Why hello there!
Well done you on choosing to come on this adventure with me. I can’t guarantee you well-constructed sentences, rational thought patterns or the meaning of life, but I can promise you excess body hair, foul language and wondrous tales of ridiculous behaviour fuelled by a bottomless pit of anxiety.
I’m grateful for whatever has brought you here. Maybe you know me from my stand-up comedy concerts, listened to me on the radio or perhaps you watched me being rejected by the nation on Australian Idol in 2004. You may be a fan of celesbian (celebrity + lesbian) model-slash-actress-slash-DJ Ruby Rose, forgot your glasses, saw my book, and thought you were buying hers.
Whatever the case, you’re welcome here.
This is a safe space. I want you to snuggle down, switch off and find comfort in the fact that you’ll leave this book feeling much better about yourself. Expect to mutter things like ‘I’m so glad I’m not her,’ and ‘I’m nowhere near that neurotic,’ and ‘Why is she incapable of keeping track of her menstrual cycle?’ during the course of our time together.
I only ask one thing of you: that you suspend all judgement from here on out. I’m going to take you deep; we’re now explorers on a quest to find out how the hot, ridiculous mess that is Em Rusciano came to be that way. I also promise that is the only time I will refer to myself in the third person.
First an explanation of the title I’ve chosen for this book. I’ve been a try hard since the age of two. I attempted to give up being a try hard during the nineties, when it was cool to look like you’d slept in your clothes for a week, however I relapsed at the age of seventeen upon meeting the head of my gay mafia, Lyndon. It should be noted that only in Australia is ‘trying hard’ considered a derogatory and unappealing personality trait. In America they have parades for people who try hard. They give out medals and celebrate public holidays for humans who put maximum effort into everything they do. Here it makes you a loser, a tall poppy, someone who must be cut down and put back in their place. Remember the inspirational story of Kurt Fearnley? The Australian paralympian who crawled the treacherous 96-kilometre Kokoda Track? I bet – sitting in a pub somewhere in Australia – a group of blokes caught that story on the news and one of them probably shouted, ‘Bloody try hard.’ Yes, he did, fictional group of blokes. YES HE DID! What a champion.
I wonder why the act of putting in effort makes some people nervous? Just being me is an effort, can you even begin to imagine? I must try hard, at everything!
Of course, there are two types of try hards. One puts in contrived effort in an attempt to be something they’re not and the other fronts up to everything, wanting to give it a red hot crack, with all that they’ve got. I’m only dealing with the latter. In my adult life, the trying hard has not lessened. If anything, it’s increased, so I’ve decided to try and reclaim the term and make it a positive thing.
Writing and finishing this book was an enormous milestone for me for the following reason: when I was eleven I was asked to stand up in front of my class and spell the word Australia. You need to know that even now, I struggle to write my own name correctly; that part of my brain is missing, the spelling part. Obviously, I shat on the honour of my country’s name and misspelled it in front of thirty-two other children. From memory I think I threw a Z in there for some inexplicable reason. After my classmates had finished laughing hysterically, my teacher then openly mocked me and said, among other unkind things, that I should know how to spell the name of the place where I live. I remember the sting of my eyes filling with hot rage tears and desperately hoping that the floor would open up and swallow me whole. It was one of my darkest hours. My teacher wasn’t finished with me, she then took me aside after class and told me that my writing and spelling needed work, that I was on the cusp of high school and while obviously I would never be a writer, I did need to know how to spell and scribe simple words so that I could make something of myself. Remember, this was the late eighties – teachers could still tell you the painful truth without consequence.
Not to be too dramatic about it, but that teacher crushed me, she stomped her sensible shoes all over my creative spirit. The truth is, up until that point I’d been an avid storyteller. It hadn’t occurred to me that how words were arranged and looked mattered. I just put them together in a way that worked for me and seemed to entertain my parents when they read them. My bedroom was full of notebooks filled with the wild tales I’d make up instead of doing actual school work. I also loved reading and dreamed of someday being just like Judy Blume, Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl.
But I stopped inventing stories after that incident.
It took many, many years for me to share my writing again. In fact, it wasn’t until Twitter came around, and the editor of the website Mamamia, Mia Freedman, told me she thought I should start writing articles. She said that she loved the way I put words together in my tweets and that I should have a crack at a putting a few more words together in the form of an article. This made my heart soar – could I be a writer again? Soon, though, the insecurities of my youth came back to haunt me. No, I probably couldn’t, as I sometimes had to draw pictures of words to be able to spell them. I couldn’t possibly do this professionally, I desperately wanted to but no. The public would surely think me a serial killer upon reading my strangely constructed sentences. When I explained the whole spelling/grammar situation to Mia, she said she had magic wizards to fix the mistakes before my columns were unleashed on the world and, well, that was that!
Now, here I bloody am! Writing! An entire book! I’ve gone and done this thing, I wrote every word, not a ghost writer in sight. Even though I like the sound of having a ghost write my book. But you know, that’s not what that means, though rest assured, if it was, I would’ve been all up in that situation.
Coming up next we have the foreword written by my best friend in the whole world, Michael Lucas. We’ve known each other since we were eleven, we met at the infectious diseases hospital where our mothers worked at. He and I are each halves of the same person, I firmly believe that. The main difference being that he’s an actual writer. I mean, he studied it and knows the correct placement of a semi-colon and wouldn’t be caught dead using a double negative. He writes TV shows like Offspring, Party Tricks and Wentworth. Enjoy the next few pages for you are in the hands of the master.
This is one of the best things I’ve ever made that isn’t alive. I’m proud of it.
I hope you love it sick.
Your pal,
Em