From Publishers Weekly
In the latest from seasoned Texan social satirist Bird (The Flamenco Academy, etc.), Blythe Young's recent divorce from Trey Dix has left her outside the protective bubble of Austin's high society. As her catering business goes broke and the IRS starts to chase her down, Blythe seeks a haven at Seneca House, the housing co-op where she lived 10 years ago during college. There, she must face Millie Ott, one of many friends Blythe shucked off in a frenzy of social climbing. Once portly Millie is now slender and, as a perfect foil for Blythe, also saintly: she delivers aid to the homeless by way of a tandem recumbent bike (which Blythe names the dorkocycle). At Seneca House, Blythe tries to make amends with people she's stepped on, to avoid the IRS, and to kick both a lingering drug habit and an addiction to scamming people into helping her out. She slowly starts to wins over the affection of her housemates until one of her unthinking decisions brings potential ruin on the co-op's financial well-being. The result is a laugh-out-loud addition to Bird's long line of estrogen-fueled dramedies. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Anyone who picks up Sarah Bird's How Perfect Is That expecting chick-lit better be wearing a flack jacket. This is hard-edge, scary-funny social comedy and not for sissies. Brits do this well, but not many Americans. But then again, not many Americans have experienced the poisonous social whirl of Texas Republican Ladies at the zenith of the Bush hegemony. Bird's heroine is admittedly no better than she should be. In fact, she probably deserves Trollope's title: ‘Can You Forgive Her?’ And I, for one, can forgive her without hesitation. She has seen the affect-challenged harpies in all their toxic vulgarity. So forget about Scott McClellan: this is ‘What Really Happened’--out there where it hurts to laugh but you laugh anyway. Then pray.” –Dave Hickey
“A perfect, curl-up-with-a-margarita splash of summer fun. Ms. Bird’s wickedly good grasp of social satire couldn’t be finer.” —The Dallas Morning News
“A delightful tale–part social satire, part comedy, part drama . . . Bird paces her story with rollicking hilarity and scathing insight.” —Candace Horgan, Elle’s Readers’ Prize 2008
“Bird details her pilgrim’s progress with an acute eye and ear–and a scorching sense of humor.” —The Austin Chronicle
“Sparks and laughs fly.” —The New York Post, “Required Reading”
“A fast-paced, fun story by a smart, sensitive woman of a certain age. . . a perfect summer read.” —Palm Beach Post
“How Perfect Is That? Pretty damned perfect. Sarah Bird’s scathingly funny look at red state high society delivers a novel that's equal parts Edith Wharton and Nick Hornby. Hilarious.”–Will Clarke, author of Lord Vishnu's Love Handles and The Worthy
“Friends, you've got a treat in store. A laugh-out-loud riches-to-rags tale, a novel of manners that's perfect for the 'coming to our senses' post-Bush age. How Perfect is That is a fried Twinkie of a book–crunchily witty, creamy-hearted and shockingly delicious.” –Janet Fitch, author of Paint It Black and White Oleander
Praise for Sarah Bird's past work
“Do not eat or drink while reading this book. It has so many laughs I almost choked to death.” –Florence King
“Sarah Bird is a fearless madcap. . . falling-off-the-chair hilarious.” –The Los Angeles Times
“Sarah Bird writes fiction with such energy and snap, her novels seem to be in motion. . . Breathtaking.”
–Dallas Morning News
“Bird’s writing brings to life every person and place. . . Laughter comes often and is uncontrolled. The compulsion to read segments out loud . . . is overwhelming.”–The Chicago Tribune
“A very funny book, too–sometimes savagely so. . . It is, in short, a treat.” –San Jose Mercury News
“A perfect, curl-up-with-a-margarita splash of summer fun. Ms. Bird’s wickedly good grasp of social satire couldn’t be finer.” —The Dallas Morning News
“A delightful tale–part social satire, part comedy, part drama . . . Bird paces her story with rollicking hilarity and scathing insight.” —Candace Horgan, Elle’s Readers’ Prize 2008
“Bird details her pilgrim’s progress with an acute eye and ear–and a scorching sense of humor.” —The Austin Chronicle
“Sparks and laughs fly.” —The New York Post, “Required Reading”
“A fast-paced, fun story by a smart, sensitive woman of a certain age. . . a perfect summer read.” —Palm Beach Post
“How Perfect Is That? Pretty damned perfect. Sarah Bird’s scathingly funny look at red state high society delivers a novel that's equal parts Edith Wharton and Nick Hornby. Hilarious.”–Will Clarke, author of Lord Vishnu's Love Handles and The Worthy
“Friends, you've got a treat in store. A laugh-out-loud riches-to-rags tale, a novel of manners that's perfect for the 'coming to our senses' post-Bush age. How Perfect is That is a fried Twinkie of a book–crunchily witty, creamy-hearted and shockingly delicious.” –Janet Fitch, author of Paint It Black and White Oleander
Praise for Sarah Bird's past work
“Do not eat or drink while reading this book. It has so many laughs I almost choked to death.” –Florence King
“Sarah Bird is a fearless madcap. . . falling-off-the-chair hilarious.” –The Los Angeles Times
“Sarah Bird writes fiction with such energy and snap, her novels seem to be in motion. . . Breathtaking.”
–Dallas Morning News
“Bird’s writing brings to life every person and place. . . Laughter comes often and is uncontrolled. The compulsion to read segments out loud . . . is overwhelming.”–The Chicago Tribune
“A very funny book, too–sometimes savagely so. . . It is, in short, a treat.” –San Jose Mercury News
Book Description
Blythe Young—a wannabe Texas princess, a heroine as plucky, driven, and desperate as Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp—is plummeting precipitously from up- to downstairs, banging her head on every step of the Austin social ladder as she falls. Not unlike the country as a whole, Blythe has surrendered to a multitude of dubious moral choices and is now facing the disastrous consequences: bankruptcy, public humiliation, a teensy fondness for the pharmaceuticals, and no Pap smear for ten years. But worst of all, she is forced to move back into the fleabag co-op boardinghouse where she lived when she was a student at the University of Texas.
Though Blythe cares much more about the ravaged state of her nails, and how to get the ingredients for Code Warrior—Blythe’s proprietary blend of Stoli, Ativan, and Red Bull that keeps everything in focus—her soul is hanging in the balance. Only when she is in danger of losing the one friend who’s been her true moral center is she ready to face her sins and make amends.
And her penance is merciless: she must find a way to lure her former socialite friends into the tofu tenement she has been reduced to. Little does Blythe know that the ensuing collision between the pierced, tattooed, and dreadlocked inhabitants and the pampered, Kir-sipping socialites offers the only hope of finding a way out of her moral quagmire.
Funny, fast-paced, sharp-eyed, an old-fashioned morality tale with an appropriately twenty-first-century ending, How Perfect Is That is a comic triumph of a novel.
Though Blythe cares much more about the ravaged state of her nails, and how to get the ingredients for Code Warrior—Blythe’s proprietary blend of Stoli, Ativan, and Red Bull that keeps everything in focus—her soul is hanging in the balance. Only when she is in danger of losing the one friend who’s been her true moral center is she ready to face her sins and make amends.
And her penance is merciless: she must find a way to lure her former socialite friends into the tofu tenement she has been reduced to. Little does Blythe know that the ensuing collision between the pierced, tattooed, and dreadlocked inhabitants and the pampered, Kir-sipping socialites offers the only hope of finding a way out of her moral quagmire.
Funny, fast-paced, sharp-eyed, an old-fashioned morality tale with an appropriately twenty-first-century ending, How Perfect Is That is a comic triumph of a novel.
About the Author
Sarah Bird is the author of six previous novels: Virgin of the Rodeo, The Boyfriend School, Alamo House, The Mommy Club, The Yokota Officers Club, and The Flamenco Academy. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
April 3, 2003
4:15 a.m.
Four-fifteen in the morning is the perfect time to catalog the one commodity I am still rich in: regrets. I keep trying to pare that lengthy list down to a manageably brief inventory of everything I failed to acquire during marriage to a scion of one of America's wealthiest dynasties. Over the past few months, I have smelted a King Solomon's mine of lost swag down to the few basics I most regret either not obtaining or not hanging on to:
1. A husband
2. A home
3. A Pap smear
I've added and removed "4. Children" from the list several times. Currently, they are off.
Recently I've also started to regret christening myself Blythe Young. I picked the name at the end of my sophomore year at Abilene High School. It was an improvement over the one my mother had saddled me with, Chanterelle Young. I was tired of being taken for either an exotic dancer or, far worse, exactly what I was, the daughter of a trailer-trash tramp of a mother too stupid to know that in her single, solitary moment of maternal lyricism she had named her only child after a mushroom.
Eighteen years later, however, instead of blithe and young, I feel burdened and every day of my thirty-three years. What I am is divorced, desperate, and currently clinging frantically to a very tenuous toehold here in Bamsie Beiver's historically significant carriage house. Although Bamsie redid the main house in meticulous turn-of-the-century detail for maximum "authenticity" and "tax benefits," my abode never received such tender ministrations. Renovations on the carriage house appear to have started and stopped once the horse turds were swept out.
The sky lightens to a clotted gray signaling that no matter how much I might wish otherwise a new day is dawning. I brace myself for the next item on the chronic insomniac's agenda: an elaborate road trip revisiting all the points in my life where I took disastrously wrong turns. First up, the prenup. I put the prenup on hold, since it is more than a wrong turn; that damned prenup is its own entire journey of the damned with an itinerary drawn up by my former mother-in-law, Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS, known more generally as Peggy Biggs-Dix. Peggy ruined my life. Without her I would still be Mrs. Henry "Trey" Biggs-Dix the Third, mistress of Pemberton Palace. I would still be sleeping on Frette sheets, numbered like works of art, and thick and dense as deep sleep itself. I would still be breathing in air that smelled of lavender, eucalyptus, and the kind of clean that only generations of really dirty money can buy. Without Peggy, I wouldn't be where I am now, huddled in Bamsie's dank carriage house, staring down bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy? Who am I kidding? I was bankrupt when I married Trey. I believed he would rescue me. But his succubus of a mother sliced my oxygen hose and left me gasping on the ocean floor. No, it is what lurks beyond bankruptcy that is so terrifying. I forbid myself to burrow into this rathole any farther. My future will be decided today. So, although the lengthy list of things I would rather be doing than coordinating Kippie Lee's garden party would lead off with "Anything" and finish up with "Gum surgery," I have no choice. One, just one, just one healthy check, could keep me alive long enough to regroup and come back to fight another day.
In another city. Under another name.
Kippie Lee's check is my last, rapidly fading hope for staying out of debtor's prison. The words "debtor's prison" fill my mind with images from A Rake's Progress. Wastrels in powdered wigs despoiling themselves at the gaming tables. Blowsy slatterns in mobcaps with beauty marks painted over syphilitic sores. Grand ladies in Marie Antoinette wigs amusing themselves by gawking at the debt-maddened lunatics imprisoned in Bedlam. The vision is highly motivating.
It is do-or-die time. Failure is not an option. Semper Fi.
Already imagining I have Kippie Lee's check, I prioritize my list of creditors into Vultures and Jackals. Vultures--my unpaid employees, the IRS, inattentive suppliers--won't attack until I've stopped moving. I can let them wait. The Jackals, on the other hand--Sprint, Visa, American Express, MasterCard, Loan Sharks 'R' Us--are already nipping at my hindquarters with their massive, wildebeest-thigh-crushing jaws. This pack will have to be seen to first. I plan to scatter precisely enough dollars in the path of the Jackals to make them unlock their cruel masseters and release my gluteals. That will give me some breathing room.
Thus bolstered, I struggle to clear my mind and fall back to sleep. Instead, the hamsters on their wheels turn even faster. They pull me back, all the way back to the day when I met Henry "Trey" "Tree Tree" "Double T" Biggs-Dix the Third. Back to the beginning of the end.
I met Trey shortly after the dot-com bubble burst and I was in financial free fall owing to the first incarnation of Wretched Xcess, Event Coordination Extraordinaire, going belly-up. Wretched Xcess was not just the name of my business but the encapsulation of an entire zeitgeist as manifested in Austin, Texas. Lord, that was a heady time when too much was never enough and the clever boys in their backward caps, Teva sandals, and cargo shorts could not burn through their venture capital fast enough. Excess, that's what my clever boys wanted and that's what I provided.
Drunk with the rest of the country at the vast money kegger thrown by the venture capitalists, I expanded to meet the needs of my ever-more-demanding clientele. Though the Bubble Boys were still padding around in flip-flops, they could tell their beluga from their osetra. And, in every case, they wanted the beluga. They also wanted the titanium chafing dishes, the Baccarat crystal, and the tablecloths with a four-digit thread count embroidered by French nuns that I felt forced to acquire. High-end all the way. Leveraged to the max. That was when I should have worried. But I had fallen under the spell of my bright boys. We were rewriting the laws of trade and were all going to retire by the age of thirty-four. Thirty-three at the latest. Working was for chumps. We would float together forever on the bubble that had already lofted us so much higher than we could have ever dreamed.
And then?
Pop.
A bubble. Yes, I could have dealt with a bubble. But did it have to be filled with deadly swamp gas?
We all fell. Just some of us, weighted down with titanium chafing dishes and tablecloths heavy as rugs, hit significantly harder than those who'd pulled rip cords on parachutes in varying hues of gold. Or who'd simply moved into Mom's garage. Mom's garage was never an option for me, since my mother was herself living in a garage. Griz's Hawg Heaven Harley Garage to be exact, owned by her "old man."
Vicki Jo keeps in touch by sending photos taken while she is "riding bitch" on the back of a chromed-out Harley-Davidson, piloted by Griz himself, whom Mom proudly describes as "a 1%er Outlaw Bandido thru and thru." In most of the photos, Vicki Jo is hiking up her top to reveal the bouncing maternal mammaries tanned to a rich, beef-jerky brown. I have to give Vicki Jo this: She has great tits for a woman her age and could almost pass for the thirty-nine she claims. At least when her very inconvenient thirty-three-year-old daughter isn't around. As for Griz, imagine a circus bear riding a motorcycle. Now stick a Nazi helmet atop its sloping head, give it a wallet on a chain, and there you had my mother's paramour.
Yes, my mother is a biker chick. Vicki Jo warned me early and often that mothering was not her "bag." My father had promised to do all the raising if Vicki Jo would handle the birthing. Mom couldn't help but feel she'd been welshed on when her husband died of a heart attack shortly after "the kid" was born. Making the best of a bad deal, my mother got a "shitty-ass, monkey fuck of a job" with the phone company and grudgingly kept me in sneakers and Clearasil for the next sixteen years with periodic memos that this wasn't "the tour" she had "signed on for" and that "we all got to float our own boat in this world." The instant I turned sixteen, Vicki Jo informed me that the "gravy train" had stopped and that her "me time" had begun.
Mom's answer to "What happens to a dream deferred?" was to move to Myrtle Beach, home to a very active biker scene and purchase a wardrobe of leathers, cutoffs, halter tops, and bandannas. Vicki Jo looked upon my childhood as an annuity and felt that every dime she'd put into raising me should have been accumulating interest and be available for withdrawal at any moment. The last time she hit me up for a loan so that Griz could get a valve job before the big Suck, Bang, and Blow Rally, she had been peeved that I was broke.
"What happened to that rich dude you married?"
"Being married to me didn't make him one penny less rich."
"Goddammit, don't tell me you signed a prenup?"
"Okay, I won't."
"What's that monkey fuck's name? Me and Griz are going to pay a visit on his sorry ass."
"Ethan Hawke."
"Gimme the son of a bitch's number."
"I'll get back to you on that."
I don't mention my mother much. All right, I don't mention my mother ever. It isn't that I'm ashamed of her. Or, okay, it isn't just that I'm ashamed of her; I fear the response if I tell the truth. Maybe illustrate it with a snapshot of Mom, riding high behind Griz, top hiked up, tan Mommy muffins exposed, big drunk grin on her leathery face. I fear that my confidant will look from the photograph to me, then back and say, "Ah, that explains it." Because all my mother explains is the obvious: Girls who aren't born rich have to work...
4:15 a.m.
Four-fifteen in the morning is the perfect time to catalog the one commodity I am still rich in: regrets. I keep trying to pare that lengthy list down to a manageably brief inventory of everything I failed to acquire during marriage to a scion of one of America's wealthiest dynasties. Over the past few months, I have smelted a King Solomon's mine of lost swag down to the few basics I most regret either not obtaining or not hanging on to:
1. A husband
2. A home
3. A Pap smear
I've added and removed "4. Children" from the list several times. Currently, they are off.
Recently I've also started to regret christening myself Blythe Young. I picked the name at the end of my sophomore year at Abilene High School. It was an improvement over the one my mother had saddled me with, Chanterelle Young. I was tired of being taken for either an exotic dancer or, far worse, exactly what I was, the daughter of a trailer-trash tramp of a mother too stupid to know that in her single, solitary moment of maternal lyricism she had named her only child after a mushroom.
Eighteen years later, however, instead of blithe and young, I feel burdened and every day of my thirty-three years. What I am is divorced, desperate, and currently clinging frantically to a very tenuous toehold here in Bamsie Beiver's historically significant carriage house. Although Bamsie redid the main house in meticulous turn-of-the-century detail for maximum "authenticity" and "tax benefits," my abode never received such tender ministrations. Renovations on the carriage house appear to have started and stopped once the horse turds were swept out.
The sky lightens to a clotted gray signaling that no matter how much I might wish otherwise a new day is dawning. I brace myself for the next item on the chronic insomniac's agenda: an elaborate road trip revisiting all the points in my life where I took disastrously wrong turns. First up, the prenup. I put the prenup on hold, since it is more than a wrong turn; that damned prenup is its own entire journey of the damned with an itinerary drawn up by my former mother-in-law, Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS, known more generally as Peggy Biggs-Dix. Peggy ruined my life. Without her I would still be Mrs. Henry "Trey" Biggs-Dix the Third, mistress of Pemberton Palace. I would still be sleeping on Frette sheets, numbered like works of art, and thick and dense as deep sleep itself. I would still be breathing in air that smelled of lavender, eucalyptus, and the kind of clean that only generations of really dirty money can buy. Without Peggy, I wouldn't be where I am now, huddled in Bamsie's dank carriage house, staring down bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy? Who am I kidding? I was bankrupt when I married Trey. I believed he would rescue me. But his succubus of a mother sliced my oxygen hose and left me gasping on the ocean floor. No, it is what lurks beyond bankruptcy that is so terrifying. I forbid myself to burrow into this rathole any farther. My future will be decided today. So, although the lengthy list of things I would rather be doing than coordinating Kippie Lee's garden party would lead off with "Anything" and finish up with "Gum surgery," I have no choice. One, just one, just one healthy check, could keep me alive long enough to regroup and come back to fight another day.
In another city. Under another name.
Kippie Lee's check is my last, rapidly fading hope for staying out of debtor's prison. The words "debtor's prison" fill my mind with images from A Rake's Progress. Wastrels in powdered wigs despoiling themselves at the gaming tables. Blowsy slatterns in mobcaps with beauty marks painted over syphilitic sores. Grand ladies in Marie Antoinette wigs amusing themselves by gawking at the debt-maddened lunatics imprisoned in Bedlam. The vision is highly motivating.
It is do-or-die time. Failure is not an option. Semper Fi.
Already imagining I have Kippie Lee's check, I prioritize my list of creditors into Vultures and Jackals. Vultures--my unpaid employees, the IRS, inattentive suppliers--won't attack until I've stopped moving. I can let them wait. The Jackals, on the other hand--Sprint, Visa, American Express, MasterCard, Loan Sharks 'R' Us--are already nipping at my hindquarters with their massive, wildebeest-thigh-crushing jaws. This pack will have to be seen to first. I plan to scatter precisely enough dollars in the path of the Jackals to make them unlock their cruel masseters and release my gluteals. That will give me some breathing room.
Thus bolstered, I struggle to clear my mind and fall back to sleep. Instead, the hamsters on their wheels turn even faster. They pull me back, all the way back to the day when I met Henry "Trey" "Tree Tree" "Double T" Biggs-Dix the Third. Back to the beginning of the end.
I met Trey shortly after the dot-com bubble burst and I was in financial free fall owing to the first incarnation of Wretched Xcess, Event Coordination Extraordinaire, going belly-up. Wretched Xcess was not just the name of my business but the encapsulation of an entire zeitgeist as manifested in Austin, Texas. Lord, that was a heady time when too much was never enough and the clever boys in their backward caps, Teva sandals, and cargo shorts could not burn through their venture capital fast enough. Excess, that's what my clever boys wanted and that's what I provided.
Drunk with the rest of the country at the vast money kegger thrown by the venture capitalists, I expanded to meet the needs of my ever-more-demanding clientele. Though the Bubble Boys were still padding around in flip-flops, they could tell their beluga from their osetra. And, in every case, they wanted the beluga. They also wanted the titanium chafing dishes, the Baccarat crystal, and the tablecloths with a four-digit thread count embroidered by French nuns that I felt forced to acquire. High-end all the way. Leveraged to the max. That was when I should have worried. But I had fallen under the spell of my bright boys. We were rewriting the laws of trade and were all going to retire by the age of thirty-four. Thirty-three at the latest. Working was for chumps. We would float together forever on the bubble that had already lofted us so much higher than we could have ever dreamed.
And then?
Pop.
A bubble. Yes, I could have dealt with a bubble. But did it have to be filled with deadly swamp gas?
We all fell. Just some of us, weighted down with titanium chafing dishes and tablecloths heavy as rugs, hit significantly harder than those who'd pulled rip cords on parachutes in varying hues of gold. Or who'd simply moved into Mom's garage. Mom's garage was never an option for me, since my mother was herself living in a garage. Griz's Hawg Heaven Harley Garage to be exact, owned by her "old man."
Vicki Jo keeps in touch by sending photos taken while she is "riding bitch" on the back of a chromed-out Harley-Davidson, piloted by Griz himself, whom Mom proudly describes as "a 1%er Outlaw Bandido thru and thru." In most of the photos, Vicki Jo is hiking up her top to reveal the bouncing maternal mammaries tanned to a rich, beef-jerky brown. I have to give Vicki Jo this: She has great tits for a woman her age and could almost pass for the thirty-nine she claims. At least when her very inconvenient thirty-three-year-old daughter isn't around. As for Griz, imagine a circus bear riding a motorcycle. Now stick a Nazi helmet atop its sloping head, give it a wallet on a chain, and there you had my mother's paramour.
Yes, my mother is a biker chick. Vicki Jo warned me early and often that mothering was not her "bag." My father had promised to do all the raising if Vicki Jo would handle the birthing. Mom couldn't help but feel she'd been welshed on when her husband died of a heart attack shortly after "the kid" was born. Making the best of a bad deal, my mother got a "shitty-ass, monkey fuck of a job" with the phone company and grudgingly kept me in sneakers and Clearasil for the next sixteen years with periodic memos that this wasn't "the tour" she had "signed on for" and that "we all got to float our own boat in this world." The instant I turned sixteen, Vicki Jo informed me that the "gravy train" had stopped and that her "me time" had begun.
Mom's answer to "What happens to a dream deferred?" was to move to Myrtle Beach, home to a very active biker scene and purchase a wardrobe of leathers, cutoffs, halter tops, and bandannas. Vicki Jo looked upon my childhood as an annuity and felt that every dime she'd put into raising me should have been accumulating interest and be available for withdrawal at any moment. The last time she hit me up for a loan so that Griz could get a valve job before the big Suck, Bang, and Blow Rally, she had been peeved that I was broke.
"What happened to that rich dude you married?"
"Being married to me didn't make him one penny less rich."
"Goddammit, don't tell me you signed a prenup?"
"Okay, I won't."
"What's that monkey fuck's name? Me and Griz are going to pay a visit on his sorry ass."
"Ethan Hawke."
"Gimme the son of a bitch's number."
"I'll get back to you on that."
I don't mention my mother much. All right, I don't mention my mother ever. It isn't that I'm ashamed of her. Or, okay, it isn't just that I'm ashamed of her; I fear the response if I tell the truth. Maybe illustrate it with a snapshot of Mom, riding high behind Griz, top hiked up, tan Mommy muffins exposed, big drunk grin on her leathery face. I fear that my confidant will look from the photograph to me, then back and say, "Ah, that explains it." Because all my mother explains is the obvious: Girls who aren't born rich have to work...
