Excuse Me While I Disappear

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist and "greatly gifted and highly original artist" comes a masterful collection of stories about the timeless universal struggle to connect (New York Times). Joanna Scott, the critically acclaimed author of ten novels and two collections, turns her “incandescent imagination” (Publishers Weekly) back to the craft of the short story, with breathtaking results. Ranging across history from the distant past to the future, Scott tours the many forms our stories can take, from cave wall paintings to radio banter to digitized archives, and the far-reaching consequences of our communications. In Venice in the Late Middle Ages, a painter's apprentice finds a way to make his mark on canvases that will survive for centuries. In the near future, after the literary canon has been preserved only on the cloud and then lost, a scholar tries to piece together a little-known school of writers committed to using actual paper. In present day New England, a radio host invites his electrician to stay for dinner, opening up new narrative possibilities for both men. Written in prose so naturally elegant, smooth, and precise that it becomes invisible, Excuse Me While I Disappear asks what remains of our stories—as individuals and civilizations—after we are gone.

Get the Summary of Laurie Notaro's Excuse Me While I Disappear in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Laurie Notaro humorously navigates the trials of aging in "Excuse Me While I Disappear." She embraces her gray hair, despite initial resistance, and learns to appreciate the wisdom it represents. Notaro also discovers the unexpected power of invisibility that comes with age, finding humor in the ability to go unnoticed. She candidly discusses the physical changes that accompany getting older, from acid reflux to incontinence, and the importance of health screenings...

From Pulitzer Prize finalist and "greatly gifted and highly original artist" (New York Times) Joanna Scott, a masterful collection of stories about the timeless, universal struggle to connect. Joanna Scott, author of ten critically acclaimed novels, now turns her "incandescent imagination" (Publishers Weekly) back to the craft of the short story, with breathtaking results. Ranging across history from the distant past to the future, Scott tours the many forms our stories can take, from cave wall paintings to radio banter to digitized archives, and the far-reaching consequences of our communications.In Venice in the Late Middle Ages, a painter's apprentice finds a way to make his mark on canvases that will survive for centuries. In the near future, after the literary canon has been preserved only on the cloud and then lost, a scholar tries to piece together a little-known school of writers committed to using actual paper. In present day New England, a radio host invites his electrician to stay for dinner, opening up new narrative possibilities for both men.Written in prose so naturally elegant, smooth, and precise that it becomes invisible, Excuse Me While I Disappear asks what remains of our stories--as individuals and civilizations--after we are gone.

A laugh-out-loud spin on the realities, perks, opportunities, and inevitable courses of midlife. Laurie Notaro has proved everyone wrong: she didn't end up in rehab, prison, or cremated at a tender age. She just went gray. At past fifty, every hair's root is a symbol of knowledge (she knows how to use a landline), experience (she rode in a car with no seat belts), and superpowers (a gray-haired lady can get away with anything). Though navigating midlife is initially upsetting--the cracking noises coming from her new old body, receiving regular junk mail from mortuaries--Laurie accepts it. And then some. With unintentional abandon, she shoplifts a bag of russet potatoes. Heckles a rude driver from her beat-up Prius. And engages in epic trolling on Nextdoor.com. That, says Laurie, is the brilliance of growing older. With each passing day, you lose an equivalent amount of fear. And the #1 New York Times bestselling author has never been so fearlessly funny as she is in this empowering, candid, and enlightening memoir about living life on the other side of fifty.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Laurie Notaro has an uncanny ability to attract insanity—and leave readers doubled over with laughter. Need proof? Check out The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death and try not to bust a gut. Join Notaro as she experiences the popular phenomenon of laser hair removal (because at least one of her chins should be stubble-free); bemoans the scourge of the Open Mouth Coughers on America’s airplanes and in similarly congested areas; welcomes the newest ex-con (yay, a sex offender!) to her neighborhood; and watches, against her own better judgment, every Discovery Health Channel special on parasites and tapeworms that has ever aired—resulting in an overwhelming fear that a worm the size of a python will soon come a-knocking on her back door. In Notaro’s world, strangers are stranger than fiction. One must always check the hotel bathroom for hobo hairs and consciously remember not to stare at old men with giant man-boobies. And then there are the lessons she has learned the hard way: Though it may seem like a good idea, it’s best not to hire a tweaked-out homeless guy to clean up your yard. The Plain Dealer says that Laurie Notaro is “a scream, the freak-magnet of a girlfriend you can’t wait to meet for a drink to hear her latest story.” With The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death, Notaro proves she’s not only funny but resigned to the fact that you can’t look bad ass in a Prius. Don’t even try.

The first novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club is a rollicking tale of small-town peculiarity, dark secrets, and one extraordinary beauty pageant. When her husband is offered a post at a small university, Maye is only too happy to pack up and leave the relentless Phoenix heat for the lush green quietude of Spaulding, Washington. While she loves the odd little town, there is one thing she didn’t anticipate: just how heartbreaking it would be leaving her friends behind. And when you’re a childless thirtysomething freelance writer who works at home, making new friends can be quite a challenge. After a series of false starts nearly gets her exiled from town, Maye decides that her last chance to connect with her new neighbors is to enter the annual Sewer Pipe Queen Pageant, a kooky but dead-serious local tradition open to contestants of all ages and genders. Aided by a deranged former pageant queen with one eyebrow, Maye doesn’t just make a splash, she uncovers a sinister mystery that has haunted the town for decades. “[Laurie Notaro] may be the funniest writer in this solar system.”—The Miami Herald

In 1987, when Richard Harris – the legendary star of This Sporting Life, The Field and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – was interviewed for the first time by Joe Jackson, they almost came to blows. Jackson was determined to unearth deeper truths about the actor than he usually disclosed during interviews. Harris had manipulated the media all his life, largely to keep people from getting to really know him. However, by the time that interview ended, they had become firm friends. It was only then that Jackson told Harris, ‘I want to show the public that there is far more to you than your superficial image as a boozing, brawling womaniser.’ Harris loved this idea and two years later he asked Jackson to write his biography. Richard Harris: Raising Hell and Reaching for Heaven is that biography. But it is much more besides. Based on a searingly honest series of interviews Jackson recorded with Harris between 1987 and 2001, plus the author’s journal entries and extensive notes, this book is also a part-memoir that tells a highly personal and moving back story about why it was inevitable that Jackson and Harris would connect at the deepest possible level. This book will finally prove beyond a doubt that there was far more to Richard Harris, indisputably one of Ireland’s greatest actors as well as a Grammy-award-winning recording artist and published poet, than has previously been revealed.

Mia’s happy marriage is shattered when a brain tumor begins to change her husband’s personality beyond recognition. As Frederik becomes ever more a stranger before her eyes, the revelation that he has used his position as headmaster to mbezzle millions from his school's treasury turns Mia's private crisis into one that involves the community. But this disgraceful crime could become Mia’s salvation: working with a defense lawyer to build Frederik's case, they wrestle with the latest brain research, the question of free will—and their growing attraction to each other. Consumed by her new obsessions, Mia must reexamine everything she thought she knew about her marriage, and herself, as she too starts to change. . . .