doesn't necessarily get any easier as you get older. But it does get funnier.

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It’s Not You, It’s Me

I am the sucker.

Ben’s standing on the sidewalk, his hands in his pockets; his hair, normally straight and elbow-length, is now appallingly cornrowed as his head hangs toward the ground because I’ve caught him.

I’ve caught him.

He’s too goddamned scared to make a move and I don’t blame him, because he’s my boyfriend and I caught him, just now, packing up all of his crap into a piece-of-shit hippie van because he’s running off to Seattle to follow his dream, which is growing pot, smoking it, and learning to play Neil Young’s “Old Man” on an acoustic guitar in order to perform it as a birthday gift for his dad, a man he has never met.

He is running away.

With HER.

Turn to the right, there she is, standing behind the van, trying to hide from me; it’s Dog Girl, his ex-girlfriend, dressed in a tremendous gauze dress and with matching cornrow hair.

“She made the curtains,” he mutters, still looking at the sidewalk.

“WHAT?” I said, shaking my head.

“She made the curtains,” he repeats. “For the van. She sold her car and bought the van.”

For a moment, I’m confused and I wonder about what I’m supposed to do with this. Am I supposed to fight, and kick and scream, am I supposed to oppose it? I have no idea, and I don’t do anything. I just walk away.

“Don’t you want to hit me?” he calls out.

“Don’t you want to yell at me, tell me you hate me?” he yells to me.

I just shake my head, and keep walking.

“It’s not you!” he shouts one last time. “It’s me!”

That’s enough to make me stop dead in my tracks.

“Really?” I ask as I spin around. “Are you sure it’s you? Because that would make my day, just knowing that it was YOU and NOT ME, especially after I just caught you in the middle of an escape attempt. Is it you? Is it really you, Ben?”

“Well, I guess it’s me a little bit,” he stammers as Dog Girl peeks an eye out from behind the purple curtains as one of her hair ornaments chimes. “But, well, if you really want to know, I’d say that yeah, it’s mostly you.”

“Mostly me?” I reply. “It’s mostly me that’s forced you into this scene from Children of the Cornrow? God, it looks like Stevie Wonder and Bo Derek jumped you in an alley and gang-braided you!”

He stands quiet for a moment, thinking, then nods his head.

“Actually, it’s pretty much all you,” he adds with a sigh. “I don’t think it’s me at all. No, no, it’s you. All you. It’s not me, because the feeling that I’m getting in my chakras is that it’s definitely you.”

As if I needed confirmation. I’ve seen that play It’s Not You, It’s Me before, and as a matter of fact, I’ve played the lead in that scenario since before I had boobs.

My role is “Super Idiot Girl,” the kind of female who searches out the most alluring sociopath to date, who never learns that if you see a tornado coming, especially one that works in a record store and displays no other ambition outside of making mixed tapes from bootleg Grateful Dead shows, duck under the nearest table until the roar passes.

It all started in fifth grade, when my mother bought me a box of valentines from Kmart. I searched out the perfect Holly Hobbie valentine, a little farmer boy in overalls milking a cow, for the boy I wanted to move into sixth grade with. Only a few days earlier, he had passed me a note, chunkily folded in the shape of a football, that said, “Whats your shampew? Gee, your hair smels terrifick.” It absolutely declared the love that was to guarantee me perfect happiness for the rest of my life, or at least until summer vacation. In my best cursive handwriting, I signed the back of the valentine, “To Paul, I use Breck once a week. Luv, Laurie,” and, to add a sense of female intrigue, dotted the i’s with puffy hearts to let him know that I was all lady, all right.

I can understand now how that kind of message would be chilling enough for a boy to shy away from the love of an oily-headed, prepubescent girl, but I still don’t think it reached the proportions required for him to stand up during lunchtime and loudly scream, “I am NOT your boyfriend! I like Melissa Crow because she can sit on her hair and she has horses!”

When I transferred to junior high I already had a major crush on Mike Smithfield from my sixth-grade class, and had waited all summer to see him. I began parting my hair on the left out of compassion for his left-handedness, a somber physical disability that he bravely bore in a cruel right-handed world, which, at the same time, made it difficult for others to cheat off of him during tests. If I could tell that Mike Smithfield was a knight of gallantry and preeminence just by the way he faced the obstacle of the No. 2 pencil God had placed in his left hand, we were meant to be soul mates. Ideal husband material. For him, I relentlessly practiced my cutest smile, which I had noticed in a certain light was identical to the smile of the Elizabeth sister on Eight Is Enough, and entailed curling down the sides of my mouth and then innocently—yet strategically—pouting out my two front teeth slightly. I found it to be the perfect image of vulnerability and a girlish glow of a much-delayed, though still yet possible, sexual awakening. My mother, on the other hand, saw a premature appearance of the Elizabeth smile when she stormed into the bathroom one day and suddenly interrupted my practice time.

“Jesus Christ,” she said sharply in her native Brooklyn accent, “if you had that look on your face the day I brought you home from the hospital, I probably would have laid off the cigarettes when I was pregnant with your two younger sisters. Now, I don’t know what the hell you’ve been sniffing, but I’m telling you right now to get off smelling the paint or eating the glue or whatever, and from now on when I fill up the gas tank, you are staying in the car!!! I’ll be watching for deep breaths, you know! This isn’t the Linkletter house, for your information! No one in this house is getting drug crazed and then jumping off my goddamned roof! We just had that thing retarred!”

My mother had convinced herself that it was my destiny to one day simply fling myself off the roof like Art Linkletter’s daughter, who vaulted to her death from the top of a six-story apartment building after taking some drugs in 1969. I’m sure it was a frightening moment for my mother, who most likely looked at me when she heard the news flash and mumbled, “Over my dead body!” despite the fact that at the time, I didn’t even have the ability to chew, let alone the motor skills necessary to assemble a rig and shoot my fat little baby arm up with black-tar heroin. My “Art Linkletter’s Daughter” lessons started early, when I was about nine. It happened the day my mother dropped me off for school in our Country Squire station wagon and saw a sixth-grader wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt. “See that kid?” she said, grabbing my arm and pointing to the rainbow-colored figure swinging on the monkey bars. “I bet his parents are drug people. Hippies! You know what hippies eat for dinner?”

I shook my head. “Meat on Fridays?” I ventured.

“NO!” my mother informed me. “TRASH! Hippies eat trash! They go through their neighbors’ garbage...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
037576092X
ISBN 13 
9780375760921
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

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