Roz Weston: A Little Less Broken

Mary Anne (Voiceover) 00:00:02
The women of Ill repute with your hosts. Wendy Mesley and Maureen Holloway.

Wendy Mesley 00:00:07
So, Maureen, we we have a man of Ill Repute this week.

Maureen Holloway 00:00:12
A man. A man. A man I sort of know, but not really. I mean, do we really know anybody?

Wendy Mesley 00:00:18
But this is Roz West and you Ros West.

Maureen Holloway 00:00:22
Okay, but I have to explain. For almost for five years, I worked at Rogers Radio at CHFI, hosted the morning show, and the studio right next to ours was the Kiss 92.5 studio. And Roz was in there every morning. And I think I met him maybe saw him twice in five years. But you know what? He was the coolest guy in the building.

Wendy Mesley 00:00:47
So, Maureen, really? You never saw him?

Maureen Holloway 00:00:51
No, I did. I saw him. I saw him, but he was legendary for not being particularly social. But it was like high school. He was like, oh, he's the cool guy. He looks like a rock star, but nobody really knows anything about him. The only thing that I knew about Ross was he was obsessive about mowing his lawn.

Wendy Mesley 00:01:08
So this is a guy who looks like a rock star and he's obsessed with mowing his lawn.

Maureen Holloway 00:01:14
I mean, picture a rock star mowing his lawn. That's Roz Weston, as far as I.

Wendy Mesley 00:01:19
Know of a contradiction. No.

Maureen Holloway 00:01:21
Okay, so Roz has written a book which we're going to talk to him about a memoir. And he describes himself as a kind of a contradiction, having above average confidence but low self esteem.

Wendy Mesley 00:01:34
Well, there's a few people like that. I didn't have the office next door, so I didn't know him. I saw him on the billboards and all that. I know he's a big deal and everything, but then I read his book because we were going to be talking to him. And I learned well, I always thought I was a workaholic, but apparently I was not a workaholic compared to him. I always thought I had kind of, like crazy love affairs. And then I read about his love affairs. Oh, my God. He also talks a lot in the book about losing his dad. He lost his dad to cancer. He was young. Ish he's sort of burdened by guilt for all we can talk about that, too. The cancer, the guilt, all of that, but the really cool stuff, I learned that I'm not the only one who has a problem with turkey and that perhaps that's your takeaway.

Maureen Holloway 00:02:17
Yeah.

Wendy Mesley 00:02:18
There's a reason that it comes with all that shit on the side, the gravy and the cranberry.

Maureen Holloway 00:02:24
It's a terrible bird, but he has a turkey recipe, so hopefully we'll get to that. Roz is sitting right here. It must be really weird. But welcome, Ross. I'm so glad you're doing this show. I have so many questions.

Roz Weston 00:02:41
You guys are the best. Thank you so much. That was the greatest introduction, I think, of all time.

Maureen Holloway 00:02:47
Really?

Wendy Mesley 00:02:47
We didn't even say that you were 17 years with Entertainment Canada and that you do the show while Raz and Mocha, you do the morning show. We didn't even say any of that. We just sort of leapt right into.

Maureen Holloway 00:02:58
You have great hair turkey recipe.

Roz Weston 00:03:02
Yeah, no, thank you for having me. It's really incredible to, first off, talk to both of you. One mo. Finally, after all. It's interesting. It's sort of a joke with the people I work with where they keep threatening to bring people into the studio that I've worked with for 15 years and ask me what their names are. The reason it started that way was because when we started the radio show, I was already doing Et Canada. And so my days were getting up at 330 in the morning, going and doing the Razamoka Show, and then I would leave. The show would finish at ten, and I had to be in makeup for the TV show at 1030, right? So I had to get from A to B. So I missed out on all the staff meetings, I missed out on everything. I just wasn't part of that world. My career with the radio show was to literally walk into the studio, do the show. As soon as we turned off the microphones, I was gone. I wasn't part of the social structure of the company or anything like that. I think a little bit of my later reluctance to even bond with people came because it had been so long, I think, as well. And then I think that I got to a point with so many people that it would have been weird had I gone up and talked to them. And then there's like a little bit of embarrassment and there's a little bit of insecurity and all of this other stuff. And so it fit my life perfectly to just sort of go and do the show and then get the hell out.

Wendy Mesley 00:04:34
But you secretly found fantasized about Mo, right?

Maureen Holloway 00:04:37
Oh, stop. I didn't even realize that you'd left Et Canada because I didn't watch, but so that was fairly recent. So you picked radio over television? Or was it that simple, or was it just too much to do both gigs?

Roz Weston 00:04:57
No, well, see, I wrote the book over two years while doing both shows. So I was working 13 and a half hours a day for the radio show and the TV show, and then I was writing 30 hours a week is the way that my schedule sort of sort of broke down over that year and a half that I wrote the book. And I knew that I could write a book and work two full time jobs, but I couldn't launch a book and work two full time jobs. I couldn't sort of give this the life that it needed. I needed to be able to do press with people that weren't the company that I worked for. I needed to be able to go anywhere at the last minute. I needed to be able to do this stuff in the middle of the afternoon, which I wouldn't have been able to do. And so Et Canada had gone through a lot of changes. A lot of the people that I loved and were great friends of mine were no longer there. And it was time. And I made the decision to walk away. And I don't regret leaving the show, but I don't have the freedom that I thought that I was going to have. I thought that I was going to be so overjoyed with having all this time on my hands. And I find that I'm just getting antsy. I've never not had two full time jobs in almost 20 years. And so I thought that I was, like, going to come home and life would be great. And I find that I don't have a place to put that energy anymore because the book is written, it's out, and I don't know what I'm going to do next. But I'm not relaxed. Like, I'm not content.

Maureen Holloway 00:06:18
You've never been relaxed or content, I don't think, from you, judging from your book. But doesn't this sound familiar, Wendy? I mean, this is what a lot of people go through post retirement.

Wendy Mesley 00:06:28
Yeah, it sort of changed for me when I had a kid, and she's now 24. You've got a 13 year old, so good luck with that. I remember when our daughter was 13. Oh, my God. It's very strange. I was telling my husband about how you were working these two amazing jobs, like, very time consuming, and you were working, I think you said, somewhere, something I saw anyway, in the research, that it's 30 hours a week of writing the book. And he says, yeah, there's something about you people, and he means people like me and Maureen and you, that you need to live out loud. What is it? I ski like a crazy person now because I don't have seven jobs anymore. But what do you get? How do you explain it?

Roz Weston 00:07:15
So I think that in this business and I talk a lot about this in the book because I think it is relatable to not only people in our business, but to people in other businesses as well, which is when I was younger, I was so focused on chasing opportunity and making sure I was damn ready for it when it came, because I never wanted to fall back. And so I was an opportunity hunter. And what that wound up putting me was in a position where so much of my self worth and identity was locked into what I did for a living and who I did it for. And I became very uncomfortable with that idea because my father had sort of gone through that. And then once I stopped chasing opportunity, I shifted and I started chasing creativity, where every day I have this insatiable urge to just get an idea out of my head and into the world, make something beautiful. Because it's much more difficult to make something beautiful than it is to point out all the things in the world that are ugly. And so now I chase creativity, and that is something that I can't shake because I enjoy it too much. It's so incredibly fulfilling and it does no harm to anyone, and it only lifts me up. And I got pretty good at being me because I don't think a lot of people are really, really great at being themselves. And so that's where I find myself now, is just this incredible, ferocious need to be creative constantly and one less place to put.

Maureen Holloway 00:08:44
I love the idea that you take whatever's in your head and it either comes out as a radio show or a podcast or a book painting.

Roz Weston 00:08:52
Yeah. And that was it, because I was just so obsessed for so long with advancing, and I refused to ask for help, and I didn't want to schmooze and all of this stuff. I had a lot of issues with asking for help, and that led me to a place of where I was shutting a lot of people out. So any opportunity that came up, I needed to feel like I earned it 100%. And that didn't leave me in a great spot. One, it didn't leave me with a lot of friends, and two, it left me feeling like my entire identity and who I was was tied up into what I did for a living and who I did it for. And so I switched that. And then instead of chasing opportunity, I started chasing creativity. And that's sort of where I am today. And that's kind of where the book came from. The book was originally very different from the book that was released, but I think a lot of books are I think that that's fine, but that was all part of that process, right, about.

Maureen Holloway 00:09:51
The actual art or task of writing. I found it really you're such a contradiction in so many ways. And one is that you said you don't read, you were an indifferent student, and then you write a book, a best selling book, which pisses a lot of people off.

Roz Weston 00:10:09
Right.

Maureen Holloway 00:10:10
Not that you don't deserve it, but yeah, you don't deserve it, actually, because did it just come to you? You didn't write short stories. How did this happen? It was like Fell, a gift from heaven.

Roz Weston 00:10:23
Yeah, I've written more books than I've read. Okay, so I will say this. Yes, I was a shit student, and I didn't do all that well, and I thought I was going to be a rock star and all of this stuff, but I realized sort of later in life, in my early 20s, all the things I did not know. And one thing that I knew is that I was not particularly smart. And so I made it my mission to sort of educate myself with the resources that I had through various jobs that I had library and all of this other stuff. And the one thing that bothered me the most is that I didn't know how to write. I wasn't a particularly great writer. And then the more writing I did, I realized that working from company to company and in all of these sort of different shows and in all the different departments within television and radio, when layoffs happened, the best writers were usually the last people to lose their jobs because they could work in promo, they could work in news, they could work in all sorts of areas. And so I made it my mission to just to be the best writer that I could. And now I write constantly. Like, I'm just always, always writing. But all of that happened much later in life. I didn't come out of college with this great, well read, sort of incredible vocabulary. I was quite ignorant. And all of that happened later. I was like a very typical late bloomer.

Wendy Mesley 00:11:52
So the book is called A Little Bit Broken, which is a quote mentioned.

Maureen Holloway 00:11:57
The title until next Broken.

Wendy Mesley 00:12:02
I mean, you've got rock star hair, you're tall, you're successful. Why did you end up a little bit broken?

Roz Weston 00:12:12
One of the things when I sat down to write this book is that I was obsessed with the notion where we are today, that we don't fix things anymore, we replace them. And whether that be friends or our phones or relationships, we don't fix things anymore. If it's broken, we replace it or.

Wendy Mesley 00:12:34
Just go on tinder and you swipe and.

Roz Weston 00:12:38
That'S it like a $900 phone. There's no fixing anything anymore. And so I was a little bit obsessed with that because my dad was a fixer and everything in his life got a second chance. And it wasn't particularly done well, and he wasn't artistic, but when he was done with it, it would work and it would do the thing that it was supposed to do, but everything got a second chance. And when I sat down to write this book, because my dad was dead and he died at a point before there was a lot of permanent record of people, I don't have any audio of my dad. I don't even think I have any video of my dad. We have sort of photo albums. And one of the things that I realized is that when I go, so will him, basically, right? He goes when I go because my brother and I are the sort of keepers of his stories, and we're the ones who will tell his stories when they're gone. And I wanted to leave a permanent record of my dad, right, because I thought that he deserved that. And I felt like I owed it to him because he was so incredible. And I didn't just do it for my dad. I sort of did it for all the dads that were great and then disappeared. And once the people who are around to tell their stories are gone, they're gone. And that was heartbreaking to me. And so a big part of this was making sure that there was a record that he was awesome.

Mary Anne (Voiceover) 00:14:08
The women of ill repute. 

Maureen Holloway 00:14:08
What about your mom, Roz? You didn't talk to her while we were writing the book?

Roz Weston 00:14:17
No, my mom found out that I was writing the book the day that I sent the book to the printer.

Wendy Mesley 00:14:23
So I'm thinking of the movies and the mom is calling all the time and saying, hey, in this case, Roz, pick up friggin phone. Like, it's kind of weird that you didn't talk to your mum for for two years. Like, why while you were writing? It must have been hard.

Roz Weston 00:14:40
But we talked, but we didn't talk a lot. It was COVID, right? And so we weren't seeing each other a whole lot. Anyway, I would go and bring them stuff if they needed me to bring them stuff, and we would text all the time. But I really disappeared, for the most part for two years. But I think that for her it was kind of understood because I was always so busy. And then with COVID doing both shows and everything else, I don't think she really questioned it much. And then I called her one day and I was like, hey, listen, I got to meet with you. And then I still couldn't go in her house. So it was cold outside and we sat in a little park in front of her apartment building and I told her, I was just like, Listen, I wrote a book and here is what it's about. And then I went through some of the things to just sort of prep her for it because there was a lot in the book that she did not know. And I told her that I used to hurt myself because I thought that that was one of the things that she needed to know first, because it couldn't be the second thing I told her. And so I told her I used to hurt myself. And then and then I told her why. And then we hugged and we cried. And then she was like, oh, my God, you wrote a book. She's like, I've been writing poetry. And then she got out her phone and she started reading me her poems. And we sat there and we hugged and it was a really beautiful moment and she wasn't pissed at all. I think that she knows me well enough to know that that's how I operate and that's how I do things and I'm very secretive with things. When she did find out who's not.

Maureen Holloway 00:16:11
Your wife, your fiance.

Wendy Mesley 00:16:14
Yeah. So it's the end of the book. Like, you were going to propose. You were using your book to propose to the woman that you've been with the mother of your 13 year old daughter. I mean, tell us what happened, and are you getting married? Did she say yes?

Roz Weston 00:16:32
She did say yes, and we are getting married. It's going to be in the summer. And she finally got a ring because I couldn't do that ahead of time. I knew going into this that I was going to propose. The very first line that I wrote in the book was, when I sat down to write the book, I knew it was going to end with a proposal. And when I tell stories, I always tell stories at the end first. I need to know where I'm going. I need to know how I'm getting out. And so when I sat down to write the book, I wrote the line, when you find somebody to spend the rest of your life with, you're also finding the person who will tell your stories when you're gone. And if you're lucky, you'll find somebody who only sees the best in you. And so I wrote that and then I put it aside, and then I went back to the beginning and I wrote all the way up to that point. And Catherine, my fiance, she was a part of the writing process from the very beginning, where I would finish a chapter and I would take my computer and I would put it on her lap and I'd be like, do you have 15 minutes? Read this. Because there was so much that she didn't know. And so then she would have questions. Sometimes we would sit and laugh together. Sometimes we would sit and cry together. She was part of the process the whole way, but she didn't know how it was going to end. And one of the reasons why I wanted to end the book that way was because I knew it was a tough read and I needed people to know that there was a happy ending. I needed people to go into it with optimism because it's not an easy book to read. But I wanted people to know that there is an extremely happy ending and to go into it with sort of like, heart wide open. This is all going to be okay.

Maureen Holloway 00:18:04
It isn't an easy it's in spots. It's hilarious. Your childhood stories are both hilarious and horrendous. Reading it is. I'm a mother of two boys and I'm like, oh, God. I can understand why your mother would be surprised by some stuff, but I want to talk about writing about such personal stuff and yet not naming names and not just professionally. Wendy and I have talked to a number of people who've written memoirs and let it all hang out, for better or for worse. Usually for worse. You seem to have managed to find a good balancing act. The only people that I think that I know that you mentioned are Julie Adam, who is our boss, and Carlos Ferrari, right son of a bitch guy, bully. Those are the only two people that you actually name and the rest.

Roz Weston 00:18:57
Yeah, there are a few people who I did. There's reasons why there are certain people in my life that I didn't name, and I don't even give them fake names. I don't give them any name one, because I don't think revenge makes for great memoirs. Right. So that was a part of it. And then the other part of it, too, is a lot of those stories and a lot of the people that I'm talking about, this is stuff that happened 30 years ago, and I like to believe that people change. And the people I'm writing about were the people they were then, not the people they are now, and I don't know them now. And so that was a big reason why I didn't put names in Oregon.

Wendy Mesley 00:19:41
Wants to know the names.

Maureen Holloway 00:19:45
You know what, I can figure out quite a number of them, because anybody could.

Roz Weston 00:19:51
Anybody could figure out who they are. But I didn't write it from a place of sort of vengeance, because I don't think revenge makes for a great memoir. And the people that I wrote about that were sort of truly awful to me. This was 30 years ago, and I wrote about the people they were then, not about the people they are now, because I don't know them now. And I like to believe that people can change and that maybe people have changed. And it's not that I felt like I owed them that sort of bit of anonymity, but I didn't want the focus to be on an individual. I wanted people to read those stories and see themselves in it. That's why there was no target.

Maureen Holloway 00:20:31
Yeah, but that being said, we want to ask because we've all interviewed a lot of famous people between the three of us.

Roz Weston 00:20:37
Sure.

Maureen Holloway 00:20:38
We have interviewed everybody. And you do name names. And I'm with you. With Alec Baldwin. I interviewed him years ago, and he was a dick.

Roz Weston 00:20:47
Yeah. I mean, Alec Baldwin's, notorious. The interesting interview is Alec Baldwin's brother. I interviewed Billy Baldwin one time. Billy. Billy.

Maureen Holloway 00:20:57
I've interviewed all the bouncing Baldwin boys.

Roz Weston 00:21:01
But Billy Baldwin was interesting because it was right after that thing that the story of the Alec Baldwin story that I talk about in the book, which was this, which was we were set up in a hotel room to interview Alec Baldwin, and there was camera guys and audio guys and producers and everything else. And there was sort of like hotel French doors, which are there's no insulation. There's no anything on them. And he came in with his assistant, he was sitting in the other room, and he picked up the phone and he was reaming somebody out over the phone. Like I've never heard a person scream.

Maureen Holloway 00:21:32
Probably his ten year old daughter.

Roz Weston 00:21:34
Another human being before. Yeah. And this was not that long after that right? There was the filthy pig daughter call and then there was this. And this went on for 15 minutes and we were mortified and we thought that he was going to storm out of the room and leave and the interview was going to be over and he slammed the phone down and then walked into the room and was like, hey, guys, I'm Alec. And we were like it was incredible how fast he switched it off. And so I told that story to his brother and he said to me, listen, if you think Alec is brutal to the people who work for him, you should listen to the way that he talks to his family.

Maureen Holloway 00:22:11
Oh, God.

Roz Weston 00:22:12
And he goes, Alec's problem is this when he speaks to you like that, you can't do anything. If he punched me in the face, I could have him charged. But when he talks to you like that, there's nothing you can do. And he knows it. And that was from his own brother.

Maureen Holloway 00:22:29
He reminds me of somebody I worked with famously, or infamously similar kind of rage. And yeah, it is brutal, but I mean, who's the worst person you ever interviewed? Can you name names?

Roz Weston 00:22:42
Yeah, sure. Worst. I have different categories of worst. Like, I have different categories of best. Worst. There's just people who suck at being interviewed. Yeah, right. That sort of thing bothers me more than if somebody's a jerk. I can deal with somebody being a jerk because really they're going to look like they're a jerk. But when you're just talking to somebody who's really, really terrible at being interviewed or giving an interview, there's not much you can do with that. Right.

Wendy Mesley 00:23:10
I love the line in your book about how they would always say, no personal questions because you're interviewing a celebrity and celebrities get to set all the rules and people in the media business are so desperate to talk to them, they agree to anything. But Maureen knows that I always had this massive crush on comedians. So I finally got to interview Steve Martin and all he wanted to talk about was the freaking Group of Seven. Who doesn't love the Group of Seven? Like, the Beatles are like, amazing, but it's Steve Martin. And I agreed. I agreed. And I only talked to him about his fascination with one of the Group of Seven and was at the Ago. And afterwards I'm like, what about the arrow through the head? I didn't do any of that. But you broke rules all the time, didn't you?

Roz Weston 00:23:59
I was hired to break rules. Right. And that was sort of my purpose with the early years at Et Canada. And I have to say this because Et Canada did change and they changed in a very wonderful way. But in the early days of Et Canada, I was hired to go in and ask the things that we swore that we would not ask, because this was before social media. And when we started the show, it was like TMZ had maybe just started, and Perez Hilton was the biggest thing in celebrity sort of news, right? And so they needed us then they still needed us. And so we had the ability to sort of overstep, and they couldn't say anything because if they had something to say, if they had a rumor that they needed to dispel, if they had a movie that they needed to promote, they still needed us. And so I was sent in there to overstep every single time, and that was my purpose with that show, and I got very good at it when social media came around. The Rock doesn't need entertainment tonight. The Rock can go on Instagram and talk to 25 million people plus. Right? So it's a gift now when The Rock sits down with you. So that whole dynamic between celebrity journalism and the celebrities changed, and I think it changed for the better, to be honest with you. And I started to enjoy the show more once. We didn't have to be gross, because for a lot of years we were gross, but I really enjoyed the show more in the last few years of the showdown.

Wendy Mesley 00:25:28
Sucks. Who was great?

Roz Weston 00:25:30
Steve Carell is the best.

Maureen Holloway 00:25:31
Yeah, I met him a long time ago when he was just starting, and he is a genuinely nice person in every way.

Roz Weston 00:25:38
He's very good at the game, right? Steve Carell, Paul Giamatti, there's a few others who are brilliant at the game because the game is, I don't know you and you don't know me, but for five minutes, we have to act like we're best friends. Going to make you laugh. I'm going to make you laugh. I'm going to ask you one question where you're going to pretend to give me something that sounds like you haven't given it to 15 other people already today, and then we're going to shake hands, and it's going to be awesome, right? That's the game. And Steve Carell is one of the best at the game.

Wendy Mesley 00:26:05
Yeah, I did Idris Elba once, and it was the same thing. I rarely agree to ten minutes. He got ten minutes with the superstar and then ten minutes with somebody else. But I agreed because it was Idris Elba, and he's hot, so I agree. All of the rumors were about him being the next Bond, and whatever you do, don't ask the quit. And I broke the rule, and he was like that. He's like, we're best friends for five minutes, maybe ten. And he answered the Bond question. Yeah, sure. Who wouldn't want to be Bond? And I was like, oh, you're just so cool. But it is like that. Well, there is like, a Bond that happens.

Roz Weston 00:26:48
There is. And the biggest stars in the world never come with rules. That's the interesting thing. George Clooney has never told you what to ask.

Maureen Holloway 00:26:56
No.

Roz Weston 00:26:57
Brad Pitt. Has never told you what to ask the biggest stars in the world. Sandra Bullock has never told you what to ask the biggest stars in the world. Don't do that. And that is, I think, the level that everybody wants to get to, what.

Maureen Holloway 00:27:09
We'Ve learned both from our other jobs and doing this podcast now for the past year, is we've learned to be very wary of publicists because they could change the dynamic, and you can't talk about this, and then you actually talk to the person. And I'm not going to name names because we need these publicists to like us so we can get to the people we want to talk to. But they put up a fence and they dictate. And I often wonder if the guest celebrity author or whatever has any idea that this is going on.

Roz Weston 00:27:42
Of course they do. I now have a publicist in Toronto and have a publicist in Los Angeles. You know everything. Yeah, I know everything. I know everything that's going on because I pay them.

Maureen Holloway 00:27:53
Yeah. Listen, your book, you and Catherine actually designed it yourself. She did the photography and you designed it. I mean, you didn't just write it?

Roz Weston 00:28:01
No. Yeah. And it's crazy. Again, creativity and obsessiveness and everything else. I sort of sat down to think about the COVID of the book, and Catherine's a photographer, she takes all the pictures of me, and I wanted her to be a part of it, so I wanted her to take the picture. So I put it in my contract. When I signed the book contract initially, that I got to pick the photographer who was going to shoot my book, I put it in there just so there was no sort of debate about it. And then I started building it and I made a couple of mockups, and they just wound up liking it. And it was crazy because this is the COVID here, right.

Maureen Holloway 00:28:37
Leaps out.

Wendy Mesley 00:28:38
Great. Yeah.

Roz Weston 00:28:39
I had this my name and the name of the book sort of different, placed everywhere, all over the book. And I had them all printed out, and I left them on the dining room table. And all the different ones, there was like six different ones. And I would come in every day and I would look at them just to see which one jumped out at me. And the closer I got to choosing the book cover, the sort of deeper I got into editing the book, where I realized the things that I was going to be talking about.

Maureen Holloway 00:29:04
How you learned a lot.

Roz Weston 00:29:06
I learned a lot. But what I also realized is that this, with my eyes covered, was the only version of the book that I was comfortable releasing.

Wendy Mesley 00:29:13
Wow.

Roz Weston 00:29:14
Because I felt because I felt far too exposed with this anywhere else. And so that's why they got that one.

Maureen Holloway 00:29:23
Wendy, you know that I ran into Raz at the storytellers ball at the writers Gala last fall, and the one where I tried to chase Margaret atwood.

Wendy Mesley 00:29:33
Around the yeah, and you were the only one who was all I was.

Maureen Holloway 00:29:37
The only I had elf ears on because we were supposed to dress up, but I was one of the very few people in costume. But I saw Roz and Catherine. It was the first time I'd met Katherine. And how was that for you? I was there as a guest because I knew it was some rich guy who invited us. But you were there as a writer. With all the top writers in this country.

Roz Weston 00:29:59
It felt really great. Like, it was incredible. You write a book, and the thing that I learned about writing books is that most books you've read in your life and most books, when you walk into a bookstore, everything all through the shelves and even at the front, most people spend two years writing a book for less than $5,000. Right. Sounds like podcast. Yeah. And that's why there are no more authors. That's why every author is an influencer or an academic or there's very few authors anymore, unless you are Margaret Atwood and so on and so forth. You have to have a platform. If you don't have a platform, you're not going to get a book deal. You can self publish, but if you don't have an audience built in because you have to market your own book, a publisher won't even look at you. And so I have such great respect for writers because I realize that it is literally the most tedious, difficult, heartbreaking, awful thing you can do is to sit down and write a book. It really is. But when you get to the end, it is the most rewarding thing I've ever done. And so that storytellers ball while we were there, and, like, you know, I got invited to that as an author, and, you know, I knew Margaret Atwood was going to be there, and I knew, you know, a couple of the other a couple of the other authors. It was a really beautiful moment for me. That was the sort of first outing we had with the book, and I've never felt comfortable in those rooms. And I was sitting at the table with Catherine, and she looked beautiful, and I just wanted to get a picture. I don't post shit on anywhere, right. Like, it's just not my thing. I don't post a lot of stuff. And they had a picture of me on the front of the centerpiece, had a picture of me and my book, and I just wanted a picture of it. And I was trying to stage something as everything was going on, and Margaret Atwell was on stage talking, and I moved everything all into this little vignette, and I fucking set the whole thing on fire with a candle. Right?

Maureen Holloway 00:31:58
Yes.

Roz Weston 00:32:01
I went from not feeling like I didn't belong to actually looking like I don't belong. And that's sort of how that night went for me. But it was a beautiful night. I had a great time.

Maureen Holloway 00:32:14
I think I heard about that.

Wendy Mesley 00:32:16
Ross, it's been wonderful talking to you. You said earlier that you're maybe not the smartest person, but, boy, oh, boy, you went deep and you exposed a lot, and you've done a lot, and you mean a lot. I think that what you've accomplished in that book, I think you're getting somewhere really important.

Maureen Holloway 00:32:34
A Little Bit Broken is published by Double Day. That's usually how we end these interviews. I hope you write another one. I hope you just keep creating with more names.

Wendy Mesley 00:32:42
More names.

Roz Weston 00:32:45
I will never do any one of these.

Maureen Holloway 00:32:46
Really? Well, I'm glad you did this one. I'm glad you did this one.

Roz Weston 00:32:50
No, I cried for two years writing this. I don't want to cry for another two years. There's no way I'm ever doing this again. I might do a cookbook.

Maureen Holloway 00:32:59
Yeah, you should. That turkey recipe is amazing. With the skin thing. I'm so doing that. I am so doing that.

Roz Weston 00:33:05
Before we go, I will tell you this, and I really love that you brought that up, because that chapter that has the turkey section in it, right? That part was in the book and out of the book and in the book and out of the book and in the book and out of the book the whole time I was writing it because I would be proofreading the book and then I would get to that stuff again. I'm like, what the fuck am I doing? I'm putting a turkey recipe in this book. And then I would get rid of it, and then I would read it again and I'm like, oh, no, put the turkey stuff back in. And then at the last second, I left the turkey stuff in.

Maureen Holloway 00:33:36
I think you should write a cookbook. I think you should write a cookbook full of stories. Yeah, that would be great about it. Think about it.

Roz Weston 00:33:43
Yeah.

Maureen Holloway 00:33:44
Ross, your wife to be is a lovely woman. I suppose this is not a shock.

Roz Weston 00:33:49
Thank you.

Maureen Holloway 00:33:50
Love to Catherine. It was just a pleasure meeting her. And we wish you guys all the happiness of the world.

Roz Weston 00:33:56
Thank you.

Maureen Holloway 00:34:00
Thanks a lot, Roz.

Roz Weston 00:34:02
Thank you. I really appreciate both of you. Thank you.

Maureen Holloway 00:34:06
Thanks, Roz.

Wendy Mesley 00:34:07
Soon.

Maureen Holloway 00:34:08
Bye bye. Okay, so we had a lot of technical problems with this, but hopefully we've cleaned them all up. But what a well, he's a professional. He's a professional broadcaster. He should be a good interview.

Wendy Mesley 00:34:25
Yeah, he does open up, though, and I think that's important. I think that's what the book is about. Everybody who is a professional has stories, and so some of the stories you hear over and over. But I think he's trying to be open and honest and to figure out what the hell are we all doing here? Which is pretty meaningful. So is he going to write your book?

Maureen Holloway 00:34:48
No, it sounds like a hell.

Wendy Mesley 00:34:51
But you'll make $5,000.

Maureen Holloway 00:34:53
Yeah, if I could get $5,000, that would be amazing. No, it was obviously very painful for him and he goes there and all the dark the dark underside of being Roz Weston is there. And it may surprise you if you are a fan and have been listening to him or watching him all these years, where he's come from. But he seems to be in a good place now. Yeah, it was great.

Wendy Mesley 00:35:15
We never even asked him about he's got Tourettes, like, how many people have we never even asked him about that. And yet he has eye twitches and whatever and they get better.

Maureen Holloway 00:35:27
We forgot to ask him it's in the book. We forgot to ask him about a lot of stuff and we had technical problems. But it's a really good read. He may not be the best writer. He says he's a good writer, but he is a great storyteller. So pick up the book and enjoy. 

Mary Anne (Voiceover) 00:35:27
Women of Ill Repute was written and produced by Maureen Holloway and Wendy Mesley with the help from the team at the Sound Off media company and producer Jet Bellgraver.