Description
An electric examination of women and men, sex and love, self-loathing and twenty-first century loneliness.
Between Daily Self Care, the weekly column she writes for the website The Hype Report, and managing her mood stabilizers, Gloria navigates her quasi-relationship with Florian and commiserates with Isabel, her best friend, about dating apps and dick pics, married men and questionable boundaries. But when she makes a glib pass at Daryn, a stranger wearing a sad face pin on a subway platform crowded with young male protestors leaving an anti-immigration rally, and finds him waiting for her outside her health club the next day, curiosity leads her not to consider a restraining order, but to talk to him.
Claiming she wants to interview him for an article she’s writing on the incel movement, Gloria meets Daryn for coffee and soon invites him back to her apartment—where his strange earnestness and painfully restrained desire inspire her to dominate him sexually. As their sexual relationship intensifies, so does their emotional connection, and Gloria can’t shake her sense that she’s headed in a dangerous direction. An electric examination of women and men, sex and love, self-loathing and twenty-first century loneliness, Self Care is a devastating novel about all the ways we try to cope—with ourselves, and with each other.
Praise for Self Care
“A perverse, bleak, often hilarious Romeo-and-Juliet tale for our cultural moment. Smith renders the self-obsessed urban landscape with absolute precision.”
—Mark Kingwell, author of Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations
“A gripping, unforgettable story about a young journalist and her secret incel lover that explodes the fairy tale of the frog prince. It had me sitting on the edge of my seat.”
—Susan Swan, author of Big Girls Don’t Cry
“A millennial tragedy that is also smart, funny, and mercifully free of piety and exculpation. Self Care is a book and an attitude adjustment that CanLit could really use.”
—Timothy Taylor, author of The Rule of Stephens
Praise for Russell Smith
“For me at least, Canada’s most fascinating writer, the author whose new books and stories I most eagerly anticipate, whose fiction I approach with a hopeful curiosity.”
—Jeet Heer
“Russell Smith is one of the best stylists of my generation. His prose is exact, surprising, and written by a man with a fine ear.”
—Andre Alexis, author of Fifteen Dogs
“Smith writes some of the most luminous prose in Canadian fiction . . . He mines and refines the best of what has come before on the way to making it his own.”
—Montreal Gazette
“[Confidence is] a poisonously funny portrait of the so-hip-it-hurts fashion, food, and bar scene.”
—Maclean’s
“Smith . . . is a gifted anthropologist of the urbane. Those gifts are on full display throughout Confidence.”
—Globe and Mail
