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