Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory
by Raphael Bob-Waksberg · 2019
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 4.2/5
Bob-Waksberg's absurdist short stories collapse the distance between the fantastical and the achingly intimate, though inconsistent execution prevents the collection from reaching its full potential.
Bob-Waksberg's debut collection finds genuine feeling beneath absurdist surfaces, though inconsistency keeps it from greatness.
This is a writer learning to translate the sensibility that made BoJack Horseman so vital—the marriage of comedic grotesquerie and emotional precision—into the shorter form, with mixed but promising results. The collection's best stories justify the book's existence; its weaker ones suggest Bob-Waksberg still needs to discover what fiction can do that television cannot.
Bob-Waksberg arrives at the short story already fluent in a particular kind of comedy: the extended metaphor that begins as absurdist flourish and ends as genuine wound. His stories about love—romantic, familial, platonic, imaginary—use fantastical premises not as escape but as precision instruments for emotional examination. A woman dates a man made of bees; a couple argues through a series of quatrains; a person falls in love with someone they haven't met. In each case, the formal strangeness serves the emotional truth rather than obscuring it, which is harder than it sounds.
The collection's thematic coherence is real, though not always visible at first glance. What unifies these eighteen stories is not love itself but the particular loneliness of contemporary attachment—the ways we fail to communicate what matters most, the gap between what we feel and what we can articulate, the desperate mathematics of trying to be known. Bob-Waksberg understands that love is not the opposite of loneliness but sometimes its most acute expression. This recognition gives the collection its spine and prevents it from reading as mere clever variation.
His formal experimentation deserves credit. The quatrain story mentioned above works partly because the constraint forces genuine compression; the absurdist stories succeed because their premises are never mere gimmicks but extensions of emotional logic. When Bob-Waksberg allows himself to play with structure—dialogue-only stories, fragmented narratives, shifts in perspective—the collection feels alive and generative. One senses a writer discovering what he can do in prose that his television work did not permit.
Yet the collection's unevenness is difficult to ignore. Several stories feel undercooked, their absurdist premises not yet ripened into emotional significance; others mistake sentimentality for sentiment, asking us to care about characters before they have been made real. The book's amoral bleakness—which NPR noted as distinguishing Bob-Waksberg from peers like George Saunders—sometimes reads as a default rather than a choice, as if the writer hasn't decided whether his characters deserve our investment. When a story fails here, it fails completely; there is no middle ground between insight and mere cleverness.
What remains clear is that Bob-Waksberg possesses the fundamental skills: an ear for dialogue, an instinct for structure, and a refusal to let emotional honesty become maudlin. Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory is a debut that announces a real writer, one who understands that love stories are really stories about the failure of love, and that sometimes the most honest thing a writer can do is sit with that failure without resolving it. The collection's best moments—and there are several—suggest he will only deepen this gift.
Key Takeaways
- Loneliness in attachment
- Formal experimentation
- Emotional precision
Summary
- A 18-story collection from the creator of BoJack Horseman, exploring love in its many fractured forms through absurdist premises and emotional precision.
- Bob-Waksberg uses extended metaphors and formal experimentation—quatrains, dialogue-only narratives, fragmented structures—to collapse the distance between the fantastical and the intimate.
- Thematic core: the loneliness embedded in contemporary attachment; what remains unsaid between people who claim to love each other.
- The collection's amoral bleakness distinguishes it from similar work, though this sensibility occasionally reads as a stylistic default rather than earned artistic choice.
- Strongest stories demonstrate genuine formal innovation where structure and emotion reinforce each other; weakest feel underdeveloped, mistaking absurdity for substance.
- Bob-Waksberg's dialogue and ear for contemporary speech patterns are reliable strengths; his instinct for narrative compression less consistent.
- Unevenness is the book's primary limitation—it swings between insight and mere cleverness without much middle ground, making some stories difficult to complete.
- A promising literary debut that announces a real writer capable of depth, though the collection suggests he is still discovering what fiction uniquely allows him to say.
Chapter Guide
- Chapter 1: A Most Fortuitous Encounter
- A man meticulously plans his first date, navigating the absurdities of romantic expectations and the anxieties of modern courtship with a nervous, yet hopeful, precision.
- Chapter 2: The Infinite Sadness of the World's Most Beautiful Woman
- A woman's transcendent beauty becomes a burden, isolating her from genuine connection as others project their ideals onto her, rather than seeing her true self.
- Chapter 3: You Are Not a Young Man Anymore
- A protagonist confronts the inevitable march of time and the fading of youth, reflecting on past choices and the elusive nature of fulfillment in middle age.
- Chapter 4: The Universal Heartbreak of Man
- Exploring the shared human experience of loss and disappointment, this story delves into the ways individuals cope with profound emotional pain and the search for meaning in its aftermath.
- Chapter 5: Rufus
- A peculiar narrative unfolds around a character named Rufus, whose eccentricities and unique perspective challenge conventional understanding of identity and belonging.
Read the full review at https://reviewerinsight.com/book/69ed500df2f1713bdeb2cd8d/someone-who-will-love-you-in-all-your-damaged-glory