The Naked Truth Takes the Nation

Okay that’s just a slight over-statement! But so far I’ve been on radio from Halifax to Chatham, from Wingham to St. Catharines.  And today, it’s CFRB 1010 Toronto. 

I’m so looking forward to spending some on-air time with Ted Woloshyn at CFRB.  Although we never knew each other really well, we were colleagues back at ‘RB in the (gulp) early 1990’s.  Ted, of course, took over the morning show reins from Wally Crouter and hosted for 10 years.  He writes TV comedy and newspaper columns and hosts radio on the weekends.

I’m due to be on at 11:30 this morning.  Better get in gear, huh?

Meanwhile, here is the first review of the book.  I’m still gobsmacked by it.  Dan Brown is a treasured friend but he’s also the kind of guy who would give it to me straight. After all, a pro doesn’t mess with their reputation as a journalist just to please a friend.  So here is what he wrote on the London Free Press website titled Coming of Age With No Clothes On.

The Naked Truth is one woman’s coming-of-age tale.

The new e-book describes how an unsure teen from small-town Ontario discovers herself in the summer of 1980 — by working and living at a nudist colony near Hamilton.

The woman is Lisa Brandt. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you hear her on London’s Free FM, where she works as the morning newscaster (full disclosure: She’s a friend).

Like Brandt herself, The Naked Truth is both funny and wise. As you might expect from an author who’s a veteran broadcaster, the tone is conversational: “I had a love-hate relationship with my body, except without the love part,” she recalls in the first of 25 readable chapters.

Of a naïve co-worker, she says “She had the wide-eyed look of someone who was raised in a protected environment, like veal.” Nice one.

Brandt spares no detail in her narrative. Breasts heave, penises flip from side to side and sweaty butt cheeks come to rest on the resort’s furniture, always separated by a thin layer of cotton in the form of omnipresent towels.

I have a pretty high gross-out threshold, so there was only one passage in The Naked Truth that made my face go white. I won’t give it away; let’s just say Brandt knows how to bring a chapter to an end with a well-thrown curveball.

What I loved about this e-book is that Brandt is at her best when she describes conflicting feelings. Each one of us is a bundle of contradictions, but I’ve encountered only one other writer who is this good at capturing and illuminating the ambivalence of human beings, John Fante.

One of the subplots is how an older, posh resident of the Four Seasons Nature Resort takes an interest in the young Brandt while she cleans his room.

As the seduction unfolds, she wrestles with her emotions. She’s intrigued, attracted, tempted . . . but ultimately repulsed: “I was flattered and quite liked the version of me reflected in his eyes, but I worried that in trying to live up to that image I’d morph into something I couldn’t sustain. I also worried that I worried too much.”

And although she’s a fish out of water because she’s the only employee of the resort who won’t go nude, Brandt grows to be a partial defender of the Four Seasons, a society unto itself.

What’s also insightful about The Naked Truth is its anthropological aspect. Working at the Four Seasons was Brandt’s first experience of living away from home, so in her mind the camp becomes a lab for her to observe and make conclusions about human nature.

She finds, for example, that despite all campers having the same uniform — no clothes — they still find ways to project their status. “Even nudists have a class structure,” she says.

She also observes older swingers trying to impress younger women by trying to act as cool as John Travolta’s character in the film Saturday Night Fever: “They were poor imitators of a style that never existed and if it had would not have been sexy or youthful.”

Having read Brandt’s first book, Celebrity Tantrums, in which she dissected pop culture, her keen eye for human behaviour comes as no surprise.

We all have a first job that sticks with us for the rest of our lives. Her experience at the nudist colony makes a deep impression on Brandt. “Working at Four Seasons offered me a kind of accelerated education I wouldn’t have received elsewhere,” she concludes, and in a strange way it prepares her for post-secondary studies at Niagara College training for a career in radio.

At its heart, The Naked Truth is about how one future radio announcer found her footing. But the lessons are universal and timeless.

The Naked Truth is available for Kobo or Kindle ($2.99) and as a PDF ($3.99). Visitlisabrandt.ca for details on how to download your own copy.

dan.brown@sunmedia.ca

1 thought on “The Naked Truth Takes the Nation”

Comments are closed.