The start of Sarah Bird’s writing career coincided with her move from Albuquerque to Austin, Texas in the mid-seventies.  Growing up and all the way through college back in New Mexico, she had set her sights on being an anthropologist.  Even as she began to have articles published she never really considered herself a writer.  Sarah wrote articles for Cosmo and for Seventeen magazine, pesticide brochures for the EPA and stories for a publication by the Texas department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation.  She found her “true” calling with rent-paying, grocery-buying articles for True Confession and True Stories.

Sarah Bird recently finished her seventh novel (if you don’t count the five romance novels she produced under the name Tory Cates in what she lovingly recalls as her time in the “Pink Ghetto”).  They are full of fun with irreverent humor that betrays what she insists is her natural introvert within. 
 

Video 1 The Story Behind the Story
For Sarah Bird, writing How Perfect is That was a way to cope with the effect her previous novel was having on her and the general malaise of the country after 9/11.

Video 2 A Reading from How Perfect is That
Blythe Young is on the run from creditors, the IRS, employees of her cratering catering business and the circle of high-society friends Blythe used to be a part of.  She returns to the college campus co-op where she once lived, hoping to hide out until she can sort out the mess she’s made of her life.

Video 3 Telling Lies
Sarah confesses the motivation behind writing fiction and how she how her career as a writer came to be.

Video 4 The Pink Ghetto
Sarah wrote five romance novels under the name Tory Cates to pay the rent while working on her book Alamo House.  In this clip from a performance in Austin, Sarah gives some insight into the glamorous world of being a romance writer.

Books by Sarah Bird

The Alamo House
(1986)

The Boyfriend School 
(1989)

The Mommy School
(1991)

Virgin of the Rodeo 
(1999)

The Yokota Officers Club
(2002)

The Flamenco Academy
(2007)

How Perfect is That 
(2008)