INTERVIEW BY CATHERINE WALKER

Photo By Laurie Notaro

Writer Laurie Notaro documents the funny side of daily life in a collection of columns, Autobiography of a Fat Bride.

It didn't take much to realize that Laurie Notaro is every woman's woman. On the back cover of her recent memoir it states, "Laurie Notaro has never written for Rolling Stone, Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker (the list continues) ... She lives, and probably will die, in Phoenix, Arizona. Miracu-lously, this is her second book." On her Web site (www.laurienotaro.com), she calls her book tour "Laurie's Summer 'I Lost My Wallet In NYC AGAIN, Wit-nessed 30 Fellow Airline Passengers Hurling Into Barf Bags and Accidentally Showed a Businessman My Hinterlands On the Train To DC' Tour 2003."

The icing on the cake came when I laid eyes on the cover of Autobiography of a Fat Bride, her newest installment in a series of hilarious stories about her Greek Wedding-esque life. Bent over and digging through a fridge is an anonymous woman; her only distinguishing feature -- her large butt -- is only further emphasized by ruffled underwear. It's a position many a women have been in and one that many more women wish they would never assume again. This true-to-form image should immediately grab the attention of readers. Notaro laughs about the book's cover: "The only thing I wanted to change was to make the girl's butt bigger!"

Her stories range from first boy-friends to psychotic pets, covering all aspects of pre-wedding paranoia and married life in between. Looking back at puberty and her overwhelming mother, Notaro writes, "To my mom, I'm still the sixth-grader whom she made get undressed in a dressing room with an eighty-year-old bra saleswoman at Sears when my 'lentils' (breast buds) started to become 'pintos' (knockers)."

I was worried that Notaro's self-degrading humor and honesty wouldn't carry the book through its 50-ish stories, but when I came to the end, my stomach ached from laughter. Some stories were repetitive, but from one chapter to the next, Notaro compensates for lost ground. In a hilarious and accurate analysis of the warning signs of aging, Notaro concludes that her heyday must be over.

"How could I have not seen the symptoms?" she writes. "A week ago, I watched the Billboard Music Awards and didn't know who anyone was. I don't understand the new commercials for Levi's. I saved $19.34 on groceries a couple of days ago by using coupons and a Fresh Value card. I just finished reading something that had an 'Oprah's Book Club' sticker on the cover." Notaro's realistic humor is on target with that of average women, and that's exactly what propels Fat Bride to success.

Notaro got her start as a columnist for a daily newspaper in Phoenix, where she wrote about her life on a weekly basis. Eventually, she took combined a selection of columns into her first memoir, The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club. The audience for her column, Notaro says, was male and female. "(Fat Bride) is marketed to women, so it might be a fear factor for men. But some guys still do read it. Because my column audience was 50/50, I think that if guys gave (the book) a chance, it would be well received."

She has no plans to stop her hilarious autobiographies anytime soon. "I'm not worried about running out of material because as long as I'm me, trust me, things will happen," she says with a laugh. Up next is I Love Everybody (And Other Atrocious Lies), while a fourth book will probably round out her series of memoirs before she tries her luck at fiction.

If Notaro continues her autobiographical writing, it might be like watching The Real World cast members eat and sleep. But maybe she'll surprise us and hold onto the magic that make Autobiography of a Fat Bride so entertaining. ©

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