Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar

May 27, 2013
In these disjointed autobiographical essays, L.A.-based writer, Twitter celebrity, and mom Oxford per-forms a flatfooted exercise in pointlessness. Framed by silly dialog with her three children ("Did you write this book to make dough?" eight-year-old Hen asks), Oxford's erratic chapters relay cherished memories from a not-so-long-ago youth: her early attempts to stage a production of Star Wars at her French Canadian immersion school, a first job washing dishes at the popular Schitzelhaus, pot-smoking teenage shenanigans with her best friend Aimee (such as traveling to Las Vegas to meet the about-to-be-a-big-star Leonardo DiCaprio), finding her future husband while working at a diner, and freaking out after becoming a mother in her early twenties without a "backup" secondary degree. Though pithy moments can be found, these stories often succumb to aimlessness. A trip to Las Vegas to meet magician David Copperfield, who provides a gracious reception after becoming a fan of Ox-ford's on Twitter, and a trip to Disneyland with her family prove feeble fodder for hilarity. The humor is wackily contrived, nearly slapstick, possessing little irony, tension, or subtlety. Instead, exclamation points lead the way like a banal laugh track and scatological references seem like a desperate plot for reaction.

April 1, 2013
Autobiographical vignettes from Twitter comedian Oxford. These stories fall into roughly three stages of the author's life: obnoxiously precocious childhood, confused young adulthood and parenthood. When Oxford tells us about her childhood and teen years, she doesn't hold back, giving us mortifying stories about wetting herself in a gas station and puking in her friend's father's car before a party. She also comes across as somewhat bratty and entitled. Her young adulthood was appropriately wacky. She flew from Canada to Los Angeles on a whim in a desperate attempt to meet Leonardo DiCaprio and bought, then sold, a dilapidated camper van. When describing her adulthood and parenthood, she grows into her precociousness. "An Open Letter to the Nurse Who Gave Me an Enema Bottle" is entertaining, and the last sentence is genuinely funny and unexpected. "How I Met Your Father" is sweetly raunchy, the kind of story that will horrify her children but delight her grandchildren. As amusing as some of these stories are, Oxford is a mostly unremarkable writer with a remarkable claim to fame: her successful use of Twitter to gain an audience for her humor and writing. Yet this, the most interesting fact about her, receives very little attention in the book. She does share her experience meeting David Copperfield as a result of a Twitter exchange, but the story readers will most likely want to hear--how she got started with Twitter and how her tweets got the attention of significant public figures like Copperfield and Roger Ebert--is absent from the narrative. Alternately grating and amusing, Oxford skips the most interesting part of her life: her canny use of Twitter.

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