Spotlight: Sisters!: Bonded by Love And Laughter
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Credit: Drue Wagner
No one has your back like your sister. And no one can make you laugh as hard. Explore this humorous, nobody-else-could-ever-understand, special world in Sisters! Bonded by Love and Laughter, featuring over 50 hilarious (and true) stories, Q&As, interviews and more from contributors including New York Times bestselling authors, Saturday Night Live legends, humor writers, podcasters, and other creatives, as well as Nickie's Prize winners.
Enjoy comical sister stories of illicit ear-piercing, sisterly advice (gone seriously awry) and sharing that shoulder to cry on during life’s most crushing moments.
If your sister is “your person,” then Sisters! is for you—and her—and for friends in your life who are just like sisters, and share that special bond of love and laughter.
Excerpt
Conversations in Cars with Sisters
Kim Bonner
The women in my family are not good drivers. They lack basic defensive driving skills, insist on fishing for a pack of gum underneath the seat while merging onto the highway, and are generally prone to vehicular mayhem. The effects of this hereditary defect quadruple when more than one of us is in an automobile at any given time.
Once, my sister and I sat in silence as my mother and two of her sisters crammed into the front seat of a Ford LTD to go shopping, while we sat in the back, choking down their second- hand smoke. I think I was ten years old.
“I can’t breathe,” I whispered to my sister.
She seemed unconcerned. “Don’t be so dramatic. Roll the window down.”
“You’re letting the air condition out!” my mother barked. “But...” I gagged.
“You ran a stop sign,” one of my aunts pointed out, mid-drag. My mother was indignant. “Did not.”
“I LITERALLY CANNOT BREATHE.”
“Just inhale through your mouth,” my other aunt advised me as she lit an unfiltered Camel. This, along with, “If you don’t have a fever, you’re not really sick,” was a staple of their parent-ing philosophy.
Years later, I was driving my sister and her toddler son home.
She’d volunteered him as a guinea pig for me to test out whether I could hack being a mom, since I was considering procreating. (I did, and she turned out fine, thank you very much.) When I glanced at the back seat, where I’d painstakingly strapped the tyke into a five-point harness, I squealed and swerved hard to the right, nearly nicking a mailbox. My sister was unperturbed, having hit more than her share of mailboxes.
“Your son is buck naked!” The kid had managed to remove all of his clothes, including his pull-up diaper. He sat happily wiggling his toes like a tourist on a European nudist beach.
“Yeah, sometimes he does that.”
The rest of the ride home was a mashup of, Your kid is a psy- cho and Don’t be so dramatic.
Later, when we had four kids between us, the conversations became, Can’t you make that Tamagotchi toy shut up? and Do you think that shake weight thing actually works?
Our kids, though, are of a softer generation and less tolerant of distracted driving. There were no aunts in their life to blow carcinogens in their face and say things like, “Go play in the street,” unironically. My mother’s sisters used to let our cous- ins light toothpicks with matches and pretend to smoke them. But our offspring? When my sister got pulled over because the two of us were debating McDonald’s fries vs. Wendy’s fries and didn’t notice a flashing yellow light, they ran and tattled to their granny, the same granny who wouldn’t roll down a window so I could breathe 30 years earlier. She put us both on restriction. I was 41.
Conversations in cars with sisters nowadays is just a matter of using Bluetooth, keeping your hands at the ten and two position, and generally being boring. Our kids will never know the thrill of almost losing your life because your sister can’t talk and drive at the same time.
Take, for example, my grandmother’s two older sisters. They lived together for 50 years until one of them became unable to care for herself and had to move to a nursing home. The other, deaf since birth, prevailed upon me, my mother, and one of my aunts to transport her to visit. When we picked her up, it was with the full expectation that there would be something by way of an address or map to get us to the nursing home. Mind you, this was before GPS or Siri or the Internet.
My great aunt deposited herself in the front passenger seat and proceeded to point whenever a turn had to be made, occa- sionally slapping my aunt on the arm when she failed to exe- cute instructions quickly enough.
“Couldn’t she have written out directions?” my aunt snapped as she swerved around a garbage truck. “I know my glasses are in here somewhere,” she mumbled, digging in her purse with her freshly bruised arm.
My great aunt was probably thinking, Couldn’t she have learned sign language?
My mother launched into one of her signature diatribes from the back seat, where I hunkered down. “You can’t see without your glasses! And she can’t tell you where to go. Lord have mercy!”
My great aunt slapped my regular aunt again and panto- mimed putting glasses on. “I’m looking!” my aunt hollered, ap- parently forgetting her aunt was deaf and, therefore, impervious to her go-to dispute resolution tactic: Yell until they forget why they’re mad.
“Are you touched in the head? Why would you even crank the car without putting your glasses on?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” I muttered.
My aunt skidded around a corner and almost took out a young couple walking a tiny poodle. “Who cranks a car any- more! What decade are you living in, for chrissakes?”
My great aunt slapped her arm again. She did not tolerate blasphemy, even if she couldn’t hear it.
“Don’t you have cataracts?” my mother persisted.
“Only old people get cataracts!”
“You’re 13 months younger than me!” my mother shouted back, reigniting a longstanding car debate: If I am the youngest sibling, does it mean I am actually young?
The actual young couple snatched up their pooch and ran for the curb, raising angry fists and shouting that my aunt needed to get her eyes checked. She triumphantly produced her glass- es and waved back at them. “There. All better.”
“Slow down!” my mother yelled.
They made it to the nursing home and a good time was had by all. No poodles were injured and the traffic authorities did not get involved. Those were the good old days, when conver- sations in cars with sisters meant real talk, a little drama, and sometimes a naked toddler.
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About the Editors
Nickie’s sister, Marcia Stewart (above left), is a 30-year publishing veteran who spent most of her career acquiring, editing and writing business and legal books for the publisher, Nolo. She co-founded Nickie's Prize for Humor Writing in honor of her younger sister who died of lung cancer in 2018. Sisters! is the first of what Marcia plans to be many humor books on relationships and family.
Teri Rizvi is the founder and director of the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop at University of Dayton, where she serves as executive director of strategic communications. She's the author ofOne Heart with Courage: Essays and Stories and the co-editor ofLaugh Out Loud: 40 Women Humorists Celebrate Then and Now...Before We Forget.
About the Illustrator
Drue Wagner is an Austin-based graphic designer and illustrator. She got her start at Pentagram, in Austin, then spent over ten years at various publications in New York, including GQ, Bon Appetit, and the Wall Street Journal, before moving back to Texas.
