First Look: Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem
This excerpt is part of our First Look column, where you’ll find exclusive sneak peeks of upcoming books across all genres!
New York Times best-selling author and humorist Laurie Notaro’s latest memoir riffs on her unpreparedness for navigating life after turning 50 and the surprising benefits of getting older. It’s a nonstop and often profane monologue of sardonic takes on menopause and midlife, shot through with off-the-cuff advice, the best of which amounts to get a good attitude and better health insurance.
Order your copy here and stay tuned for Notaro’s appearance on Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books!
“I’ve decided,” I said as I plopped down in the cushy salon chair. “Today is the day.”
My hairstylist looked a little shocked, but I nodded. “I’m going all the way.”
“Okay,” she said. “But you have to be sure. You really have to be sure, because there’s no going back.”
“Full steam ahead!” I tallyhoed. “Make me gray!”
I won’t lie. I wasn’t a mature woman embracing her true self, age, and root color. I had, instead, recently seen a photo of myself in which someone had clearly poured powdered sugar on my head, right down the part, with the surgical precision of an alien ship leaving crop circles.
“Look at that!” I said to my husband, pointing at the image on Facebook. “Someone was eating a doughnut above my head! Why didn’t someone tell me?”
My husband peered over my shoulder, took a good look at me, and quickly said, “I think I hear the teakettle.”
Odd, I thought. I didn’t hear a teakettle. I followed him into the kitchen. He glanced back and picked up his pace, sprinting into the dining room.
“I didn’t hear anything,” I said as I pursued him through the living room and back to the kitchen. On my second lap, I got a good look at the empty stove.
“There’s no teakettle!” I said louder as he doubled back to the dining room, where I found him blocked by Maeby, our Australian shepherd. She’d realized that the sheep had escaped the pen and was now frantically herding my husband into his chair.
“There’s no teakettle!” I asserted again.
My husband threw his arms up. “Just as there was no doughnut.”
“What?”
“There was no doughnut,” he explained. “No one dropped powdered sugar on your head.”
“Okay,” I said, beginning to laugh. “Maybe it was cocaine.”
“One of your friends just got a fellowship at Harvard,” he stated. “Another one runs a hedge fund on Wall Street. One owns a bookstore. Another was the president of the PTA in a snooty neighborhood. And don’t forget the one fighting malaria in Africa—but, more importantly, Bill Gates knows that one’s first and last name. No one is doing cocaine at your Scottsdale-cinnamon-roll-french-toast brunches.”
“Okay!” I said, fully laughing. “I guess it was a bad light reflection.”
“It was not a bad light reflection!” my husband finally spouted. “It’s your roots. Your roots are white.”
I squinted at him, unbelieving. “But I get them done every three weeks. At a hundred and seventy dollars a pop. Plus tip. And I’m a good tipper.”
“Well, the real tip is that every three weeks, they grow back—white,” he said. “Honey, I think you’re gray.”
There was every possibility that he was right. I’d found my first gray hair at twenty-two, and after that they just kept coming. I’d invested in the occasional box of L’Oréal every now and then for the first twenty years or so. Later, when I was sick of guests inquiring furtively about the brown splotches on the walls of my bathroom—because I apparently rinsed out hair dye as if I were a wet dog—I started getting my hair dyed professionally. At first, I made a trip to the salon every five weeks, and then, as I merged into my forties, every four. Eventually, I worked my way up to a three-week rotation. I knew more about my colorist than I did my therapist and was actually offended when I did not make it onto the guest list for her wedding.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have gasped when she mentioned that she was using fake flowers from Michaels to create her centerpieces, or suggested lightly, “Remember, not everyone can pull off a sleeveless dress. It’s true. My sister once fired me from her wedding party when I pointed out that the average BMI of her bridesmaids definitively pointed to arm coverings, unless the Spanx lady had suddenly invented a girdle for flesh curtains.”
So every three weeks, when I visited my fake-flower-loving colorist for my fake chestnut-brown hair, I was investing $170 plus a good tip into a lie, and it had stopped delivering returns. The way I saw it, I had several options.
Move my coloring appointments to every two weeks, the cost of which would have decimated my snack budget, even though evidence on my colorist’s Facebook page revealed—to my aesthetic horror—that the bridal party was indeed sleeveless, despite the fact that photos live forever.
Get a wig. Initially, this seemed like a great idea. Can you imagine putting on your hair like a bra? It would be that easy! Then I actually tried a few on at the mall’s wig store and instantly transformed myself into an aged prostitute. Not to mention, those wigs are itchy. I thought about seeking out a higher-end wig, but the idea of finding someone else’s hair in my food every time I cooked made me want to hurl on the spot.
Become a hat person. I tried to think of women I knew who wore hats or artfully tied scarves regularly, and the vision wasn’t promising, being that their faces were typically covered in new biopsy Band-Aids every week, and most of them rode the bus for free with their senior passes. So, no. It also turns out that I have an enormous head, which explains some of my mother’s feelings toward me. She most likely still has several stitches in place from October 1965.
Revert to my birth religion and join the order. This move would have solved my hair problem in a snap, but I wasn’t sold on wearing a habit. First there was the question of adopting an entire belief system that I had already rejected at the age of twelve when episodes of Little House on the Prairie interfered with my confirmation classes. But I was still considering joining a convent (free food, free rent, walks around long gardens, chastising small children) until I realized that the fabric choices were limited, because the Catholic Church only springs for cotton if you’re the pope. If there’s something I want less on my head than a gray hair, it’s polyester. But the ultimate nail in the coffin of this idea was the realization that there are pins and magnets involved in securing the head covering, and pins anywhere in the relative proximity of my eyes is an instant deal breaker.
Face the truth. I am past fifty. I have gray hair. Big deal. What was I so afraid of? Looking my age? That’s ridiculous, I thought to myself. I have somehow lived through five decades of bad decisions. I have scars that look like I got them in prison, and none of the under forties I work with believe that mothers used to send their children off with ham and cheese sandwiches in metal lunch boxes in 115-degree heat without one of those children dying. I have beaten the odds! My impressive consumption of cigarettes and Pepsi alone made the State Farm life insurance agent laugh out loud when I was seeking coverage. I am old, but I am alive. If you would have spent only an hour with me in 1993, even if I was sleeping, you would have laughed harder than the State Farm agent at the possibility of my reaching the gray-hair stage of life.
But I made it. I am here. So why not . . . show off a little? I proved them (every one of my mother’s friends) wrong; I didn’t end up in rehab, prison, or an urn. I’m still alive! I’ve seen more than half a century of events. I’ve seen so much stuff that I had to purge 90 percent of my childhood memories from my brain in order to make room for passwords and PINs.
I’ve realized that nearly every day, I learn something new. That means that, at my age now, I have so much more knowledge and perspective than I did at twenty-seven. I’ve seen more things, had more experiences, and am honestly smarter than I was thirty years ago. There simply is no arguing with that. At fifty-plus, I now know that:
• You should never trust a junkie, no matter how blue their eyes are.
• When a motorcycle gang member named Pudgy wants to hang out at your house, it’s not because he thinks you’re cool; it’s to scout your living room for shit he can come back and steal later when you aren’t home.
• When you suspect that your boss is a little off and demonstrates multiple personalities, HR is not going to help you, and you need to find another job stat.
• If you need to fart at work, you need to go outside and find an active leaf blower or a steady stream of traffic to serve as a sound buffer.
Why shouldn’t I be proud of navigating life up until this point and wearing the badges to prove it? If each gray hair that sprouted from my head could equate to every new thing I’ve learned (being robbed by Pudgy the Biker gave me at least five hundred), that’s pretty much the same as getting a PhD in life without eighty thousand in student-loan debt.
Why wouldn’t I want to brag about that?
My mother, however, had other opinions when I told her about my decision to let nature take over.
“That is a terrible decision,” she, whose scalp is so tough after applying 672 solutions of Revlon ColorSilk in Light Ash that I’m thinking about using it as a pot holder after she dies, said immediately. “That’s a shame. A daughter who looks older than her mother. Now everyone is going to think I’m old because you look so old.”
“But don’t you think that gray hair is a symbol of knowledge and experience?” I asked, already knowing her answer. “Plus, we can move in together with two of my friends and have a hit sitcom!”
“If you want to look like shit, look like shit,” she replied. “I don’t know what else to tell you. All I know is that when you use my bathroom, it won’t look like a monkey had a fight with another monkey in there. It will just look like a haunted house with all of the disgusting spiderwebs.”
My sister had a similar take. “Why would you do that?!” she exclaimed. “It’s like you’re just giving up.”
“Remember when I was thirty-five and put a burgundy tint in my hair, and you said I was an old person trying to look young and that I should just buy a set of bingo cards?” I asked.
“I was not lying,” she responded. “But you can’t give in so easy!”
“Easy?” I laughed. “A hundred and seventy bucks plus a very good tip every three weeks to sit in a chair and chitchat for two hours with someone who doesn’t even invite you to her wedding is not easy. I’ve put in my time. Investing that time and money is dedication! And it wasn’t even working. Do you know that I saw a picture of myself and genuinely thought that someone had eaten a powdered doughnut over my head?”
“Really?” she replied. “I just thought your friends ate a lot of doughnuts.”
“They aren’t doing cocaine either,” I said sadly.
Excerpted from Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem by Laurie Notaro. © 2022 Published by Little A, November 1st, 2022. All Rights Reserved.
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Laurie Notaro is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the humor memoirs The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club, Autobiography of a Fat Bride, I Love Everybody, The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death, a finalist for the Thurber Prize, and Housebroken, among others. She is also the author of three works of fiction, including the historical novel Crossing the Horizon. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she then spent the remainder of her formative years in Phoenix, Arizona, where she created something of a checkered past. Laurie now resides in Eugene, Oregon, has a cute dog and a nice husband, and misses Mexican food like it was her youth.