Help support our writers and keep our site ad-free. I am staggeringly, disappointingly, astronomically normal and boring. I am no great beauty. In my civilian clothes, I would not turn heads on the street. I was born in Hamilton to a firefighter and an administrative assistant twenty-five years ago. I had an uneventful aughts adolescence in the suburbs of Toronto. At eighteen, I became a nude model at McMaster University. My first modeling class was utterly ridiculous.
The students were instructed to paint a figure using anything except a paintbrush. I stripped out of my clothes and into a thrift store bathrobe and took my place in front of the expectant artists.
The woman I was modeling with was in her late forties and had frizzy, dark brown hair. This is Southern Ontario. In four hours, I had made eighty dollars. To a university student, that is winning the goddamn lottery. I was hooked. All I had done was take my clothes off and stay very, very still and someone had paid me for it.
I wished I had started earlier. When I lived in the suburbs as a teenager, all I dreamed about was escape. Something inside me leapt when I sat in the theatre and watched American Beauty for the first time at thirteen and realized I was not alone when I saw the suburbs as a prison. I fought tooth and nail not to go to McMaster in Hamilton.
I was trapped in Ontario forever. My first day on campus I promised I would get out of there as a fast as I could. I worked year round to finish my degrees early and go to grad school. I was going to be a Literature professor and impart wisdom to the unlearned masses and be published and be a cause celebre of the Canadian literary scene, which of course is what every little girl dreams of.
