Finished on 11.9.25

This book rules. It made me laugh, it made me cringe (a lot)—it’s so over the top but then so, so relatable in parts. I love that it’s told in short stories, as I truly think any one of them would have been unbearable at book length. I appreciated the little connections between each story, and I really thought the book rejection letter at the end tied it all together really nicely, as it voiced so many of the thoughts I was having as I read. The book is very Extremely Online in a way that is not annoying to me, but perhaps could be to other people. It was a very quick read and I’ve requested his other book from the library.

Click here to buy this book on Bookshop.org

My favorite quotes:

“Anyway, he doesn’t want pity; he wants not to need it.”

“Love is not an accomplishment, yet to lack it still somehow feels like failure.”

“He’s never changed in one before, not even in gym class, where he used to change in the bathroom, one of many reasons he’d gotten bullied, though it was for being Asian, not gay, that they’d called him gay.”

“Noah makes active listening sounds at all the wrong moments, which only emphasizes how actively he is not listening.”

“She said a few sort of negative things about this, so after I set her straight on the ‘No Bummers’ policy in my house, I reminded her that if we were gonna pursue our goals we had to keep focused on the long term.” (The “no bummers” policy is so, so real—it’s one of the tell-tale signs of a man who doesn’t want a real relationship, since real relationships by definition require being willing to engage with a range of emotions.)

“Also, the posts that were attributed to me were taken completely out of context—for instance, when I posited that heaux aren’t always best suited for organization tasks, I literally just meant it on the level of spatial cognition! Look up ‘sex differences in chronometric mental rotation study’ for yourself! Either you believe in science or you don’t!”

“I’d made a special request through Student Housing to live in the queer-friendly vegetarian-friendly 420-friendly co-op, and the people there were … friendly. One of those houses where you just know everyone is walking around with the most devil-may-care pubes.”

“For all people claim to hate being stereotyped, they love doing it to themselves, even better when someone they admire does it to them, they’re dying to be issued their personhood so they can pursue it without hesitation, hence astrology and personality quizzes.”

“You might assume I’m the kind of loser who only has online friends—wrong! I have no friends.”

“You’ve tried worms and string, bow and arrow, a bamboo spear, a two-hundred-dollar carbon fiber rod, dragnets, dynamite, and your bare hands. You can’t even catch a break. Every lure, every lake, no luck. There’s so many of them, slick, fat, and iridescent, and you are starving. But what matters least is what the fisherman wants.”