Books

Austin novelist Sarah Bird says her piece of "extremely good luck" is living in a city "with a sense of humor, where they let women be funny ... I mean, we had Ann Richards, we had Molly Ivins. We're evolved."

She clearly adores Austin, and it loves her right back: In 2001, the weekly Austin Chronicle named her the city's best author, and she took over Kinky Friedman's Texas Monthly column when he ran for governor; she now alternates with him.

The love affair could be tested with her latest novel, How Perfect Is That (Knopf, $23.95), which offers up Austin society on a skewering fork. She'll be signing the book Wednesday night in Dallas.

It's set in 2003, midway through George W. Bush's first term as president. It was a time, Ms. Bird says by phone, "when Austin was sort of reeling – there had been this fundamental shift, and Austin had true society for the first time because of the Bush connections.

"But that was so anathema to what Austin used to be. You had this very blue dot on the map that suddenly got heated up by red society when Bush was governor. The Michael Dells of the world" – the book's "Dellionaires" – "were all over the place in this petri dish of venture capitalists and start-ups. And even when a lot of those things burned out, there was still this healthy rich residue of money floating around, mixing with Austin's vegans and hippies and students. Bizarre."

Ms. Bird, 58, started working on How Perfect "to cheer myself up," she says, from both real life and a writing project that seemed to be going nowhere, a much more serious novel called The Flamenco Academy.

"My mom had passed away, and I had painted myself into a corner with Flamenco that I wasn't smart enough to get out of," Ms. Bird says. "And I was in total despair about what was happening to our country, losing my mind on so many fronts. I couldn't read anything without going into a rage.

"I needed a solution that wouldn't end up with me putting my head in the oven. I dealt with it, essentially, by gossiping about these characters. So I could laugh at something."

Her protagonist, Blythe Young, runs a near-bankrupt catering company called Wretched Xcess, something of a metaphor for Bush-era Austin and the entire country, Ms. Bird says. Blythe – devious, occasionally criminal, not above drugging party guests when desperate – is hardly a "heartwarming book-club heroine," the author acknowledges with a chuckle.

"She's definitely not your 'arc-of-redemption' character. ... For me she embodies a lot of the dubious moral choices our country has made, praying she can be redeemed. But I didn't want to hit on that too hard – it should still be read as a comic novel."

How Perfect Is That is Ms. Bird's seventh book, not counting several romances written as Tory Cates. She says Perfect is "180 degrees removed" from the last book, The Flamenco Academy, a tale of obsessive love set in Albuquerque, where Ms. Bird earned an anthropology degree from the University of New Mexico. She also received a master's in journalism at the University of Texas. (Originally from Michigan, she was in an Air Force family and moved around a lot.)

Her anthropology background served her well on Perfect. She researched Austin's society cliques "like a South Sea tribe," she says – brunching at local hot spots, mining for college nuggets (she references the "Pi Phi Bulimia Queens") and culling Junior League directories for over-the-top Texas names such as Kippie Lee Teeter, Noodle Tiner and Lulie Bingle.

She swears all the names are real, if somewhat mixed-and-matched. "I mean, we have a famous divorce lawyer named Becky Beaver. ... Even I couldn't make that up," she notes with a wry laugh. "Even with comedy, sometimes you can't go as far as real life."Plan your life

Sarah Bird will read from and sign How Perfect Is That at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Borders, Preston and Royal. 214-363-1977. LOG ON for a review

of How Perfect Is That.

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