Boring Narcissist Diaries
Worst Boyfriend Ever and what stalling out looks like in autofiction.
Sometime around the Mia Farrow accusations against Woody Allen, I began to formulate a personal framework for enjoying art created by fallible humans. Nothing so lofty as a philosophy for separating the art from the artist, just a quick gut check for myself. If the artist’s conduct is all that I can think of when I’m consuming their art, it interferes with my enjoyment and I stop engaging with it. If I’m able to enjoy the art in spite of the artist’s real life bad behavior, then I let myself enjoy it.
Kanye West fails this test for me. As a Chicagoan, I have a nostalgic attachment to some of his music, particularly the song “Homecoming.” But for the last several years, anytime I hear his music I just think of him fangirling over Adolf Hitler and it ruins the experience for me. No more Kanye on my Spotify.
Led Zeppelin, on the other hand, passes. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant held fourteen-year-old groupies hostage in their hotel rooms for sex in the 1970s. Maybe this “should” bother me more, but I don’t think about it when I listen to Physical Graffiti, so I keep Led Zeppelin on my playlists. Ditto the works of noted antisemite T.S. Eliot, pro-pederastic Allen Ginsberg, and wife-killer William S. Burroughs. Literature is filled with men of questionable morals. Why should I let some asshole’s poor choices prevent me from appreciating good art?
All this to say, I am not squeamish about the moral conduct of artists.
There is some debate over how much of the blog known as Worst Boyfriend Ever is “real.” The anonymous author, a twenty-six-year-old white man with an Asian fetish and crippling sex addiction, purportedly started the blog to record his exploits as he compulsively cheated on his girlfriend with a string of emotionally damaged young Asian women, prostitutes, and, on a few occasions, teenagers. Eventually, his girlfriend discovered his infidelity and Worst Boyfriend Ever took the show on the road, financing a van to roam the country, leeching off of his readers and chasing pussy in every state. I’m inclined to mostly take it at face value as a lightly fictionalized sex diary.
Assuming that the thoughts, feelings, and events depicted are at least partly based in reality, it’s fair to say that the anonymous author is a reprehensible person, and knows it, and knows it. I find his misogyny, racism, and antisemitism repugnant just on a general baseline level, and for me, as an Asian American woman, the dehumanizing nature of his Asian fetishism is particularly personally repulsive.
That being said, he presents a potentially interesting character who could be fruitful ground to explore in the context of the context of fiction. When I saw that the eponymous Worst Boyfriend Ever was working on a book, I was curious about what kind of novel a mind like that would compose. Perhaps someone who confessed all kinds of socially verboten thoughts and actions to hundreds of readers online, a slimy loser who has rejected and been rejected by polite society, would be in a position to create interesting, surprising art. After all, Charles Bukowski exists. I have an affection for the figure of the literary dirty old man.
Unfortunately, Worst Boyfriend Ever the book fails wholly as art. The first thing you need to know about it is that it is not really a novel. It is not a new piece of prose constructed with a plot and scenes and character development. It isn’t even a piece of literature that aspires to subvert the usual characteristics of the novel. Rather, it is a series of previously-published Substack posts stitched together with a handful of Notes app diary entries. They are unedited, riddled with typos and inconsistent capitalization and punctuation.
As a book, it is completely lacking in ambition, except, perhaps, the sleazy urge to milk a few dollars from the blog’s credulous, salivating audience of incels, anti-woke Boomers, and disgusted normie rubberneckers. To them I implore: do not spend your $12 on this book. Just read the blog, if you must. The character presented in Worst Boyfriend Ever is, amid all his other failings, astounding lazy. He can’t hold a job, maintain a human relationship, or hold himself to any standard of discipline. It’s disappointing but not surprising to find this same laziness applied to the text itself.
I don’t object to the epistolary format in general. There are many fine novels that take the form of diary entries by disillusioned young men. Worst Boyfriend Ever is not one of them. I recommend Dangling Man by Saul Bellow, Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky, or The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke, as a starting point to explore this genre. These men share uncomfortable, ugly truths about modernity and masculinity. They are subtle, lyrical, philosophical, at times coarse and spirited. They are worth your time.
Worst Boyfriend Ever, in contrast, has no respect for your time, intelligence, or sense of beauty. The narrator positions himself as a bold truth-teller, but the “truths” are limp, old news, yesterday’s edgelord fixations, and he does nothing to complicate them. More egregiously, the writing is dull, lifeless, and sloppy.
There are interesting ways to explore the tension between biological desire and social norms. Lolita is the canonical example, a beautiful and devastating portrait of obsession. The narrator of Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth is plagued by incessant sexual urges; the prose is bold and crude where Nabokov is delicate and deft. Both books were controversial, hated, banned; yet both have clear artistic ambitions and aesthetic value. These qualities are entirely lacking in Worst Boyfriend Ever.
Take, for example, the diary entry on the occasion of the narrator’s twenty-fifth birthday:
Had my 25th birthday at the Bowling Alley last night. Got drunk enough to kind of enjoy it. Except I stared for too long at too many hot teenaged girls.
I’m comfortable enough here in my notes now to call them that: hot, teenaged girls.
You can’t tell anybody, not even your closest friends, because you never know who’s a fucking snitch. Who’s not yet honest enough with themselves to realize what their body actually wants: the bodies of teenaged girls. Not all of them, obviously. Just the particularly well-developed.
This is why I could never work at a high school. This is why straight men who are physically-self-aware can never do that. This is why our teenaged population is now being raised primarily by women and faggots. (57)
There is no artistry here. Unfiltered Notes app confessions with a few slurs sprinkled in do not amount to literature. It almost feels like the author, who is by his own admission terrified of criticism, has piled on the transgression and repulsiveness as a shield, so he can claim prudishness or sexual frustration of anyone who points out that the emperor has no clothes and his work is bad.
The narrator has limited capacity for introspection, which is never a good sign for autofiction. There was one moment, early in the book, where I detected some real feeling, and I wondered if WBE might actually surprise me. The narrator describes ghosting a girlfriend:
She was on antidepressants and completely dependent on me. She had just helped me move from Los Angeles to Seattle, box by heavy box.
I wasn’t planning on doing it this way. I was struggling to think of responses to her texts, and then struggling to think of justifications for why I haven’t been responding, then losing the willpower to do even that… well, you may have been in this situation before. Now it’s been too long and it’s too awkward to respond, so you just don’t.
And with most people, this would’ve been it. But this is a girl I’ve been dating for 6 months, pictures posted and families met and everything. So from October to November ‘21 and even into the new year, I received a string of extremely distressing messages which I do not currently have the guts to revisit—now or at any future point in my life. It would be like watching a really sad movie that you directed, except the characters really experienced all the feelings you’re imagining and it’s all because of you. (18-19)
There is a clumsy sort of insight in those final lines that might resonate if you’ve ever treated someone in your life very poorly, if you’ve ever hated yourself for being a fuck-up and a disappointment, if you’ve ever weaponized your own self-loathing and punished the people who love you for no good reason. The self-hatred becomes its own attraction, something to luxuriate in. You begin to revel in your own wretchedness. Unfortunately, that brief flash of painful clarity was not to be repeated in the book. There is bravado masquerading as desperation, and vice versa, but there is no more grace.
The problem is that Worst Boyfriend Ever is trying to write from within the prison of his depravity. He has no perspective because he is still that disappointing fuck-up. According to his blog, he is currently living in a van, driven by the single-minded pursuit of unprotected sex with emotionally unstable, very young Asian women, dodging traffic tickets, boyfriends, and fathers.
Denis Johnson the addict could not write Jesus’ Son. Only Denis Johnson the recovering addict could write Jesus’ Son. David Foster Wallace needed recovery to write Infinite Jest. Worst Boyfriend Ever has written the only thing he is capable of writing: a flaccid, uninspiring fuckboy sex diary. There is no ironic distance between the narrator and himself. He actually believes that he has won over the massage parlor prostitute with his gas station Viagra, that she can’t wait to have sex with him again. An initial glance at his writing is something of an optical illusion, where one thinks an absurdly uninsightful character has been crafted with detached awareness, but the reality is unfortunately exactly the opposite.
In part because he has not grown as a person, he fails as a writer. He hides behind faux-introspection and flimsy self-awareness, defensively proclaiming his own moral failures and a “sensitivity” that is really just low openness born of shame. In doing so, he forecloses on the potential to achieve actual emotional or psychological depth in his writing.
It’s no surprise, then, that the author is drawn to the earliest work of David Foster Wallace. One phrase repeated a few times throughout the strung-together blog posts that comprise the book is “troubled little soldier,” drawn from Wallace’s first published story, “The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing (1984).” The story is interesting in the way that the early work of all great writers is interesting, but it is unmistakably juvenilia.
Unlike Wallace, this debut ‘novel’ by Worst Boyfriend Ever does not show early promise. I see no potential for his growth as an artist because he lacks an innate facility with and appreciation for language that are prerequisites for good writing. The alleged misconduct of the author doesn’t interfere with my enjoyment of his work because his work is not enjoyable even on pure aesthetic or human-car-crash-watching grounds.
Worst Boyfriend Ever’s only talent—and it is a considerable one—is for pissing people off on Substack. In an algorithmic environment where any attention is rewarded, this circumstance may fool onlookers or even the author himself into thinking he is meaningfully popular. Already, though, the thinness of the act is apparent, and Worst Boyfriend Ever seems to be careening toward legitimately dangerous stunts like deliberately courting legal action just to chase the high of engagement. One can imagine that an embarrassed retirement from online life might actually be the best possible outcome for such a “sensitive young man,” not because of any cancellation but because chasing this pathetic mirage of successful authorhood will only bring him more pain.
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