Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Laurie Notaro is definitely dorky. Dorkier than me, even, and I happen to own a lot of "X-Files" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episodes on DVD.

Notaro, though, she’s the expert. Author of the hilarious essay collections "Autobiography of a Fat Bride," "I Love Everybody (And Other Atrocious Lies)" and the bestselling "The Idiot Girls Action-Adventure Club," she is Dave Barry with ovaries, filing bizarre and frequently humiliating reports about Life on the Goofy Side.

No subject is too mundane or embarrassing for Notaro, as she proves in "We Thought You Would Be Prettier," which describes the horrors of her first book tour, including, but not limited to: losing her wallet and driver’s license in the middle of an orange security alert; giving a reading in front of an audience of one, a woman who heard her do something embarrassing in the bathroom; and trying to be fabulous while hailing a cab when her hair, unlike Sarah Jessica Parker’s flowing locks, "met the humidity in New York City. ... I looked as if I was answering a casting call for a revival of ’Godspell.’ "

She explores her rabid obsession with the pet-store employee who wears the Farrah Fawcett flippy hair she always coveted and sensitively explains why one might require cases and cases of Ensure in the event that terrorists blow up a nearby nuclear power plant: "When your intestines are hanging out of your butt because of massive radiation exposure, you’re really going to wish you had a nice can of Ensure to pass through your contaminated digestive system!"

Notaro’s family provides good fodder, too, especially her mom, who at one point announces, "You will never believe what crawled into me at three o’clock in the morning last night." The dutiful daughter does not want to know. "Just because I’m back in therapy doesn’t mean I’m now a blank slate on which you now can feel free to inflict a whole other lifetime’s worth of damage on."

So, welcome back to Notaro’s world. By the time you’re done laughing your way through her latest foray through idiocy, you, too, may be purchasing cartons of Ensure. Just in case.