Lauren Weedman exposes herself in print

When I phone Lauren Weedman at her Los Angeles home, I catch her looking online at what authors jokingly call "writer's pornography." "Yes, I admit it," Weedman says with more sarcasm than shame. "I was looking at my ranking on Amazon.com." It's a typical first-time-author compulsion, and with this month's release of "A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body (Tales from a Life of Cringe)" (Sasquatch,256pp.,$16.95), Weedman has reader reviews and sales rankings aplenty. "Yesterday I was number 74 in humor," she adds. "Then a friend pointed out that below and above me were toilet-humor books, 'Bob's Pooping Humor,' and the like."

One chapter of Weedman's book does have riffs on bowel movements, coffee enemas and painful gas. Her approach to memoir — much like the stage persona that has earned her one-woman shows renown — is to reveal any and everything, making her own neuroses the center of her humor. Like Larry David, the late Spaulding Gray or Seattle's own Matt Smith, Weedman emotionally exposes herself onstage, as Seattle audiences who saw her one-woman performances such as 2006's "Bust" will recall. This book extends that vulnerability into print. When Weedman, 38, writes about her own childhood, the results can be devastatingly funny and poignant. In the book's best chapter, she describes the agony of waiting to talk to her birth mother on the phone for the first time, while her adoptive mother hogs the line: "It was possible that my mother had already worn her out, and that I would end up with a Hallmark card and five bucks' back-allowance." Another chapter reveals her struggles to date a widower: During sex, she notices a photo of the man's deceased wife on the wall.

Not all of it translates from the stage to the page, and Weedman's obsession with "The Daily Show," where she worked, seems inauthentic. Yet most does score, if only because Weedman's life is one so outrageous that a reader is awed if only for the voyeuristic thrill.

There's not much difference between Weedman on the stage, in the book or in an interview, which probably speaks well for her appearance Oct. 4 at Neumos. "Before Amazon, I had videos up on a site where you could vote for 'the most annoying person,' " she says. "I'd go on it every day to see how many people had voted for me. Turns out I was super-annoying and I did really good. I'd even vote for myself; that's how much I wanted to be at the top of the charts."

Weedman shared this observation, among others, over the phone. Here are excerpts from our conversation:

Q: How did this book begin? Did someone from Sasquatch see your stage show and suggest you turn it into a book?

A: Actually, yes. After one of my solo shows in Seattle, an editor asked if I'd consider a book. At first it seemed so cheesy, but then I thought of it as a challenge. I've never done this kind of writing before. The plays I do on my feet and then I script them afterward. Writing the book was like taking a UCLA extension class. It was something I could do alone. You know, "the lonely art."

Q: I certainly know about that. Haven't I read a couple of these stories somewhere before?

A: I wrote a couple of pieces for [the Seattle-based literary journal] Swivel. And Brangien Davis of Swivel was the first person who told me I should I write a short story. That story was really easy so I thought, "I have a gift." And then when I started writing this book, that gift went away! The rest was so hard.

I didn't go to school for this and I didn't know how to write in the same tense. I wish I had this amazing awesome insight about Gandhi, or how Rome fell. But I don't.

Q: I was surprised at how revealing you were. It's one thing to tell a story to 100 people in a theater, and another to see it in print on the page forever.

A: For me, there is no other option. Not all of this [book] is true and some is exaggerated for comedy. Remember, the worst situation I ever had was writing for Glamour magazine about being raped, and then having that piece edited so it was not told in a way I would have ever told it. I had to ask myself, "Can I come to terms with that?" But I had chosen to do it.

I tend to be pretty self-divulging. People know all sorts of things about me. I don't think that Jon Stewart is going to read this but if he does, he'll be like, "Can she be more irritating?" The only person I worry about is the herpes guy, but then he did not tell me he had herpes. [In one chapter a post-divorce Weedman sleeps with a gent who doesn't tell her about his herpes.]

Q: I was surprised when you turned the focus to your widower boyfriend and his teenage son, though you changed their names.

A: Those were the stories I felt most connected to. And my boyfriend knows them all, and has read them. He's just so glad he's being written about. He's got so much better juicier stuff in his own life that I don't reveal about him. I always try to tell everything from my perspective.

Those family stories have been optioned by Fox for a television series, so that's what I'm writing now. It's a show about three broken people trying to make a family, and I'm the really inappropriate girlfriend. When I started working with TV was when I realized there is a chance I could go to hell for this: "I just sold a TV show about living with a widower and his son!" You know, just like my real life. When I told my boyfriend's son, he picked up the Tabasco sauce and drank it. It was like he was trying to give me material.

Q: Are there any other career moves you've got going on I don't know about?

A: I'm in a movie with Eddie Murphy. It's called "Nowhere Land." It's not "Doctor Dolittle 5." I play his assistant, the all-knowing sarcastic kind of assistant. I'm a glorified extra, actually, and I think all I do is hand him a few Post-it Notes.

Charles R. Cross is the author of five books. Reach him at charlesrcross@aol.com