Free I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) by Laurie Notaro

television to channel four and it should be fine.”
    Miraculously, the picture returned to Nana’s TV, and she breathed an audible sigh of relief.
    “Oh, thank God,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do! I thought if my TV didn’t come back on I might have to go to your mother’s but that wouldn’t work because she doesn’t watch anything but QVC. And frankly, I can’t stand that show. If I want to buy a blender, no one’s going to force me to do it by putting a stopwatch next to it and yelling every five seconds that my time is running out! And the people that call in, oh my God, to talk about things they’ve bought. I think to myself, how boring does your life have to be before you want to have a conversation about a blender? ‘You know,’ I want to tell them, ‘you know how stupid you look calling a stranger and talking about your pants on TV? “Oh, Kathy, I love my Bob Mackie stretch pants, they’re so nice, they stretch when I sit down, and they dry so fast! I bought a pair in every color!”’ What would make someone do that, I ask you?!”
    “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “Maybe her Lifetime TV went out, too.”
    “And your mother,” my Nana went on, “You know, sometimes when I’m over there and she’s watching that stupid show, I’ll glance over at her and I can tell. She wants to call in. She has that certain look in her eye. She wants to call in and talk about her pants or her blender, too!”
    Nana looked at me and shook her head.
    “And last week, I asked her to lunch on Tuesday, and do you know what she said? She said, ‘I can’t go on Tuesday at noon. Kathy is having a show on Diamonique, the world’s finest simulated gemstone.’ I wanted to tell her, ‘simulated’ and ‘gemstone’ in the same sentence kind of cancel each other out. It’s fake diamonds! Can you believe that? Can you believe that I raised a daughter who spends most of her time in front of the idiot box watching idiots and believing in fake stuff?”
    “Who would have thought?” I simply answered. “Who would have thought?”

         
    It’s an Idiot Girl!!!

    W hen I called my parents to tell them that after seven years of trying, I had sold my book to a publishing house, my mother reacted like I had just told her I had saved fifteen dollars off my grocery bill by using double coupons and a Fresh Value card.
    “Well,” she said. “That’s very nice.”
    But really, I shouldn’t have expected anything more or anything less. In my family, nobody wants to know anything unless you’re fine, and if you’re fine, then we don’t need to talk about it any further. We’re devout, practicing, sixth-generation Avoiders, so if you have any problems, you keep them to yourself because everything else is fine. So don’t ruin it for the rest of us.
    “After seven years, Mom!” I cried, trying to push it.
    “I know,”
she replied. “That’s what you said! I heard you!”
    “
Seven years,
Mom!” I repeated, really trying to force the point.
    “ARE YOU ON A CELL PHONE?” she yelled into her receiver. “ARE YOU IN A BAR? WHY CAN’T YOU HEAR ME? HAVE YOU BEEN SMOKING THE POT?”
    It didn’t matter, anyway. I knew my mom was happy. For the better part of a decade, she’d borne witness, as all of my family had, to my efforts to get my little book out into the world. Admittedly, I was a nave columnist at my college newspaper when I had collected enough pieces to be considered a book. My book. A finished book. I thought that naturally, I had written a book, now I’ll send it off to the publishing world and get this little book published. After all, why not? I’d gone through all the trouble of writing it! I sat down and printed out my sample chapters, letters of introduction, and contact information on very expensive paper, gently slid the packets into envelopes, addressed them to the seventy book publishing companies across the country, and mailed them off.
    Soon, I