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Recent Studies Indicate: The Best of Sarah Bird
When Sarah Bird arrived in Austin in 1973 in pursuit of a boyfriend who was "hotter than lava," she found an abundance of inspiration for storytelling (her sweetheart left her for Scientology, but she got to taste a morsel of Lynda Bird Johnson's poorly preserved wedding cake as a temp worker at the LBJ Library). Sarah Bird went on to write ten acclaimed novels and contribute hundreds of articles to publications coast to coast, developing a signature voice that combines laser-sharp insight with irreverent, wickedly funny prose in the tradition of Molly Ivins and Nora Ephron
Now collecting forty of Bird's best nonfiction pieces, from publications that range from Texas Monthly to the New York Times and others, Recent Studies Indicate presents some of Bird's earliest work, including a prescient 1976 profile of a transgender woman, along with recent calls to political action, such as her 2017 speech at a benefit for Annie's List.
Whether Bird is hanging out with socialites and sanitation workers or paying homage to her army-nurse mom, her collection brings a poignant perspective to the experience of being a woman, a feminist, a mother, and a Texan--and a writer with countless, spectacular true tales to tell us.
Now collecting forty of Bird's best nonfiction pieces, from publications that range from Texas Monthly to the New York Times and others, Recent Studies Indicate presents some of Bird's earliest work, including a prescient 1976 profile of a transgender woman, along with recent calls to political action, such as her 2017 speech at a benefit for Annie's List.
Whether Bird is hanging out with socialites and sanitation workers or paying homage to her army-nurse mom, her collection brings a poignant perspective to the experience of being a woman, a feminist, a mother, and a Texan--and a writer with countless, spectacular true tales to tell us.
304 pages, Paperback
Published April 2, 2019
10 people are currently reading
52 people want to read
About the author
Sarah Bird
24 books607 followersSarah Bird is a bestselling novelist, screenwriter, essayist, and journalist who has lived in Austin, Texas since long before the city became internationally cool. She has published ten novels and two books of essays. Her eleventh novel, LAST DANCE ON THE STARLITE PIER--a gripping tale set in the secret world of the dance marathons of the Great Depression--will be released on April 12th.
Her last novel, DAUGHTER OF A DAUGHTER OF A QUEEN--inspired by the true story of the only woman to serve with the legendary Buffalo Soldiers--was named an All-time Best Books about Texas by the Austin American-Statesman; Best Fiction of 2018, Christian Science Monitor; Favorite Books of 2018, Texas Observer; a One City, One Book choice of seven cities; and a Lit Lovers Book Club Favorites.
Sarah was a finalist for The Dublin International Literary Award; an ALEX award winner; Amazon Literature Best of the Year selection; a two-time winner of the TIL’s Best Novel award; a B&N’s Discover Great Writers selection; a New York Public Libraries Books to Remember; an honoree of theTexas Writers Hall of Fame; an Amazon Literature Best of the Year selection; a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship; and an Austin Libraries Illumine Award for Excellence in Fiction winner. In 2014 she was named Texas Writer of the Year by the Texas Book Festival and presented with a pair of custom-made boots on the floor of the Texas Senate Chamber.
Sarah is a nine-time winner of Austin Best Fiction Writer award. She was recently honored with the University of New Mexico’s 2020 Paul Ré Award for Cultural Advocacy. In 2015 Sarah was one of eight winners selected from 3,800 entries to attend the Meryl Streep Screenwriters’ Lab. Sarah was chosen in 2017 to represent the Austin Public Library as the hologram/greeter installed in the Austin Downtown Library. Sarah was a co-founder of The Writers League of Texas.
She has been an NPR Moth Radio Hour storyteller; a writer for Oprah’s Magazine, NY Times Sunday Magazine and Op Ed columns, Chicago Tribune, Real Simple, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Salon, Daily Beast, Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, MS, Texas Observer; Alcalde and a columnist for years for Texas Monthly. As a screenwriter, she worked on projects for Warner Bros., Paramount, CBS, National Geographic, Hallmark, ABC, TNT, as well as several independent producers.
She and her husband enjoy open-water swimming and training their corgi puppy not to eat the furniture.
Her last novel, DAUGHTER OF A DAUGHTER OF A QUEEN--inspired by the true story of the only woman to serve with the legendary Buffalo Soldiers--was named an All-time Best Books about Texas by the Austin American-Statesman; Best Fiction of 2018, Christian Science Monitor; Favorite Books of 2018, Texas Observer; a One City, One Book choice of seven cities; and a Lit Lovers Book Club Favorites.
Sarah was a finalist for The Dublin International Literary Award; an ALEX award winner; Amazon Literature Best of the Year selection; a two-time winner of the TIL’s Best Novel award; a B&N’s Discover Great Writers selection; a New York Public Libraries Books to Remember; an honoree of theTexas Writers Hall of Fame; an Amazon Literature Best of the Year selection; a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship; and an Austin Libraries Illumine Award for Excellence in Fiction winner. In 2014 she was named Texas Writer of the Year by the Texas Book Festival and presented with a pair of custom-made boots on the floor of the Texas Senate Chamber.
Sarah is a nine-time winner of Austin Best Fiction Writer award. She was recently honored with the University of New Mexico’s 2020 Paul Ré Award for Cultural Advocacy. In 2015 Sarah was one of eight winners selected from 3,800 entries to attend the Meryl Streep Screenwriters’ Lab. Sarah was chosen in 2017 to represent the Austin Public Library as the hologram/greeter installed in the Austin Downtown Library. Sarah was a co-founder of The Writers League of Texas.
She has been an NPR Moth Radio Hour storyteller; a writer for Oprah’s Magazine, NY Times Sunday Magazine and Op Ed columns, Chicago Tribune, Real Simple, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Salon, Daily Beast, Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, MS, Texas Observer; Alcalde and a columnist for years for Texas Monthly. As a screenwriter, she worked on projects for Warner Bros., Paramount, CBS, National Geographic, Hallmark, ABC, TNT, as well as several independent producers.
She and her husband enjoy open-water swimming and training their corgi puppy not to eat the furniture.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 23, 2019
Reviewed by Michelle Newby Lancaster for Lone Star Literary Life.
It’s often tricky to be a woman and a Texan. Sarah Bird, who frequently addresses the endless push-pull of being a woman in the Lone Star State, will make you glad to be both—simultaneously.
Recent Studies Indicate: The Best of Sarah Bird is the second book of nonfiction from Bird, following A Love Letter to Texas Women (UT Press, 2016), and her first anthology, covering four decades of work. The oldest piece, “A Question of Gender,” is a before-its-time profile of a transgender woman living in Austin written for the Austin Sun in 1976; the newest is “Paisano,” a grateful and celebratory paean to the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship retreat, written for Texas Highways in November of 2018.
In between, divided into four parts—“Womanhood: The Secret Delta,” “Texas: So Many Ways For a Girl to Lose Her Virginity,” “Motherhood: Two Seconds After the Stick Turns Pink,” and “Writing: Use It In Your Work,”—are columns, essays, articles, and opinion pieces published by disparate outlets, from Modern Bride and Good Housekeeping to Texas Co-op Power and the Alcalde, speeches, including one for Annie’s List in the wake of the 2016 presidential election (“…we Texas women, well, we just shrugged and said, “Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt and the intravaginal ultrasound to prove it”), as well as a turn on the Moth Radio Hour.
The cover reflects Bird’s trademark mix of ironic-yet-earnest wit, the top half recalling a composition notebook while the bottom half features Bird in pajamas perched on a bed with a typewriter and a naked baby, red, white, and blue stripes suggesting a disjointed flag, the whole shebang afloat in Texas Hill Country live oaks and wildflowers. The title is a reference to those innumerable studies that innumerate everything we’re doing wrong, particularly in parenting, turning the conventional wisdom on its head annually (“if only I’d put a goat in the bassinet with my baby, he probably wouldn’t have an ear infection right now”).
In the introduction Bird explains that she grew up a shy child with two competing desires: never to speak with anyone outside her family and to quiz every stranger she encountered. What to do? Writing: essays, “province of the muttering malcontent, her head full of the counternarratives and snappy comebacks she is too shy to give voice to,” and journalism, “specialty of the introvert who has learned to compensate, who uses her notepad to wedge her way into the galaxy of worlds that first intrigue and then obsess her.” Bird outlines the trajectory of her writing career beginning with pulp fiction à la True Confessions (it was that or law school) and genre (“John Ray”) romance to freelance magazine writing, a special sort of hell wherein “magazine editors are like bad boyfriends—as long as you need them, they don’t want you,” and yet she persisted to become a best-selling, award-wining novelist.
Recent Studies Indicate finds Bird go-go dancing in Japan for two weeks (NOT in a cage, she assures us), moving to Austin for a boyfriend (“hot as lava”) who soon left her for Scientology, then discovering “the life in Austin [she] was meant to have … on the day [she] found Lynda Bird’s wedding cake in the LBJ Library.”
Bird relates adventures in highlighting golden tresses faded to the color of “garden mulch” (reminding me of a mishap of my own ending in a shade resembling lemon chiffon), Meat Loaf and screenwriting, going door-to-door with Jehovah’s Witnesses, Austin real estate, the sport of Texas billionaires—boar-hunting (“I don’t know what lowly millionaires hunt—nutria, probably”), and a case of mistaken identity involving Ambien at the Texas Book Festival.
There are lessons in meteorology, the history of progressive women in Texas politics, Catholic-school sex education (“our bodies were temples of the Holy Ghost, and … we could expect some major renovations in the temple to begin shortly”), the futility of prohibiting our sons playing with toy guns because they will create them from materials at hand, as my sons did with their soccer and ancient Egypt Lego sets, and appreciating your mother because of her six engagement rings you found in a trunk in the attic, not despite it.
Recent Studies Indicate is a treasure chest brimming with Bird’s distinctive voice: bold, thought-provoking, stitch-in-your-side funny, acerbic when called for, and, in the end, full of joy.
It’s often tricky to be a woman and a Texan. Sarah Bird, who frequently addresses the endless push-pull of being a woman in the Lone Star State, will make you glad to be both—simultaneously.
Recent Studies Indicate: The Best of Sarah Bird is the second book of nonfiction from Bird, following A Love Letter to Texas Women (UT Press, 2016), and her first anthology, covering four decades of work. The oldest piece, “A Question of Gender,” is a before-its-time profile of a transgender woman living in Austin written for the Austin Sun in 1976; the newest is “Paisano,” a grateful and celebratory paean to the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship retreat, written for Texas Highways in November of 2018.
In between, divided into four parts—“Womanhood: The Secret Delta,” “Texas: So Many Ways For a Girl to Lose Her Virginity,” “Motherhood: Two Seconds After the Stick Turns Pink,” and “Writing: Use It In Your Work,”—are columns, essays, articles, and opinion pieces published by disparate outlets, from Modern Bride and Good Housekeeping to Texas Co-op Power and the Alcalde, speeches, including one for Annie’s List in the wake of the 2016 presidential election (“…we Texas women, well, we just shrugged and said, “Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt and the intravaginal ultrasound to prove it”), as well as a turn on the Moth Radio Hour.
The cover reflects Bird’s trademark mix of ironic-yet-earnest wit, the top half recalling a composition notebook while the bottom half features Bird in pajamas perched on a bed with a typewriter and a naked baby, red, white, and blue stripes suggesting a disjointed flag, the whole shebang afloat in Texas Hill Country live oaks and wildflowers. The title is a reference to those innumerable studies that innumerate everything we’re doing wrong, particularly in parenting, turning the conventional wisdom on its head annually (“if only I’d put a goat in the bassinet with my baby, he probably wouldn’t have an ear infection right now”).
In the introduction Bird explains that she grew up a shy child with two competing desires: never to speak with anyone outside her family and to quiz every stranger she encountered. What to do? Writing: essays, “province of the muttering malcontent, her head full of the counternarratives and snappy comebacks she is too shy to give voice to,” and journalism, “specialty of the introvert who has learned to compensate, who uses her notepad to wedge her way into the galaxy of worlds that first intrigue and then obsess her.” Bird outlines the trajectory of her writing career beginning with pulp fiction à la True Confessions (it was that or law school) and genre (“John Ray”) romance to freelance magazine writing, a special sort of hell wherein “magazine editors are like bad boyfriends—as long as you need them, they don’t want you,” and yet she persisted to become a best-selling, award-wining novelist.
Recent Studies Indicate finds Bird go-go dancing in Japan for two weeks (NOT in a cage, she assures us), moving to Austin for a boyfriend (“hot as lava”) who soon left her for Scientology, then discovering “the life in Austin [she] was meant to have … on the day [she] found Lynda Bird’s wedding cake in the LBJ Library.”
Bird relates adventures in highlighting golden tresses faded to the color of “garden mulch” (reminding me of a mishap of my own ending in a shade resembling lemon chiffon), Meat Loaf and screenwriting, going door-to-door with Jehovah’s Witnesses, Austin real estate, the sport of Texas billionaires—boar-hunting (“I don’t know what lowly millionaires hunt—nutria, probably”), and a case of mistaken identity involving Ambien at the Texas Book Festival.
There are lessons in meteorology, the history of progressive women in Texas politics, Catholic-school sex education (“our bodies were temples of the Holy Ghost, and … we could expect some major renovations in the temple to begin shortly”), the futility of prohibiting our sons playing with toy guns because they will create them from materials at hand, as my sons did with their soccer and ancient Egypt Lego sets, and appreciating your mother because of her six engagement rings you found in a trunk in the attic, not despite it.
Recent Studies Indicate is a treasure chest brimming with Bird’s distinctive voice: bold, thought-provoking, stitch-in-your-side funny, acerbic when called for, and, in the end, full of joy.
November 15, 2020
Little Free Libraries deliver sweet treats! This "Best of..." Sarah Bird is the treat and tonic I needed after a long walk. Her short stories are full of wit and lend an acerbic take toward life in Texas. For many years I looked forward to reading her column in Texas Monthly, and a few classics are reprinted herein. If you are not familiar with her work, this is a great intro to a Texas literary icon. And someone you would like to call a your friend as well as have lunch with regularly.
I highly recommend her latest, The Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen, a story of the first black female to enlist in the US Army.
I highly recommend her latest, The Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen, a story of the first black female to enlist in the US Army.
June 25, 2019
To find this book, look in the dictionary under "charming."
November 19, 2025
Monkey & Dog book. Various stories. Forgetable now.
October 9, 2019
Sarah Bird's series of short essays made me laugh out loud, a feat that only a few books have ever achieved for me. Reading Bird's essay, “Unlike a Virgin,” republished from its original appearance in Austin's own Third Coast magazine in 1985, made me feel nostalgic feelings about my own Catholic upbringing. She summed it up well when she wrote "Pre-Vatican II Catholics lived in a world of crisp moral delineations. From birth to death, you knew exactly where you stood on the big Parcheesi board of life..." Another 1982 Third Coast essay repurposed, “Talkin’ Trash,” recalled fond memories of my own beloved yet anonymous El Paso trash jumper. He would wake me most weekday mornings by singing Slim Whitman’s "Una Paloma Blanca" from two stories below my bedroom window while digging for treasures in the apartment's dumpster. Who doesn't have a Dakota Prewitt in their sorted past as real as Bird describes in her essay, "Bumfuzzled," reprinted from a 1998 Texas Co-Op Power magazine? Bird's Dakota "with his Walmart sex appeal, physical courage, and stiff-necked disdain for all social fripperies from toothbrushing to functional literacy..." makes the cowboy closeted in my own dusty past seem like a prince, albeit a tobacco-chewing one. Thanks for sharing these and more Sarah!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews