The Big Sleep
How I ended up spending my panel appearance at the Texas Book Festival lying on a bench and drooling on the floor.
Sarah Bird is the author of eight award-winning novels, including The Yokota Officers Club, Virgin of the Rodeo, The Mommy Club, and The Boyfriend School. Her most recent novel, The Gap Year, was named one of Library Journal’s Best Novels of the Year for 2011. Her ninth novel, A Princess Lily Girl, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in the spring of 2014. Sarah was the holder of the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship in summer 2010, was inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, and received a National Magazine Award nomination for her Texas Monthly columns. She has written screenplays for Warner Bros., CBS, TNT, the National Geographic Channel, Hallmark Features, and many independent producers and syndicated programs. She has been a contributor to the New York Times, Salon, Oprah magazine, the Daily Beast, Real Simple, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and Texas Monthly. She and her husband, George Jones (not the dipsomaniacal C&W singer), make their empty nest in Austin with not-frequent-enough visits from son Gabriel.
Articles by Sarah Bird
Meat, My Maker
When Dallas’s very own Marvin Lee Aday—that’s Meat Loaf to you—optioned one of my screenplays, he didn’t just offer me a glimpse of paradise by the dashboard lights. He also helped me write a novel.
Sink or Swim
In an excerpt from Sarah Bird's new novel The Gap Year, a single mom prepares to send her only daughter off to college. Guess which one is a wreck.
Hedda Garbler
Help! My voice recognition software is making me save airy funnel things witch nobody wonder Stans.
One Angry Woman
Am I the only person who has always wanted to get picked for jury duty?
Rats!
Turns out being a test subject for a dermatology research lab is not the best thing that could ever happen to a girl.
Ranch Blessing
Or, how I stopped worrying and learned to love my formerly ugly, recently hip, linoleum-clad, mid-mod house.
Ready, Set, Go-Go!
Every female on earth believes she can dance. My big break came when a Bob Hope wannabe with shiny suits and a pinkie ring took me on as his sidekick for a two-week tour of Tokyo.
The Goodbye Boy
My only son is leaving for college, and I’m weeping through Mamma Mia! Lord help me.
Lactation Nation
Putting the fun in fun bags! The mommy in mommy muffins! (I could go on.)
Desperate Housewives
In this excerpt from writer-at-large Sarah Bird’s new novel, How Perfect Is That, the realities of life in early twenty-first century Austin become all-too-clear to a defrocked socialite.
This Year’s Model
Hey, captains of industry: If Dr. Evil can have a Mini Me, why can’t the rest of us?
No Ifs, Abs, Or Butts
My instructor is a Flabbo Nazi, and other tales from the aerobics wars.
Tour De Farce
The absurdity of the college visit (and why you should leave your kids at home).
The Furs Were Flying
There is a world where the kings of small African countries send cases of Dom Pérignon as hostess gifts, where you get to choose between the white-striped chinchilla and the violet beaver shearling poncho. Who let me in?
Buy, Buy, Birdie
Ladies’ fashion is nothing if not a fantasy inside an illusion wrapped in a thong. Every season, there is a new “look,” a new “trend,” a new “paranoid schizophrenic thought disorder.” And then there are returns.