The Potty Mouth at the Table

June 3, 2013
New York Times bestselling humorist Notaro returns with her eighth collection of essays featuring amusing anecdotes, clever insights, and charming neuroses. Notaro sounds off on Antiques Roadshow, a rude fedora-clad poet at a writing panel, and the creepiest things one encounters on Facebook. She also shares cringe-worthy stories of a day-long train trip taken while suffering from food poisoning and an encounter with Harry Potter erotic fan fiction. Some of her best work revolves around food, about which she has passionate opinions. She bemoans cooking a Thanksgiving meal for friends with dietary restrictions, complaining: "I had to buy something with the word ânamaste' on it," dismisses "foodies" for inventing their own language "like twins...or a feral Jodie Foster living secretly in the woods," and lays out the "six signs that Pinterest food pins are destroying the world." Notaro's friends and family provide excellent material, including her sister's fainting after consuming a warm soda too quickly and her husband's wry refusal to allow her to buy "the Great Gatsby of chairs" because of her hoarding tendencies. She can also get poignant, closing with an account of a close friend's battle with a terminal brain tumor. Notaro is sharp, relatable, and pithy; a dynamic combination.

May 15, 2013
From comedic essayist and novelist Notaro (It Looked Different on the Model: Epic Tales of Impending Shame and Infamy, 2011, etc.), another compendium of humorous, heated, autobiographical tales about the minutiae of modern American life. Having consistently hit the best-seller charts with her previous collections of true, often hilarious and bawdy stories, the author sticks with the same formula here. These essays include "I Hate Foodies," "Creepy Facebook Moments" and "Six Things I Never Want to Hear (Again) While Standing in Line at the Pharmacy." Notaro is nothing if not direct as she riffs on topics such as why it's never acceptable for nettles to appear on restaurant menus and hunting down the relative whom she suspects of borrowing her shower puff. Without a plot, these pieces follow no order, but they share her signature, casually blistering tone. In one, entirely made up of food-related expressions that she loathes (including "gastrique," "coulis," "mouthfeel" and "savory"), she offers this explanation for her hatred of the word "delish": "If it's not something you would name your dog or if you're embarrassed to yell it out in front of strangers, we need to banish it from the human language." The book's title was conceived when Notaro appeared on a comedy-writing panel where a fellow presenter condescendingly referred to her as "the potty mouth at the table." She claims to have been humiliated, but that didn't stop her from getting revenge, and it clearly hasn't stalled her from continuing to produce biting, sometimes crude pieces that read more like off-the-cuff rants than revised works of writing. In spite of the essays that miss their mark, when Notaro's funny, she's very, very funny. Entertaining beach reading for fans of humorous, breezy essays.

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April 15, 2013
Notaro is either the best friend helping to ward off fashion faux pas and warn of impending dating disasters, or the person banned from entering the house even if she was bearing a giant Publisher's Clearing House check. Sly, snarky, and scornful, Notaro doesn't suffer fools gladly, but she'd also be the first one to include herself in that category. As she casts her raucously jaundiced eye upon such immediately recognizable contemporary danger zones as the sanctity of one's personal care products or the pretentiousness of Food Network devotees, Notaro also brings any collateral shame, confusion, and embarrassment right to her own doorstep. Though her husband, mother, siblings, and friends are all foils for her acerbic wit and the unwitting source of much merriment, Notaro selflessly saves her most caustic remarks for her own wacky weaknesses. A wry observer and ribald commentator, Notaro brandishes her zesty brand of irreverent humor like a Day-Glo badge of courage.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)