Self Care

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.