Ophira Eisenberg isn’t quite sure what to expect when she appears at Pages on Kensington tonight to present her book Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogam y.
"This is my hometown so I don’t know if I"m going to met with a bunch of ex-boyfriends or people from high school or if it will just be other writers or what it will be" she says. "I don’t know if we’ll have to do a panel of my stories versus other people’s memories. I’m sort of up for anything."
The reason she’s curious about who will turn up is in part due to the stories contained in her memoir. As the title suggests there’s more than a few sexual anecdotes in this book and the first part of the book focuses on her youth in Calgary.
There’s the innocent youthful makeout with Brad Moore the only name she didn’t alter in the book because he was a good kisser (nice work Brad). Then there’s the dirtier encounters — on the dancefloor at a teenage "nightclub" a bloody good time in the closet at a party and finally a climax of sorts in Banff. Some locals of a certain vintage who attended Western high school might find it fun to read through and try to guess who’s who. If you were in a U2 cover band and went to Western you definitely want to read it.
Okay so she’s written a book about sleeping around and finally getting married to a great guy. But why?
Eisenberg in addition to performing stand-up and hosting an NPR show called Ask Me Another hosts Moth events in New York City where she now lives. If you’re not familiar with The Moth it involves people getting up onstage and telling reall stories from their lives.
"I would tell some of these stories that are in the book in various different incarnations" explains Eisenberg.
One night those stories caught the attention of a literary agent who asked whether she had enough material to write a book.
"Then I went home and looked at my various documents I’d written over the years and leafed through some notebooks and it was sort of a wonderful and terrible realization at the same time where you go ‘wow I really have been through a bunch of some not-great things some great things and everything in between" says Eisenberg.
"How have I amassed so much material?"
The material runs the gamut from cringe-worthy to really cringe-worthy to funny and sometimes even a little bit sexy. It’s the kind of stuff she doesn’t want her family to read although she admits it’s impossible to prevent them from doing so. But her husband?
"He’s really supportive and clearly he had heard a lot of the stories along the way because I’d performed them in different incarnations and then also we talked. We had talked about some of them. There was a couple of chapters mostly the ones that had to do with him that I thought would be right for him to read obviously" she says.
"There was only a couple of things that he took issue with and they were jokes I was trying to pull off that actually didn’t really land anyway so I was happy to change them or work a little harder on them.
"That has always been our relationship to my material. If it’s funny it stays."
Eisenberg will be telling tales at Pages tonight starting at 7:30. The evening is hosted by the CBC’s Russell Bowers.
