Self Care

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By (author): Russell Smith

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.

AUTHOR

Russell Smith

Russell Smith is one of Canada’s funniest and nastiest writers. His previous novels, including How Insensitive and Girl Crazy, are records of urban frenzy and exciting underworlds. His newest book, Confidence, was nominated for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize as well as the 2015 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. He writes a provocative weekly column on the arts in the national Globe and Mail, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Guelph. Russell Smith lives and writes in Toronto.

Reviews

Praise forSelf Care

Smiths writing is at its best when hes skewering the often performative nature of sex dating and politics as well as the solipsistic delusion of 21stcentury lifeSelf Careis an uncomfortable disturbing and timely examination of relationships between men and women

Kirkus Reviews

A perverse bleak often hilarious RomeoandJuliet tale for our cultural moment Smith renders the selfobsessed urban landscape with absolute precision

Mark Kingwell author ofQuestion 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 ofBig Girls Dont Cry

A millennial tragedy that is also smart funny and mercifully free of piety and exculpationSelf Careis a book and an attitude adjustment that CanLit could really use

Timothy Taylor author ofThe Rule of Stephens

With Self CareSmith writes with the exacting and intimate observation for which he is known and loved offering an unflinching playbyplay of protagonist Glorias murky interiority as she navigates an insidious but intimate relationship with incel Daryn Think sharp psychological realism of Kristen Roupenians Cat Person or Graham and ThornesAdolescenceSmiths 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 wellobserved It haunted me and I couldnt put it down

Aley Waterman author ofMudflowers

Praise for Russell Smith

For me at least Canadas 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 ofFifteen 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

Confidenceis a poisonously funny portrait of the sohipithurts fashion food and bar scene

Macleans

Smith is a gifted anthropologist of the urbane Those gifts are on full display throughoutConfidence

Globe and Mail