Meet Canada’s Twitter whiz
Canada’s Twitter whiz talks life in 140 characters or fewer
When Kelly Oxford was 14 years old, she attended a model search at an Edmonton mall. She was cut after the first round. Undeterred, Oxford snuck into the room where the agencies were conducting followup auditions, and presented herself to several talent scouts, as if she was supposed to be there. When that tactic failed, she took off her glasses, leaned over the table towards one woman, and asked her to reconsider: “Maybe you like me better now that you can see me close-up?” she said.
Oxford’s first collection of essays, Everything is Perfect When You’re a Liar, is an extremely close-up look at the Edmontonborn, Los Angeles-based writer and Twitter superstar. She’s held nothing back. “I kind of let it all out,” she says. (The other day, Oxford says her mom told a relative that the book is “so, so funny, but I hope not all of it is true.”) F*ck You Forever details the (inadvertent) betrayal of a childhood friend; Work Experience 101 finds her dealing with an overly excited customer lurking in the adultonly section of the video store where she clerks; The Terrible Horrible chronicles the worst lie she’s ever told; I Peed My Pants and Threw Up on a Chinese Man is an appreciation of late 19thcentury French literature. Or not.
“I got into really great detail not because I find myself fascinating, but just because I find that people leave out so many of those sorts of stories in their own personal mythology,” says Oxford, 35, during an interview in Toronto last week. “And I think that by me sharing all of these details in a funny way I’m sort of hoping that I can help propel, in some way, some small segment of society to move toward more truth about their lives. Because I really, honestly believe that so much stress comes from wanting to be something, rather than just wanting to be yourself.”
The something Oxford has long wanted to be is a writer. Although she concedes, from the outside looking in, she probably appears to be an overnight success, she’s been at it since she was young; the first essay in the collection, Queen of the World or Something, is about her attempt to adapt Star Wars into a stage play to be performed by the other neighbourhood children.
She’s been posting her writing online since the late ’90s — her first website, now lost, was hosted by GeoCities (“God bless them if they can find it,” she says of attempts to track down her early work. “I’d love to see it. I think it was photos of Leonardo DiCaprio”) while a second, more recent blog remains nameless, fearing hackers might uncover it. But it was on Twitter she found an audience, thanks to her razorsharp observations about life. Recent example: “The world won’t change until there’s a tampon commercial where the girls are all curled up on couches and angrily drinking wine.” Her first tweet was on March 5, 2009 (“Is scared of P. Diddy.”). As of Monday afternoon, she had 500,041 followers.
“I just tweet it and people follow,” she says, then groans. “That’s like the worst sound bite ever. Make sure if you use that one I say at the end ‘That’s the worst sound bite ever.’”
Yet, despite her audience, Oxford has constantly had to prove herself.
“I’ve done the normal work in a very weird way,” she says. “People knew who I was but then I had to show them that I could actually work. It was the same for TV. It was the same for movies.”
She’s already sold pilots to CBS and NBC — both TV shows failed to make it to air — while Drew Barrymore is attached to direct her first screenplay. First Twitter, then the world. “I’m going to write a pilot this season, and I’ll do another movie this season, and then I’ll get another book going this year, too.” She laughs. “I’m going to do all of it.” Although Oxford maintains one of Twitter’s most consistently LOL accounts, a funny feed does not a book make. The constraints of the medium have shaped, and aided, her writing; it’s like a poet attempting to write a novel.
The book proves, however, that not only has she mastered the 140-character barb, but the longform essay as well. The book is terribly funny, and often on par with the work of essayists she herself admires, such as Jonatham Ames and David Sedaris.
“I just want so many people to buy it,” she says of the book. “I just need to sell more books than Snookie and any of the Real Housewives.”