Everything Is Perfect When You're A Liar
Everything is Perfect When You're a Liar by Kelly Oxford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Like a lot of other folks on Twitter, I follow Kelly Oxford. So when I saw that Edelweiss was offering an Advance Reading Copy of her book, Everything is Perfect When You're A Liar, I requested it ... with more than a little trepidation. Turns out, I shouldn't have been nervous - it's a really good, interesting read.
The reason Oxford has about 430,000 followers on Twitter is that she's funny. Often very funny - and has gotten the attention of some pretty famous folks who retweet her. I know I found her because Roger Ebert retweets her a lot, and there's even a part in her book about the fact that David Copperfield is a big fan of hers on Twitter.
Here's a recent sample:
When do we find out that all this 'coconut water' is just sexy Hawaiian people spit?
— kelly oxford (@kellyoxford) January 3, 2013
The thing that made me nervous ... well, there were two things. One, 140 characters isn't necessarily the best gauge for whether someone will be interesting for 350 pages. And two, I've been burned a LOT by biographies/memoirs of comedians lately. Good comedians, like David Cross and Jen Kirkman, write books I can't begin to finish.
But Everything is Perfect When You're A Liar does something smart and interesting - Oxford starts at the beginning, of course, when she was an awkward kid with unearned self confidence (she thinks she should be a famous model, despite huge glasses, bad hair and no sense of fashion) - and then skips over most of the important moments in her life.
There's no, "And then I MADE it as a model!" "And then I got my first boyfriend!" "Here's what it was like to have my babies! All three of them!"
We just skip to a point in her life where that's happened...and it's SO refreshing. Let's be clear - I could give less than two shits about what it was like when a boy asked her out in the eighth grade. Or what it was like to be a model. And Oxford clearly knows that.
Instead, she tells random stories that sewn together provide a good idea of what she's like (spoiler alert - I don't want to be her best friend, she's honest about not always being a terrific person), and some often quite funny moments from her life. Highlights include the David Copperfield story, her experience helping patients with short-term memory brain injuries (and the reason she gets into this field is pitch perfect), as well as her trip to Los Angeles as a 19-year old determined to find a mostly undiscovered Leonardo DiCaprio to make him her boyfriend. Yeah, you read that right - it's funny, trust me.
At some point she's married, and at other points children start popping up. Oxford is one of Twitter's success stories - she's moved her family to Los Angeles from Canada to write for TV and movies and largely was discovered from Twitter. And she deserves it - she is FUNNY, and clever and smart. And her book is all of those things.
Give it a shot, and thanks to Edelweiss for the advance copy!