The realistic nature of his story, stumbling over what happened when, looping back and forth in time to pick up dropped threads, contributes to its impact: you could be in a New York bar, lending a sympathetic ear to a self-pitying tale of woe. Fairly predictable and anticlimactic story of a sociopath who used to break women’s hearts for pleasure during alcohol. As it is, the reader becomes trapped inside the mind of a howling paranoid. Diary of an Oxygen Thief is an honest, hilarious, and heartrending novel, but above all, a very realistic account of what we do to each other and what we allow to have done to us. A fiction would have more logic, more shape the wrongs done to Mr Anonymous would be more substantial and his outrage more proportionate.
However, if one chooses to read it as an unfiltered account of real events, the strangely feverish splurge of the narrative makes more sense. One can never know to what extent this first-person account of a broken-hearted advertising creative who once “liked hurting girls” before the tables were turned on him is autobiographical, and there’s a strong argument for it not mattering. Since the author of this short, anguished novel first self-published it in 2006, it has assumed cult status, with no shortage of readers testifying to its powerful effect.
