Worst Boyfriend Ever: a Sensitive Young Man by Worst Boyfriend Ever (2025, Self-Published)

Writing Autofiction Will Ruin Your Life

Have you ever wanted to read the blog of one of the characters in a Bret Easton Ellis novel who isn’t the narrator? One of the attractive, disaffected youths who lounge by the pool and casually get drunk and take pills?

If the answer is yes (and I know it is), then this debut autofiction novel is something you’re going to want to grab.

How much of this book is true and how much is fiction is open to interpretation. It carries the obligatory “All characters depicted are products of the author’s imagination” disclaimer at the start, so it could be entirely fictional, or borderline memoir.

My guess is that it’s somewhere in between. The book itself insists it’s real, in what could be described as a metaphysical way, but either way, you’re not supposed to know.

Our protagonist is a young, successful, handsome “Sensitive Young Man,” hyper self-aware and chronically online. He’s cheating on his girlfriend, excessively, mostly with Asian women. He’s at once comically arrogant and painfully insecure. He’s laying his soul or lack thereof, bare for all of us to gaze upon.

If that doesn’t sound like enough of a story for you, then you’ve failed to grasp what this book actually is. It’s presented as a collection of blog posts, phone app notes, or whatever medium our protagonist happens to use to document his exploits.

He’s painfully aware of his own exploits, how bad they are, and what they’re doing to him. As a nihilist, he simply records them in cutting detail.

I can’t tell you how many sections left me stunned by the brutality of his self-loathing. This is the new generation of autofiction, more heart removed and planted on a spike in the centre of a party than heart on sleeve, and as a result, it’s incredibly compelling to read.

This is distilled Zoomer autofiction, nothing short of glorious. The pace of the stream-of-consciousness prose is breakneck, littered with typos and lowercase i’s; it reads like a hastily sent message from a younger nephew who can’t actually be bothered to talk to you.

All fat is cut away, leaving only the words that express the sentiment as directly as possible.

Unsurprisingly, the book has come under considerable scrutiny online, as people gradually become aware of its true nature, along with that of the blog. To me, this indicates two things.

The first thing is out-and-out anti-male hatred. The protagonist of this book is all of us, led by what’s between our legs in our twenties: lost, reeling, confused, self-medicating, wondering what ratio of beast and what ratio of human we are.

I’ve seen some criticism comparing him to a knock-off Houellebecq or Easton Ellis. The reason we all grew up reading both of them is that they spoke to this beast inside us. It made us feel more human to know that someone out there felt the same way we do, or felt nothing at all in the same way.

This book continues in that tradition. It also draws comparisons to Bukowski, though WBE is less focused on alcohol and less poetic.

The cold, biological view of sex does feel straight out of Houellebecq’s mind, while the detached, stylish chronicling of emotional disintegration owes more to Easton Ellis. Readers of all three will find echoes of their brilliance in the (messy) prose presented here.

I want to quote lines here to illustrate exactly what I’m talking about, but I don’t want to spoil a single thing for potential readers. Although much of this can be read on his blog, experiencing it in paperback form is a delight, and there’s something perversely satisfying about it.

The second thing the attention this book has received told me, confirmed on my first read, is that there is something of undeniable value here. Even the critics, of whom there are many, are fuelling the fire this book has started with their long, elaborate essays rooted in that previously mentioned deep anti-male hatred.

That hatred is fuelled in no small part by how damn likeable and how quickly successful WBE is becoming. At no point did I dislike our narrator, even as he recounted the hideous things he was doing.

He’s too eloquent in expressing himself, and too self-aware to be written off as a blundering fool. I have no doubt this guy is tall, handsome, talented, and funny, and that people respond to him gleefully. But it isn’t enough, it’s never enough. You can be blessed and cursed, as WBE undoubtedly is.

For me, WBE goes straight into the chud-lit canon alongside Mike Ma and Delicious Tacos. He is someone on the outside of the literary industry, though he could just as easily have been on the inside if the whole industry hadn’t been hijacked by certain demographics.

He is impossible to ignore, and once you start reading, it’s impossible to look away. WBE represents all of us at a certain point in our lives. If you were born male, then you’ve had a WBE period, he is all of us and for that reason should be celebrated.

I’ve read this book twice this year: the first time utterly aghast, the second time deconstructing it in a more critical fashion. Both times I have adored it, and for a certain type of man, this is going to be the biggest and most enduring indie-lit hit of the year.

Grab a copy of WBE on Amazon in paperback or Kindle now: https://www.amazon.com/Worst-Boyfriend-Ever-Sensitive-Young/dp/B0F3XSJGSD

And subscribe to his previously mentioned blog, here on Substack, where the story continues: