Review: Someone Who Will Love You In All Your Damaged Glory
"When you're confronted with life you can either be cowardly or you can be brave, but either way you're going to live. So you might as well be brave."
Someone Who Will Love You In All Your Damaged Glory
Raphael Bob-Waksberg
248 pages - 2019 - fiction, short stories
November 19th, 2024 — November 24th, 2024
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
My favorite short story, since I was in tenth grade, is “Orientation” by Daniel Orozco. The premise is that you are starting a job and you’re going through the office orientation with your boss. Simple, right?
But quickly it turns into something more bizarre. The boss mentions to never look one coworker in the eyes, that another will tell you constantly about how you will die, to ignore the tentacles reaching under management’s door. It’s all spoken about with the same blasé tone that a typical orientation would be.
I think it’s spectacular, because it sets up so many rules of the universe so quickly. It brings us into the space, too, not just as readers, but as participants, because they’re addressing “you” through the story. It’s funny and creepy and completely weird, and I love it.
I have not found many stories that come very close to giving me those same feelings that I have about “Orientation”, but I think Bob-Waksberg came incredibly close in a good portion of the stories within this collection. All of them are weird, that is true, and I say that as the highest compliment. But he also has a brilliant way of building out a world.
I added this book to my list because I loved BoJack Horseman, and Bob-Waksberg is most known for his extensive work on that series. The humor shines through in both works. I think I pictured about half of the stories I read as being drawn in that archetypal BoJack style.
But it is also remarkably different from the humor of BoJack at times, for the better. Bob-Waksberg seems like he had a great deal of fun writing these stories, which is a wonderful thing to think while you’re reading. I could tell that he really put a lot of heart and joy into what he was creating.
My favorite of the stories in this collection is hard to pick, but I quite enjoyed “A Most Blessed and Auspicious Occasion”, in which the narrator and his fiancée have to plan a wedding. It starts by sayin that if you ever want to hear people give you opinions on the “right way to have a wedding”, tell them that you’re planning a wedding. Simple enough.
The end of the first page (at least in my copy) mentions the need for candles, because otherwise “how will the half-blind love-demon transcribe your names in the Book of Eternal Devotion?”
It continues this way through the story—we learn that he has to purchase a giant metal egg for his fiancée, there’s the Dance of the Cuckolded Woodland Sprite, and people are quite up-in-arms learning that they aren’t planning on sacrificing any goats to the Stone God at their ceremony, despite the narrator’s brother being in training to be a professional slaughterer. They might not even have a Shrieking Chorus.
I enjoyed it so much because we are brought into the world and told the rules. We are “in” on the joke right away; there’s no explaining. We’re treated like members of the family, who have every right to be nervous that no goats will be sacrificed.
He also has a way of ending these ridiculous romps with one of the most heart-wrenching paragraphs or sentences you’ve ever read. The quote in the subtitle of this post comes from a story about a band who becomes a group of superheroes after one of the bandmates makes some bracelets, but they have to be blackout drunk to be able to use their superhero powers. It leads to fighting and breakups and death, and ends with a reflection on how death and life are both going to happen, no matter what we do, so we can choose cowardice or bravery. Super deep for something about drunk superheroes.
There are quite a few stories about breakups, in many different forms, but particularly ones where the main character is not doing very well and their ex-lover is doing spectacularly. Naturally, those come with a certain level of sadness and wisdom.
In the acknowledgments of the book, Bob-Waksberg thanks his wife last, saying:
About half of these stories are from before I met her and half since, and I’m convinced if you lined them all up in the order they were written, you could pinpoint the moment where my heart became whole.
I think it’s true, too—you can tell in the stories when he was writing from a place of genuine heartbreak, and when he was feeling more lifted up than put down. I think he gets the balance of these things just right, too. You never feel like you’re spending too long in one feeling.
If you’re a fan of a little bit of absurdism masking profound truths about the world, big and small, I think you should check out these stories. He is a good writer with a specific voice and a wonderful way of looking at the world around him.
Total pages read so far, 2024: 17,254
Total books read so far, 2024: 47
Next book: The Sandman, Volume 2 by Neil Gaiman