Self Care - by Russell Smith (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An electric examination of women and men, sex and love, self-loathing and twenty-first century loneliness.

Between writing a weekly column for The Hype Report and managing her mood stabilizers, Gloria navigates a series of quasi-relationships while commiserating with 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 on a subway platform crowded with young anti-immigration protesters, and finds him waiting for her outside her health club a couple of days later, a surprising curiosity leads her not to consider a restraining order, but to talk to him.

Claiming she wants to interview him for an article on the incel movement, Gloria meets Daryn for coffee and soon invites him back to her apartment--where his earnestness and painfully restrained desire inspire her to dominate him sexually. As their physical relationship intensifies, so does their emotional connection, and Gloria can't shake the sense that she's headed in a dangerous direction.

An electric examination of sex and love, self-loathing, and twenty-first century loneliness, Self Care is a devastating novel about women and men, what they want and what they say they want, and the violent tension between the two.

Review Quotes

Praise for Self Care

"Smith's writing is at its best when he's skewering the often performative nature of sex, dating, and politics, as well as the solipsistic delusion of 21st-century life. [Self Care is] an uncomfortable, disturbing, and timely examination of relationships between men and women."
--Kirkus Reviews

"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

"With Self Care, Smith writes with the exacting and intimate observation for which he is known and loved, offering an unflinching play-by-play of protagonist Gloria's murky interiority as she navigates an insidious but intimate relationship with incel Daryn. Think sharp psychological realism of Kristen Roupenian's "Cat Person" or Graham and Thorne's Adolescence. Smith's ability to bravely take readers to the very edge of tenderness in the face of danger leaves one with something more profound than a lesson and more encompassing than a fact. Self Care is a story as hard to look at as it is well-observed. It haunted me and I couldn't put it down."
--Aley Waterman, author of Mudflowers

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

About the Author

Russell Smith is the author of twelve previous books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation. His fiction has been nominated for every major Canadian award, including the Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Amazon First Novel Award. A journalist and cultural commentator, his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and elsewhere. An acquiring editor at Dundurn Press, Smith lives in Toronto.