Frumpy Middle-Aged Mom
Dispatches from the Front Lines of Motherhood
Never mind the Real Housewives of Orange County—Marla Jo Fisher is the woman everyone can relate to, complete with bad parenting, rotten dogs, ill health, and fashion faux pas. For nearly two decades, in the Orange County Register and many syndicated papers, readers have delighted in Marla Jo’s subversive humor, cranky intellect, and huge heart on her journey through broke, single, after-40 motherhood, when she adopted Cheetah Boy and Curly Girl, to her oddball adventures around the globe, to the sublime ridiculousness of life next door. Even while facing a devastating diagnosis, Fisher teaches us that humor is the balm that eases and the very thing that binds us together.
Marla Jo Fisher writes the Frumpy Middle-Aged Mom column, which runs in eleven of the Southern California News Group's newspapers, including the Orange County Register. She was a workaholic newspaper reporter before adopting two children out of foster care at age 46, picking up a scruffy dog along the way, and she has somehow managed to keep them all alive. A former award-winning investigative reporter, Fisher now juggles her job as a newspaper columnist with being a single mom, all the while being exhorted from everywhere to be thinner, smarter, sexier, better exercised, more philanthropic, more frugal, more stylish, more devoted to her kids, more devoted to her job, better dressed, a healthier cook, a tidier housekeeper, and a more engaged citizen.
Fisher’s columns and travel articles have also appeared in many newspapers and websites nationwide, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, Deseret News, Wichita Eagle, Waterbury Republican-American, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Sacramento Bee, Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Charlotte Observer.
