Self-Care
Will be published approx. on 19. March 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
224 pages
978-1-77196-624-5 (ISBN)
Description
A Globe and Mail Fall Book of 2025
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
Praise for Self Care"Smith's bleak, horny comedy holds up a funhouse mirror to an aspect of the human condition that feels unique but has always endured: What do we owe others, and why is there something so funny in the tragedy of our constant failure to connect? While there are no satisfying answers provided in Smith's novel (nor in any novel), there is an undeniably stylish brutality to his portrait of desperately lonely urbanites; when it hits you, you just might laugh."
-Emily M. Keeler, Globe and Mail
"More than 30 years after he started chronicling the sexual habits and proclivities of young urban professionals in his debut, How Insensitive, Smith is still at it in this story of a female journalist whose relationship with a man she's ostensibly interviewing for an article on incel culture starts crossing into risky sexual and emotional territory."
-Emily Donaldson, Globe and Mail
"Provocative . . . Daryn is a person as well as a possible woman-hater. Smith says getting to know both of these separate personalities to see what's underneath might be worth a shot."
-Sam Franzini, Our Culture Mag
"Smith's writing is at its best when he's skewering the often performative nature of sex, dating, and politics, as well as the solipsistic delusion of 21st-century life. [Self Care is] an uncomfortable, disturbing, and timely examination of relationships between men and women."
-Kirkus Reviews
"A searing indictment of shallow, self-obsessed online culture and the deep disconnects in society, Canadian writer Smith's latest examines trauma and tragedy and delves into the difference between performing care and actually caring."
-Booklist
"Smith often accurately and anthropologically puts his finger directly on the throbbing purple bruise of modern discontent, disaffection and alienation . . . Self Care isn't just poking fun. It is also, in many ways, deeply sympathetic to its characters, who are struggling with a world very different from the ones their parents grew up in . . . With a deft touch and authentic dialogue, Smith explores the slippery notion of sex and attraction among people who are outwardly ambiguous about traditional relationships and who seem averse to exploring grey areas."
-Jill Wilson, Winnipeg Free Press
"Smith is adroitly capturing the volatile, anxiety-ridden world of men and women in their twenties . . . Self Care is a revealing rollercoaster ride, a compassionate yet unflinching window into troubled lives of today's young adults."
-Tim Niedermann, Ottawa Review of Books
"You can always count on Russell Smith for a straightforward technique that hits you in the solar plexus . . . The novel's title proves piercingly ironic: this is a book about people whose absolute inability to care for themselves is the product of social alienation and a world in which everything-from proscribed gender roles to the ravages of unfettered capitalism-is stacked against them. That the only escape from this cycle of despondency appears to be violent is the ultimate indictment in this bleak, acerbic fable of our benighted time."
-Steven W. Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag
"A perverse, bleak, often hilarious Romeo-and-Juliet tale for our cultural moment. Smith renders the self-obsessed urban landscape with absolute precision."
-Mark Kingwell, author of Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations
"A gripping, unforgettable story about a young journalist and her secret incel lover that explodes the fairy tale of the frog prince. It had me sitting on the edge of my seat."
-Susan Swan, author of Big Girls Don't Cry
"A millennial tragedy that is also smart, funny, and mercifully free of piety and exculpation. Self Care is a book and an attitude adjustment that CanLit could really use."
-Timothy Taylor, author of The Rule of Stephens
"With Self Care, Smith writes with the exacting and intimate observation for which he is known and loved, offering an unflinching play-by-play of protagonist Gloria's murky interiority as she navigates an insidious but intimate relationship with incel Daryn. Think sharp psychological realism of Kristen Roupenian's "Cat Person" or Graham and Thorne's Adolescence. Smith's ability to bravely take readers to the very edge of tenderness in the face of danger leaves one with something more profound than a lesson and more encompassing than a fact. Self Care is a story as hard to look at as it is well-observed. It haunted me and I couldn't put it down."
-Aley Waterman, author of Mudflowers
"Consumed this jewel of a novel in a single sitting . . . Upsetting and hilarious by turns, it is a sort of updated comedy of manners, really, about a wellness blogger who dominates an incel. By one of Canada's closest social observers."
-Stephen Marche, author of On Writing and Failure
Praise for Russell Smith
"For me at least, Canada's most fascinating writer, the author whose new books and stories I most eagerly anticipate, whose fiction I approach with a hopeful curiosity."
-Jeet Heer
"Russell Smith is one of the best stylists of my generation. His prose is exact, surprising, and written by a man with a fine ear."
-Andre Alexis, author of Fifteen Dogs
"Smith writes some of the most luminous prose in Canadian fiction . . . He mines and refines the best of what has come before on the way to making it his own."
-Montreal Gazette
"[Confidence is] a poisonously funny portrait of the so-hip-it-hurts fashion, food, and bar scene."
-Maclean's
"Smith . . . is a gifted anthropologist of the urbane. Those gifts are on full display throughout Confidence."
-Globe and Mail
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Emeryville
Canada
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 209 mm
Width: 133 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
290 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-77196-624-5 (9781771966245)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Russell Smith is the author of twelve previous books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation. His fiction has been nominated for every major Canadian award, including the Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Amazon First Novel Award. A journalist and cultural commentator, his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and elsewhere. An acquiring editor at Dundurn Press, Smith lives in Toronto.