Low Road

With the cranky forthrightness of Fran Lebowitz in Pretend It’s a City, the essays in Low Road Forever are self-assured and deeply self-effacing as she exposes the light haze of misogyny that hangs over us all to find what’s funny, what’s true and what needs to be said. In this excerpt from her essay “I Got Ended,” Thorne writes of being “fired”—that is, having her business relationship ended—from a weekly CBC arts gig, after tweeting about a retiring premier’s son’s sex life.

Tara Thorne Nimbus Publishing

If you’ve flipped directly to this essay then you might not know this, but really if you have any idea about me you should know that I do not care about what happens to straight white men. Their time is over. Do I feel bad about what I tweeted, specifically? Absolutely not. If it had been just a random man’s son, no one would have ever cared; if the Liberal toadies had thought it through they would have realized pointing it out only extends its life not just to do harm to me, but also to expand the alleged embarrassment the premier’s son felt—that is, if you believe men can be slut-shamed, which I don’t. Some people pretended to seriously ask what if it were his daughter (it wasn’t), or what if I were a male journalist (I’m not) tweeting about a woman (it was a man), or did I think about his girlfriend at all (I identified her as “my downstairs neighbour” only, no gender, cool assumption). I wanted more for his girlfriend, that was the fucking point!

Do I regret the tweet? Yes and no. Yes, because I knew immediately that a line had been crossed, but I knew it was funny and I wanted the external validation. I regret that I needed that. I regret that it made everyone else I worked with at the time feel like it was necessary to hold meetings to decide whether they could continue working with me. And I regret that I no longer get to speak with the hosts and techs I loved working with, and that we’ll never get a goodbye. Occasionally a random person will recognize me by voice and say something like, “Love listening to you on Thursdays!” and I just let them have it, because they’re clearly not a regular listener and will never know the difference.

I got ended on August 10, 2020. By Labour Day, I had my first feature film fully funded by Telefilm, a podcast with the Halifax

Examiner, and a deal for this book with Nimbus. It turns out the corporation was dark energy holding me back from my destiny and I’d had no idea. I would have stayed on until I aged out, which in CBC time means I would have been on the air into my fifties. “It turns out the corporation was dark energy holding me back from my destiny and I’d had no idea..” It’s certainly not the way I would have chosen to go. I’ve spent many nights falling asleep to my own various quitting fantasies over the years. We’ve all dreamed of standing up and walking out in a big dramatic fashion, a story that becomes company lore or at least a party anecdote, but this was not that. No matter how well things have turned out since, if not for this I never would have quit. They would have had to ask me to leave and they would have been kind about it, some bullshit about budget probably, and I would have had my little goodbye week with a cake and people calling in and we all would have moved on as friends. ■ TARA THORNE has been an arts advocate and journalist in Halifax since 2000. She leads the rock band Dance Movie, hosts “The Tideline” podcast and coordinates the Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival. Her feature debut as a writer and director, Compulsus, is currently on the film-festival circuit.