Alternately grating and amusing, Oxford skips the most interesting part of her life: her canny use of Twitter.
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.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210222-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
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Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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