'Worst Boyfriend Ever: A Sensitive Young Man' by Worst Boyfriend Ever (Self-published, 2025)

Book Review

This week I wanted to post a review of an indie-lit title from this year. This post should be taken as an emphatic endorsement, and I may even post more about WBE in the future. His book, his blog and him as a person are all fascinating to me.

Enjoy,

Tox

WORST BOYFRIEND EVER: A SENSITIVE YOUNG MAN

Have you ever wanted to read the blog of one of the characters in a Bret Easton Ellis novel who isn’t the narrator or protagonist? 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 that it is), then this debut autofiction novel is going to be something you are going to want to grab.

How much of the contents of this book are true, and how much is fiction, is open to interpretation. It contains the obligatory “All characters depicted are the author's imagination” disclaimer at the beginning, so it could be entirely fiction, or it could be borderline memoir. My guess is somewhere in between. The book itself insists it is real in what I suppose 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 is cheating on his girlfriend, excessively, with mostly Asian women. He is conversely comically arrogant and painfully insecure. He is laying his soul, or lack thereof, out there, for all of us to gaze upon.

If that doesn’t sound like enough of a story for you, then you fail to grasp what exactly this is. It’s presented as a collection of blog posts, or phone app notes, or however else our protagonist chooses to document his exploits. Exploits he is painfully aware of, how bad they are, and just what they are doing to him. Which, as something of a nihilist, he merely sees fit to just describe in absolutely 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, which is more “heart removed and planted on a spike in the centre of a party” than “heart on sleeve,” and as a result, it is incredibly compelling to read.

This is distilled Zoomer autofiction, nothing short of glorious. The pace of the stream-of-consciousness-style prose is breakneck, littered with typos and lowercase i’s; it’s written 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 which express the sentiment in the most direct way possible.

Unsurprisingly, the book has come under a great deal of scrutiny online, as people are slowly made aware of the exact nature of it, along with the blog. This is indicative of just two things to me.

The first thing is out-and-out anti-male hatred. The protagonist of this book is all of us, led by our cocks in our twenties, lost, reeling, confused, self-medicating. Wondering what ratio of beast and what ratio of human we are. I saw some criticism comparing him to a knock-off Houellebecq or Easton Ellis, I forget which; it doesn’t matter. The reason we all grew up reading both of them is because they spoke to this beast inside of us. It made us feel more human to read that someone out there felt the same way we do.

This book continues in that tradition. It also draws comparisons to Bukowski, though WBE is less alcohol-focused and less poetic. The cold, biological view of sex is certainly 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, concerning exactly what I am talking about, but I don’t want to ruin a single thing for potential readers. Although a lot of this can be read on his blog, reading them in paperback form is a delight; there’s something perverse about it.

The second thing the attention to this book told me, which was confirmed on my first read of it, is that there is something of value here which is undeniable. Even the critics, of which there are many, are fuelling the fire this book started, with their long and elaborate essays rooted in a deep anti-male hatred.

That hatred is possibly 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 described the hideous things he was doing. He’s too eloquent in expressing himself, too self-aware to be written off as a blundering fool. I’ve no doubt this guy is tall, handsome, talented, funny, and that people do respond to him gleefully. But it isn’t enough, it’s never enough. You can be blessed and cursed, as WBE is without question.

For me, WBE goes right into the chud-lit canon with Mike Ma and Delicious Tacos. Someone on the outside of the literary industry, who could just as easily have been someone on the inside, if the whole industry hadn’t been hijacked by certain demographics.

It’s impossible to ignore, and once you start reading, it's impossible to look away. WBE is all of us at a certain time in our life. If you were born with a cock, then you have had a WBE period, he is all of us, and as a result, should be celebrated.

I’ve read this book twice this year now, the first time utterly aghast, the second 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 this 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 Substack, where the story continues, here: