Weston’s memoir a riveting, emotional romp

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/12/2022 (1395 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Roz Weston, best known for his work on the nightly TV show, Entertainment Tonight Canada, and a Toronto morning radio show called The Roz and Mocha Show, has written a refreshingly candid memoir. A Little Bit Broken is all about his youth, his career and his love life, leading up to his meeting Katherine, who is “all the things I’m not, and everything I hope to be.”

In straightforward language liberally spiked with the two most common four-letter words, Weston, now 48, tells all about his life so far — the people he has met, the places he has been — while presenting incisive looks at his own behaviour and thoughts. He says he does not read books, but he certainly has a knack for offering both insight and amusement.

He admires his older brother. “Rich is the smartest person I’ve ever met,” he writes. “It took me a lot of years to realize that I wasn’t smart. Like not at all. I pretty much cruised through school riding on charm, charisma, and really great hair.”

Roz loves his parents, too, and has good things to say about them throughout the book. “There’s nothing my dad loved more than being a dad, and… he was goddam good at it.”

They lived in the town of Acton, Ont., not far from Toronto. Early on, Roz realized he had Tourette syndrome — facial twitches and tics he became good at hiding. He grew tall — he was over six feet in Grade 8 — and that was no doubt a factor in his attracting girls older than he was. He was a heavy smoker. He got into the habit of burning himself — slipping a red-hot sewing needle under his toenail, for example — and it became an addiction. “Burning was never a way to cope with emotions,” he says. “It was a way to feel them.”

Weston’s time at school was unspectacular. “My high school grades left me with very few college options,” he writes. “Actually, they left me with just one option: the radio broadcasting program at Humber College, about a forty-minute drive from [Acton].”

He moved into the Humber dorm and soon became astute at radio work — at a local rock station every Saturday night — as well as meeting older women for one-night stands. He was determined to get an internship in New York on The Howard Stern Show, and his explanation of how that actually came about is hilarious. Among other things, it involved a letter that was forged by his mother, whose office work made her an expert at writing resumés.

The Stern experience resulted in his not completing his program at Humber. And it made it easy to get interviews for the jobs he wanted as he settled back in Toronto.

“I’ve worked two jobs at the same time since I was twenty,” Weston writes. He became used to sleeping for only four hours a night. One serious consequence of this was the collapsing of both lungs, requiring him to have medical attention for a lengthy period.

In relationships, he made a mistake that he repeated for years — he became the person the other person saw or wanted him to be. He met an actress, Summer, whom he really liked but, he recalls, “I never really opened up properly or let Summer see any of the things I had stacked away… I could have been honest with her, but I wasn’t. I could have told her how afraid I was, but I didn’t. So I married one of her friends instead.”

And he did — a woman he calls Taylor. But that didn’t last, and his narrative becomes dominated by his heartache at dealing with his dad’s fatal illness.

By 2009, he was immersed in ET Canada and involved with Katherine — they were expecting a baby. That relationship has matured; the baby is a girl, Roxy, now 12. (Roz has given most of the people in his book pseudonyms, but not Katherine or Roxy.)

Weston has said publicly that his memoir is not just a book, it’s a marriage proposal. Now departed from ET Canada after 17 years, he captured Katherine’s first reading of the key last chapter on film and made it available online (see wfp.to/rozweston).

Winnipeg writer Dave Williamson’s latest short story, Reading on an Airplane, is in the Fall 2022 edition of Prairie Fire magazine.