TEENAGE CHILDREN FUEL AUTHOR, TRUMP TROLL AND SOCIAL MEDIA DISRUPTER

For bestselling author, social media machine and introverted extrovert Kelly Oxford, a book tour is a bit of pushmi-pullyu situation.

“I think by nature I’m mostly (an) introvert, so the cumulative events every day get to me if I don’t have a day down,” said Oxford, adding that since her new book, When You Find Out the World is Against You: And Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments, launched she has been regularly doing five events a day.

And yes, she considers an interview with a reporter an event.

“Yes, you’re involved in this now,” the Edmonton native said on the phone from her home in Los Angeles before adding that she does, “like to meet people at the events.”

So push, then pull. Oxford’s previous book, 2013’s Everything Is Perfect When You’re a Liar, was a New York Times bestseller, and the canvas for her new collection of essays is her life. With her sharp and funny take, she has landed on topics like being a kid in Edmonton and surviving hail storms and Christian summer camp, discovering sore armpits is an anxiety issue, spying on your husband as he has a smoothie with a gay guy and explaining why dogs are not children (what?).

She also recounts that fateful day in 2016 when she heard the Donald Trump and Billy Bush Access Hollywood bus tape. No need to repeat the whole gross Trump/Bush exchange here, but suffice it to say it stopped sentient women in their tracks. Oxford responded with the following tweet:

“Women: tweet me your first assaults. They aren’t just stats. I’ll go first: Old man on city bus grabs my ‘pussy’ and smiles at me. I’m 12.”

The response was instantly viral. Oxford tweeted again about an assault when she was 13 and asked women to keep posting their stories with #NotOkay.

That tweet resulted in millions of replies and the creation of the #NotOkay campaign.

"I was really angry about it, and there was a lot of anger bleeding into upset bleeding into sadness bleeding back into anger,” said Oxford. “It was a very crazy few weeks. It’s still going on and people still tweet me every day about it.”

Oxford, who has been called a social media disrupter and influencer, figured out the Internet early on.

“I was always on it. My mom got the Internet when I was in high school, and when I figured out what it was — basically a telephone, a magazine and a TV and basically everything — I became obsessed with it,” said Oxford, who began to blog on a regular basis when she was living with her husband, James, and the first of their three children in Calgary 15 years ago.

Now Oxford has close to 770,000 Twitter and 160,000 Instagram followers. Hollywood heavyweights have noticed her hilarious tweets.

She has sold TV pilots and a movie script, and is currently working on developing a teen show with Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and James and Dave Franco for Hulu TV.

“It’s about girls who form a band and who are trying to figure out who they are,” said Oxford about the show set in the 1990s.

Oxford doesn’t have to go deep into her memory banks to be reminded of the nuances of high school — two of her children are teens.

“It’s all the same,” said Oxford. “It’s fun to listen to their stories and the dramas that are happening in high school.”

Oxford’s kids are totally OK with her mining their lives for material.

“My oldest (an almost 16-yearold girl) is an avid reader and watches every single movie. She is always telling me the best stories to use from her life,” said Oxford. “She’s my producer.”

While Oxford’s kids understand their mom’s tweets helped to score them a pool, they’re not into over-sharing.

“They get it: if they put stuff out there it’s out there forever, and other people can see it,” said Oxford. “That’s a grounded reality for them, so I don’t have to teach them that, so that is great for me. It’s great. They don’t want to embarrass themselves online.”

Embarrass themselves online like the people who send mean tweets to famous people who then read them on Jimmy Kimmel Live? That kind of embarrassment? Well, we’ve got Oxford to partly thank for that. The segment surfaced after Kimmel and Oxford were comparing the mean tweets they had received.

For the record, Oxford is not just a receiver of mean tweets.

“Yeah, I have sent them to Donald Trump for years,” said Oxford. “I think for the last six years I’ve been trolling him.”

Good work if you can get it.

My mom got the Internet when I was in high school, and when I figured out what it was — ... basically everything — I became obsessed with it.