Laurie Notaro books

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Funny Women Write from the Road Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Standalone Novels

Laurie Notaro was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. She spent ten years as a columnist at The Arizona Republic before publishing her first book, The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club, in 2002. The essay collection, drawn from her newspaper columns and personal misadventures, became a New York Times bestseller and launched a prolific writing career.

Notaro’s non-fiction books are built on self-deprecating humor about daily life, bad decisions, and the absurdity of ordinary situations. Autobiography of a Fat Bride (2003), I Love Everybody (2004), and We Thought You Would Be Prettier (2005) continued in the same vein, all reaching the bestseller list. She also wrote three novels: There’s a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell (2007), a comedy about small-town life; Spooky Little Girl (2010), about a woman who dies and has to complete a haunting assignment in the afterlife; and Crossing the Horizon (2016), a historical novel about three women who raced to become the first female pilot to fly across the Atlantic in the late 1920s.

Her most recent books have taken a more serious turn. Excuse Me While I Disappear (2022) deals with loss and mortality, and The Murderess (2024) is a historical crime novel about the 1931 Phoenix Trunk Murders, in which Winnie Ruth Judd killed two friends and shipped their bodies to California in luggage. Notaro spent a decade researching the case. She was a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor and now lives in Eugene, Oregon.