It Looked Different on the Model

It Looked Different on the Model
by Laurie Notaro
Villard Books (e-book)

When you have to look for the jokes, the book's not worth buying. This collection of tepidly humorous essays, by Laurie Notaro, covers episodes from her fairly normal life. She loses her iPhone in the chapter Please Don't Call China, and appeals to whoever has her iPhone, who 'butt-dialled' her sister at 2.45am, to return it for a reward (breakfast and coffee). Then she is accused of eating chocolate in bed by her annoyed spouse who keeps finding brown star-shaped marks on his pillow. Turns out it is their geriatric (and leaky) cat that has been sitting on his pillow. Forward to an X-Files type mystery involving the theft of two azalea trees in front of their house, and their reappearance weeks later; she hadn't reckoned on tree borrowers when she moved to Eugene, Oregon. Notaro also capitalises on stories from her dysfunctional family and her childhood, and happenings that have caused grief: she is banned from the post office, has to endure X-ray scanners at the airport that show her 'saggage', and the rest. To be fair, the opening story will induce chortles.