The Unhinged Thoughts of Plants

*Disclaimer* This episode goes blue. You’ve been warned.

What do a rubber chicken, a Tibetan singing bowl, and a hula girl figurine all have in common? They all have deeply, deeply messed up thoughts — and Elizabeth Saake is here to tell you exactly what they are. In this episode I sit down with author and associate publisher Elizabeth Saki to dig into her two wildly funny books: House Plants and Their F*cked Up Thoughts and Tchotchkes and Their F*cked Up Thoughts — and to figure out exactly what is going on inside her head.

They talk about why house plants hit a cultural nerve that Tchotchkes couldn’t quite match (spoiler: it’s because they’re alive), the anonymous co-author hiding behind the pseudonym Carlyle Christoff, the one aloe plant entry that walked the line perfectly, and why a rubber chicken that understands advanced particle physics but can only say “squawk” might be the most poignant thing in either book. They also get into why people take joke books way too seriously, the surprisingly vulnerable experience of being an author, the therapeutic value of dark humor, and whether Elizabeth’s next book — P is for Perimenopause — is actually a children’s book alphabet or something far more unhinged.

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