Recent Studies Indicate:
The Best of Sarah Bird

Forty of Bird’s best nonfiction pieces from publications that range from Texas Monthly to The New York Times—from a prescient 1976 profile of a transgender woman to a recent barnburner of a speech at a benefit for Annie’s List that broke records raising money for women candidates.

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).

Bird went on to write 11 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 her best nonfiction pieces, Recent Studies Indicate presents some of Bird’s earliest work. Whether she is hanging out with socialites and sanitation workers or paying homage to her army-nurse mom, this collection brings a poignant perspective to the experience of being a woman, feminist, mother and Texan—and a writer with countless, spectacular true tales to tell us.