eject

Maybe a cool part about a kid saying they wish you were dead is when you then pretend to die & they panic & then you laugh & laugh at them because what a liar.

I mean, if they look like this on a model…

Guys. I opened my account on Vine to post funny TV clips. You know that everyone is going to be using this app for the exact same thing within a year? Everyone. Okay, maybe not everyone… but lazy funny people for sure. I’m a trend forecaster basically. Everyone bring me the money.

I SHOT MY COVER IN AUGUST, DROPPED IT A FEW WEEKS AGO, AND SINCE THEN I HAVE STARTED A FIREPANTS TREND!!!

So I just read the first review of my book, and you’d think since it was balanced and positive I’d be elated… but I’m actually terrified.
That’s right.
It’s real.

This isn’t just something I’ve been solidly writing for a year and a half as I wrote and sold screenplays (on the side, you know)… it’s a real, living thing and it’s going to be available to ALL WORKING EYES AND EARS very, very soon.
The thought of this launch is making me sweat. I’m waiting for a large order from Kiehl’s to arrive and the deodorant could not come sooner. Will I pass out during my morning show appearances? Probs. I really hope it just sells more books.

Pre-order ‘Everything is Perfect When You’re a Liar” or something on Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble or Amazon.ca or Chapters/Indigo ETC

I’m as sad as you are (much, much more sad) about the cover not being available yet.

Here’s an early review:

On Everything is Perfect When You’re a Liar by Kelly Oxford

It’s a good thing Oxford won me early, with her big-spectacle-magnified, cartoon eyes and her precocious, naive sensibility. Else I might not have been able to stick with her as the vicissitudes of life cured her in fairly short order of a predilection for telling the truth. Sure, I enjoyed the cognitive dissonance of knowing more than she did when, at seven, she came across potsmoking and just thought of it as “not smoke, but something like smoke,” but when the author threw a masturbating monkey and a stolen, potentially loaded pistol in with her seven-year-old self for good measure, cute gave way to dismaying and I might have hit a comfort wall right there and bowed out – if it weren’t, as I say, for having been conned into caring about her right from the start.

I wind up glad I’ve stuck around when, at fourteen, like the insufferable yet irresistible Augusten Burroughs, the girl has her run in with modeling, and the author really hits her stride. Oxford the teen  sheds her glasses like her childhood innocence, and the lying begins. She’s one of ours at this point, though, and doing us proud. Only our Oxford could claim a nonexistent bladder condition while she pees her pants in public and have the presence of mind to gurgle “stommm-ach fluuuuuuu” while in the process of puking on a bicycling Chinese man. These foul feats aside, some interesting writing emerges amid the coming-of-age drama, concerning what it means to be oneself, or to feel one cannot be.

By now, roughly a third of the way into the book, it is to be suspected that Oxford has sloughed off those readers who don’t have the stomach to hang, and has effectively desensitized the remaining audience to the disgusting. As such, we can only chuckle predictably as porn enters the picture. Without getting into any of the cheap-shot details, let’s say the higher grade humor arises from where Oxford’s sympathies lie. In this, as in other parts of the book, she sides with the antihero, the perp, and does so in an endearing timbre which does not feel feigned. But of course we’re aware we can’t really trust her. We’re on our own in sorting morality out of this fine mess. Celebrities and drugs, roadtrips and more drugs, all very madcap and sordid, and then what Oxford’s calls her ‘terrible horrible’ – a scam most despicable to be sure… And which structurally serves as a turning point in the book – a last childish act of her own before she meets the man who will father her children…

As Oxford begins to write about her adulthood, it is clear that she’s making difficult choices about where to allow herself to linger. She gives over twenty pages to her stint as a personal assistant to a TV producer, but a mere single page to acing her coursework in technical college as a young mother (lots of fertile ground left fallow there). Then we see why: she had to leave room for her on-the-job experiences working with head injury cases and the elderly. These are emotionally genuine, deeply moving passages of the book. So much so that we almost wonder whether we’re reading the same story.  Where are the cutting quips? The lies? It would appear that Oxford the woman may have regained some truthfulness. Ultimately, though, the sense that arises is one of range. Like a vocal artist who can hit high and swing low, here is an author who can made us coo as well as cringe, and a person who harbors real compassion above and beyond her piercing wit.

Lest we become lulled into a false sense of security by her more earnest writing, Oxford proceeds directly to giving herself an enema, talking about her adorable, shitty kids some, and  exercising vigorously preparatory to what seems to be set up as the book’s grand flourish – meeting David Copperfield. The encounter speaks well to Oxford’s having arrived as a celeb. Sharing the stage with D.C. is powerfully rendered, with bladder-bursting suspense, and the narrative gives way afterward to some real Vegas grotesque behavior, but this chapter does not in my overall view deliver the knockout punch it might, which leaves me feeling as the book draws to a close (in Disneyland), that Oxford has won by keeping her gloves up and her feet moving the whole twelve rounds. T.K.O.

Eugene Uttley 1/2/13

I’m new to this book writing business, so I’m getting all of these lists of information back from the publishers.
This list was actually interesting:
1. I was surprised it was interesting.
2. I was surprised by the list and I wrote the fucking book.

BEHOLD a list of people I’ve mentioned in my 300+ page book:

Affleck, Ben

Aguilera, Christina

Allen, Woody

Amos, Tori

Anderson, Loni

Anderson, Pamela

Anderson, Tracy (celebrity trainer)

Anderson, Wes

Banks, Tyra

Barrymore, Drew

Basquiat, Jean-Michel

Bates, Kathy

Bergen, Edgar (ventriloquist)

Berliner, Emile (inventor)

bin Laden, Osama

Brown, Chris

Candy, John

Caray, Harry (sportscaster)

Chan, Jackie

Chung, Alexa (TV host, model)

Chung Ling Soo (magician)

Clooney, George

Close, Glenn

Coleman, Gary

Common

Copperfield, David, D.C.

Crawford, Cindy

Cruise, Tom

Culkin, Macaulay

Danson, Ted

Danza, Tony

Dean, James

Del Toro, Benicio

Depp, Johnny

DiCaprio, Leonardo, Leo

Dick, Andy

Dillon, Matt

Dion, Celine

Disney, Walt

Donahue, Phil

Evangelista, Linda

Farley, Chris

Fisher, Carrie

Flynt, Larry

Foley, Dave

Ford, Harrison

Fox, Megan

Freeman, Morgan

Gere, Richard

Germain, Karl (magician)

Goldberg, Adam (actor)

Gosling, Ryan

Hanks, Tom

Harrelson, Woody

Helfer, Tricia (supermodel)

Henning, Doug (magician)

Hepburn, Audrey

Hoffman, Dustin

Holyfield, Evander

Hurley, Elizabeth, Liz

Jackson, Michael

Jett, Joan

John, Elton

Johnson, Betsey

Jong Il, Kim

Joplin, Janis

Jovovich, Milla

Keller, Helen

Kline, Kevin

LeBlanc, Matt

LeBrock, Kelly (supermodel)

Lil Wayne

LL Cool J

Lopez, Jennifer

Maguire, Tobey

Maher, Bill

Marley, Bob

Marx, Richard

McAdams, Rachel

McCarthy, Cormac

McKee, Robert (screenwriter)

Murray, Bill

Newton, Isaac

Nightingale, Florence

Norton, Edward

O’Donnell, Rosie

Oldman, Gary

Paltrow, Gwyneth

Perez, Rosie

Phillips, Stone

Posey, Parker

Raphael, Sally Jesse

Reynolds, Burt

Richie, Lionel

Rihanna

Ripa, Kelly

Ritchie, Guy

Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugène (magician)

Roberts, Julia

Rogen, Seth

Rogers, Fred

Rooney, Mickey

Ryder, Winona

Seberg, Jean

Selleck, Tom

Shields, Brooke

Spader, James

Spears, Britney

Spelling, Tori

Stewart, Martha

Swift, Taylor

Tarantino, Quentin

Tatum, Channing

Temple, Shirley

Teresa, Mother

T-Pain

Travolta, John

Tyson, Mike

Valderrama, Wilmer

Wilde, Oscar

Williams, Robin

Williams, Serena

Winchell, Paul (ventriloquist)

Winfrey, Oprah

Wonder, Stevie

This is what I look like for 8 hours of the day. Expressionless in front of a computer.
I am sure I’ll have great skin as I age, you know, from all of the not talking and expression making that seems to be the new norm. I’m alone and I’m writing and that’s the deal. I get up every day, I feed and take the kids to their three different schools, I sit here - like this- I feed the kids and I watch The Voice… all while my hair air dries.

If I have a point, it’s this. I’m not, not here. I’m here. I’m just, not.