#Twitterboss: Kelly Oxford on the sitcom filter

You really should follow Kelly Oxford. The Edmonton-born, Los Angeles-based writer who just put out her second book, When You Find Out the World Is Against You: And Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments, regales her nearly 800K Twitter followers with daily dispatches from the parenting trenches. Many of her hilarious tweets and Instagram posts come from things her three kids (aged 16, 13 and eight) have said and done IRL, and she pretty much goes with her gut on all of them.

“I try to keep my tweets sitcom-y, like if it’s something they could have said in a public place, not personal things they do,” she says. “I’ve always instinctively known what I’m comfortable with. It sounds weird, but I’m a very private person, so I trust the choices I make about what I share. I really don’t feel that a lot of people actually know who I am. They’re very shocked when they meet me and discover I’m so different from what they thought, so I know I’m doing a good job.”

Oxford’s super-dry, super-hilarious writing made her a person to follow on Twitter. And, because this is what she does day in, day out, she doesn’t really have to talk it all out with her kids. Us regular parents should be so lucky.

“Kids don’t care what their parents do,” she says. “I never cared about my parents’ jobs. Kids are just so focused on their own lives. The positive thing about my job and being on social media is that they understand how huge it is. I haven’t had to explain that what they put out there has an effect because they’ve seen its effect on my life. I’ve never had to sit my 16-year-old down and tell her what she should and shouldn’t post because, duh, she gets it. I got to skip all of that, which is great.”

Overall, Oxford is pretty chill about social media, so we can totally learn from her while we laugh along with her. “I haven’t gone the route of the everything-being-perfect aesthetic,” she says. “I haven’t had to keep the house clean, make sure the white walls are painted really white or have fresh plants all the time. I haven’t had to worry about succulents, so that’s pretty good. Succulents and gold cutlery on a marble tabletop—nope, not part of my life.”

Our favourite @kellyoxford tweets:

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