Kelly Oxford

A tiny part of you – the petty, unbecoming little sliver you can barely bring yourself to acknowledge – wants to hate Kelly Oxford. She is a woman for whom everything just seems a little effortless. She lives in Los Angeles with a supportive husband and three children. She is smart, properly funny, and strikingly beautiful (one American magazine recently described her as ?a young Katherine Hepburn with electric blue fingernails?). Plus, despite having no connections and, she claims, not much ambition, the 35 year-old has just published her first book of essays, Everything is Perfect When You’re a Liar, which went straight to New York Times Bestseller list. And then there’s her already lucrative script-writing career.

If you’re not on Twitter chances are you have never heard of Kelly Oxford. [In 2009] she discovered the social networking service and started tweeting in her uniquely pithy, no-holds-barred style. People began re-tweeting her. Celebrities noticed, and started following her. Her following exploded. Just over three years later she has become the archetypal celebrity of the social media age. Typical of today’s brand of instant celebrity, Oxford moves fast and leaps at the opportunities presented to her. When a pilot she wrote didn’t get picked up by NBC, she devoted ?a couple of weekends? to writing a screenplay. Warner Brothers snapped it up for a six-figure sum.

What happens next for Kelly Oxford depends on how she handles her success?

Jennifer O’Connell @jenoconnell

The full article can be found in Image Magazine’s July issue, on newstands now.