Notaro - It looked different on the model: epic tales of impending shame and infamy

PRAISE FOR LAURIE NOTARO
Spooky Little Girl

A comedic killer Notaro crafts a wondrously realistic afterlife. She is able to make death laughable in a heart-felt way.

Bust

A crazy, funny version of the afterlife.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

A novel that is full of laughter [Notaro] has a winner with this hilarious take on the joys and sorrows of the surprised demised.

ChronWatch

A fun story that mixes [Notaros] unique humor with a sweet paranormal tale of friendship, family, and unfinished business.

BookBitch

Pure, unexpurgated Notaro Again [she] turns on the truth serum, and the results once more are riotously funny. Spooky Little Girl is a great summer beach read. The freshness it brings to a tired idea in chick litgirl loses everything and exacts revenge by making herself overis, well, refreshing.

San Antonio Express-News

An amazing story.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Were always thrilled to know that the prolific scribe of Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthood and We Thought You Would Be Prettier: True Tales of the Dorkiest Girl Alive will crack us the you-know-what up with a new book just when were casting about for something to read.

Phoenix New Times

The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death

Hilarious.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

[Laurie Notaro] writes with a flair that leaves you knowing she would be a gal you could commiserate with over a bucket of longneck beers. If you need to laugh over the little annoyances of life, this is a book for you. If you need to cry over a few of them, Flaming Tantrum can fit that bill, too.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A double-handful of chuckle-worthy vignettes Notaro blends sardonic, often self-deprecating comedy with disarming sincerity.

Publishers Weekly

For pure laugh-out-loud, then read-out-loud fun, its hard to beat this humor writer.

New Orleans Times-Picayune

Theres a (Slight) Chance I Might be Going to Hell

[Notaros] quirky humor, which shes previously showcased in her cult-classic essays on girly dorkdom, runs rampant.

Bust

Notaro is a natural comic, a graduate of the Jennifer Weiner school of self-deprecation, but shes best when shes being nasty.

Houston Chronicle

I Love Everybody

Notaro is everywoman. She is every woman who has ever made a bad judgment, overindulged (you pick the vice), been on a fad diet, been misunderstood at work, been at odds with her mother or been frustrated with her grandmothers obsession with Lifetime TV, while somehow being a little too familiar with the conflicted, star-crossed person-ages of those movies.

San Antonio Express-News

Autobiography of a Fat Bride

Notaros humor is self-deprecating, gorily specific, and raunchy.

A.V. Club (The Onion)

[Notaro] may be the funniest writer in this solar system.

The Miami Herald

ALSO BY LAURIE NOTARO

Spooky Little Girl

The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death

Theres a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell

An Idiot Girls Christmas

We Thought You Would Be Prettier

I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies)

Autobiography of a Fat Bride

The Idiot Girls Action-Adventure Club

It Looked Different on the Model is a work of nonfiction.
Some names and identifying details have been changed.

A Villard Books Trade Paperback Original

Copyright 2011 by Laurie Notaro

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Villard Books,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

V ILLARD B OOKS and V ILLARD & V C IRCLED Design
are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Notaro, Laurie.
It looked different on the model: epic tales of impending shame and infamy /
Laurie Notaro.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52631-1
1. Notaro, Laurie. 2. American wit and humor. 3. Humorists, American21st centuryBiography. 4. Young womenHumor. I. Title.
PS3614.O785Z474 2011
814.6dc22 2011002205

www.villard.com

Cover design: Rob Grom
Cover image composite: Debra Lill (image of curtain and room: Freudenthal Verhagen/Stone/GettyImages)

v3.1

To Heather, Haley, Ryan, and Hilary
Love, love, love

T he shirt was so pretty.

It had a little Peter Pan collar, and lining the placket were pintucks down the front, which were then framed by delicate little ruffles. The short puffed sleeves were like no other I had ever seen, almost Victorian but very casual and breezy. It was absolutely adorable.

So I went ahead and made mistake #1:

I picked up the price tag, which revealed a nugget of information that made my heart skip a beatit was on sale. And while I could easily qualify for a conservatorship based on my math skills alone, I can divide stuff in half and am right almost 60 percent of the time, and in this case, that was dangerous enough for me to move on to mistake #2:

I imagined myself in it.

Of course, my imagination stars Laurie Circa 1994 and not Present-Day Laurie. Laurie Circa 1994, it also bears mentioning, is a Frankenstein-y hybrid of box-office movie posters and Who Wore It Better photos from Us magazine, which my mother appears to have a lifetime subscription to. This fantastical altered image consists of Uma Thurmans Pulp Fiction figure, Andie MacDowells Four Weddings and a Funeral hair, and a Julia Roberts I Love Trouble smile. She not only looks cute in everything, she looks adorable. Laurie Circa 1994 also pictured herself in fifteen years as an editor at some hip magazine, high-powered enough to negotiate in her hiring package for her own bathroom that was complete with password activation and soundproofing. She never truthfully saw herself eating a fiber bar and a questionable banana for lunch right after checking to see if the whitehead on her nose had come back or if the yard guy would see her in her workout clothes, complete with her Workin for the Weekend headband, which she felt forced to apologize for. Laurie Circa 1994 would have been disappointed that Present-Day Laurie, in the course of a workday, would easily be obsessed trying to outbid ChuckyPup on eBay for a pink dog parka; would scrawl notes that say, Your car alarm goes off constantly and is irritating to those who work at home and pay taxes on this street. Park somewhere else; and your car, by the way, is a stupid color. Who would buy a yellow car? Who? It looks like you drive a huge banana. and stick them on the windshield of a particularly annoying Kia; or, for that matter would ever spend three consecutive hours looking in the mirror while employing six different sources of light trying to find one fugitive jowl hair. Things havent exactly turned out the way Laurie Circa 1994 planned, even though, to Present-Day Lauries benefit, if I feel like going to the bathroom at 2:30 P.M ., I can do it with the door open should I prefer, although the potential to set off a car alarm is vastly upsetting.