Worst Boyfriend Ever: A Review

"Prolefeed smut for never-nude zoomer girls"

Book Reviewed:

Worst Boyfriend Ever by Worst Boyfriend Ever (Self-Published, 2025. Paperback. 171 pages. $12.00)

Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5 Stars)

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I first came across Worst Boyfriend Ever on Substack. His article “Slut Review: Katie from Hinge” was shuffled to the top of my timeline. I clicked:

My girlfriend just sent me a scary text: “We need to talk. I just found hair ties under the bed that are definitely not mine. Did you cheat on me while I was gone? What the fuck… Please don’t ignore this.”

Yes. Yes I really did. Her name was Katie and she was insufferable.

I found her on Hinge. I re-downloaded Hinge as soon as you left.

Once I remembered you could filter by race, I stopped using all the other apps.

Within a day I had over 20 relatively beautiful Asian girls in my inbox. Most of them were flakes, they always are. But one of them was clearly looking to meet somebody. She had “looking for cuddle buddy/FWB” on her profile. She must have been new to the app because girls like this don’t tend to last very long.

She had a picture of herself wearing one of those black Japanese maid costumes and lyrics from a Radiohead song. I knew she was the one.

['“Please don’t tell me CREEP is the only Radiohead song you know???” Kill Yourself, Katie]

All of Mr. Boyfriend’s articles are relatively similar. Most notably, they all concern the same character—a mid-to-late twenties internet addict whose brain is so porn- and stimulant-addled that he needs mystery-formula dick pills to get three-quarters hard for UwU wasian girls from Hinge. If you like this kind of stuff, you’re in luck. In April of 2025, Mr. Boyfriend compiled several of his articles and some unpublished notes-app confessions into a book, eponymously titled Worst Boyfriend Ever.

The plot of Worst Boyfriend Ever is simple to relate—it’s just a series of tedious variations on “Slut Review: Katie from Hinge”—Mr. Boyfriend (author and protagonist) gets horny, bangs 22-year-old Lucy Li from Shanghai, and then rolls over in post-coital regret. When his girlfriend eventually discovers that he is cheating on her with cheap hookers and nervous sophomores from the local university, the relationship implodes. Mr. Boyfriend then packs all his belongings into a van and flees the city to begin a new life as a Craigslist gig-farmer and itinerant Lothario. The plot is scattered and episodic with essentially three recurring scenes—Mr. Boyfriend at his dreary corporate office, Mr. Boyfriend at home with his girlfriend, and Mr. Boyfriend out Bunburying and relishing in Wildean excess.

Worst Boyfriend Ever is a kind of weak, bloodless, and definitively modern interpretation of the picaresque novel. The author seems to envision himself as some sort of roguish, red-blooded hero who lives by his wits and defies the pale, rigid, clockwork world of restraint and repression. But Mr. Boyfriend is no picaro; he is no Julien Sorel. He spends his days not dueling with rapiers and wooing wealthy dowagers but masturbating in a dingy office park and gulleting 5mg of Adderall to churn out prolefeed smut for never-nude zoomer girls who want a titilating sexual experience without all the fluids. Mr. Boyfriend is not the rakish hero of days gone by—he is the last descendant of an old and decayed house. The strong, manly features of the race—the stallion vigor of Stendhal, the grim brutality of Celine—have all withered away, and what remains is something weak and frail—hollow cheeks and skin like alabaster.

Mr. Boyfriend has far more in common with someone like Sally Rooney. Both write horrible, lifeless BookTok prose, both are incapable of escaping the self-confessional mode, and most importantly, both were promised the riches of cosmopolitanism, a life of freedom and unrestraint, but found only stagnation, decay, and repetition. Worst Boyfriend Ever is just the same autofictional dreck repackaged for egirls who say the n-word.

James Joyce once said of his own work, “Some of it is ugly, obscene and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself.”¹ Many, no doubt, will find this a pithy summary of Worst Boyfriend Ever—they will hurry to praise the novel’s “honesty;” they will proclaim it a candid portrait of zoomer anhedonia, a voyeristic glimpse of some ravaged country where egirl bathwater is closer to God “than the ink of the philosophers and the prayers of the faithful.” I, perhaps, would place Worst Boyfriend Ever (in a position of some symbolic inferiority) beside DFW’s Infinite Jest—a work of grand cultural pessimism that implicitly reveals the myth of liberal progress, the falsity of paradisiacal techno-optimism, and the impossibility of shallow, retrogressive 1950s revivalism.

But in some sense, the Joyce quote is really too kind a review of this novel. Certainly, some of Worst Boyfriend Ever is “ugly, obscene, and bestial,” but I can’t say that any of it is “pure, holy, and spiritual.” Indeed, it occurs to me now as I’m writing that even the cover image I’ve used for this article is far too Romantic, far too idealistic. Trembling lips, a pale breast, a lock of shimmering hair—all this is foreign to the author of Worst Boyfriend Ever whose prose reads like a list of video titles on pornhub—“perky breasts” “busty” girls, “fuck-able” hookers, etc.

In this age, I fear we have mistaken art for the mirror of life. Men and women these days read not for “power” as Ezra Pound suggested, but to be reminded of themselves. Every floor-mopper at Safeway, every old arthritic coot, every pimple-faced bag boy expects to open a novel and see himself—his smallness, his meaness, his petty virtues and petty vices, his wretched figure, hideous and crooked. If he opens a novel and finds not his own monstrous visage but something fine and fair, a Grecian form full of grace and pride, then his heart fills with immortal hate. As Oscar Wilde once put it, “The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.”²

Why do we need more insipid diarists and autofictional documentarians in an age as solemn and impoverished as our own? Does anyone need literature that reminds them that the world is dull and sterile and mundane and tedious? Just look around you—fluorescent lights, gray polyester office carpet, $80 for plastic pants. Every day, most Americans wake up, go to work, come home, eat their microwavable Trader Joe’s burrito, and then settle down for an evening of guilty masturbation and Seinfeld re-runs—there’s nothing profound in this, and there’s little virtue in telling about it “honestly.”

Even realists of the past would have denied that their aim was the kind of dry verisimilitude that characterizes most modern American fiction. Guy de Maupassant, heir to the tradition of 19th-century French realism, declared that fiction is not written in ledger books—the writer is not the world’s petty purser; he is not a catalouger of the quotidian: “The realist, if he is an artist, will endeavour not to show us a commonplace photograph of life, but to give us a presentment of it which shall be more complete, more striking, more cogent than reality itself. To tell everything is out of the question: it would require at least a volume for each day to enumerate the endless, insignificant incidents which crowd our existence. A choice must be made - and this is the first blow to the theory of ‘the whole truth’. Whence I conclude that the skilled Realists should rather call themselves illusionists.”³ To become such an “illusionist,” the writer must distill reality into a series of symbolic images. This is no easy task—it requires the unconscious instinct of the artist. Mr. Boyfriend possesses no such instinct—he has only the journalist’s cold eye and the scrivener’s quick pen.

Worst Boyfriend Ever is almost Schopenhauerian in its theme. Mr. Boyfriend craves but is never satisfied; he lives, as Nietzsche put it, “impudently in brief pleasures” and barely casts his goals “beyond the day.”⁴ All his attempts to achieve some catharsis end only in disappointment and regret—the pendulum swings back and forth between boredom and pain. This, of course, should be anathema to all who abide by the Nietzschean creed—“do not throw away the hero in your soul. Hold holy your highest hope!”⁵

There is nothing heroic in Worst Boyfriend Ever—there are no trumpet sounds that rouse men from days of aimless wandering, there are no siren songs that lead off to a secret world of pale shores and moonlit eyes. What is the purpose of art if not to show man that there is another path? that the weary route of dust and stone is not the only way, that there is another kind of life, another kind of land “where men have heaped no burial mounds, / And the days pass by like a wayward tune, Where broken faith has never been known, And the blushes of first love have never flown.”⁶ As Nietzsche writes,

“what does all art do? does it not praise? does it not glorify? does it not select? does it not bring things into prominence? In all this it strengthens or weakens certain valuations. Is this only a secondary matter? an accident? something in which the artist’s instinct has no share? Or is it not rather the very prerequisite which enables the artist to accomplish something?... Is his most fundamental instinct concerned with art? Is it not rather concerned with the purpose of art, with life? with a certain desirable kind of life? Art is the great stimulus to life.”⁷

The only redeeming thing about Worst Boyfriend Ever is that it is, in some sense, a novel of escape. It is the tale of a young man who is weary of this world and seeks another path, but what he finds along the way is not greatness or genius or love or adventure but just more of the same world he fled—more drugs and dreary cafés and half-limp intercourse. In this sense, it is a novel of defeat—it proves that all escape is only illusory. The secret path that leads toward freedom and hope is only a mirage in the desert. This, of course, is a lie. There is something beyond this ashen world of illusion and veils, a secret grove where the trees rustle and the water runs clear and the great god Pan leaps in the meadows. I have always believed this, so did the Greeks, and so do all men who have that fire in their blood.

To be clear, my critique of Mr. Boyfriend’s book is not that of the clerics and petty moralizers. I don’t care that it depicts drinking and drugs and pre-marital sex. To quote A.E. Housman, I too “have been to Ludlow fair and left my necktie God knows where.”⁸ What offends me is that, with Mr. Boyfriend, we are always in the gutter and the sordid streets and never “out on the hillside with Apollo.”⁹ Even the purest and holiest things—the innocent touch of girl, the tremble and the heat, the taste of salt and skin—are all profaned by Mr. Boyfriend. When one has reached the end of Worst Boyfriend Ever, he feels that all that was warm has become cruel and cold; all that was once the meat and marrow of life has suddenly become sour and rank and worm-ridden. This is the stultifying effect of all ugliness. As Nietzsche writes, “from the physiological standpoint, everything ugly weakens and depresses man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; he literally loses strength in its presence. . . .Whenever man’s spirits are downcast, it is a sign that he scents the proximity of something ‘ugly.’ His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage and his pride—these things collapse at the sight of what is ugly, and rise at the sight of what is beautiful.”¹⁰ Only a man who has succumbed to despair depicts a world hideous and grotesque without some “courageous and free spirit” who strives to redeem the time. Where are our novels now that show the untimely man, the fighter against his age, the man out of season? Where is the classical man? Where is the romantic hero? “Must the ancient fire not some day flare up much more terribly, after much longer preparation?”¹¹

Part II:

I have already voiced some objections to Mr. Boyfriend’s pessimistic theme and his moral milksop protagonist, but I must also point out some major blunders here in plotting and style.

Novels are generally compelling in one of two ways. Either the novel has an intricately crafted plot (the adventure novel, the spy novel), or the novel is an intellectual exploration of some idea (the philosophical novel). The best novels are compelling in both ways—they have an intricately crafted plot that serves to express, illustrate, and dramatize some theme or philosophical idea. Worst Boyfriend Ever has neither invigorating ideas nor an intriguing plot.

Let us first consider the plot. Mr. Boyfriend’s novel begins where his relationship ends. The next 160 pages trace the long, slow path leading up to the breakup. This is a familiar structure. It’s the structure of Frankenstein, The Go-Between, Wuthering Heights, and many other novels. The key to this kind of narrative is that the reader knows what will happen but does not know how it will happen—that’s the mystery. In Mr. Boyfriend’s novel, there is no mystery—we aren’t left to wonder how or why Mr. Boyfriend breaks up with his girlfriend and hits the road in a Chevy Astro. It’s spoiled on the very first page. Mr. Boyfriend is humping Katie from Hinge, and his girlfriend finds out. If “Slut Review: Katie from Hinge” were not the first chapter of the novel, some suspense could have been created—Will Mr. Boyfriend cheat on his girlfriend? Will she find out? If so, how? But for some reason, Mr. Boyfriend doesn’t understand the basic conceit of all mysteries—if you know from the start that Colonel Mustard did it in the kitchen with the candlestick, there’s no fun in the game.

A novel without a plot or with a seriously flawed plot can often redeem itself as a novel of ideas. J.K Huysmans’ Against Nature is the example that first comes to mind. Jean des Esseintes, the decadent protagonist of the novel, hardly leaves his house. For 200 pages, he simply reclines at home with the curtains drawn, inspecting his etchings and his gem-encrusted turtle—but every line in that book is clean and sculpted. Huysmans is a truly brilliant stylist.

Already he had begun dreaming of a refined Thebaid, a desert hermitage equipped with all modern conveniences, a snugly heated ark on dry land in which he might take refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity.

One passion and one only - woman - might have arrested the universal contempt that was taking hold of him, but that passion like the rest had been exhausted. He had tasted the sweets of the flesh like a crotchety invalid with a craving for food but a palate which soon becomes jaded. In the days when he had belonged to a set of young men-about-town, he had gone to those unconventional supper-parties where drunken women loosen their dresses at dessert and beat the table with their heads; he had hung around stage-doors, had bedded with singers and actresses, had endured, over and above the innate stupidity of the sex, the hysterical vanity common to women of the theatre. Then he had kept mistresses already famed for their depravity, and helped to swell the funds of those agencies which supply dubious pleasures for a consideration. And finally, weary to the point of satiety of these hackneyed luxuries, these commonplace caresses, he had sought satisfaction in the gutter, hoping that the contrast would revive his exhausted desires and imagining that the fascinating filthiness of the poor would stimulate his flagging senses.

Try what he might, however, he could not shake off the overpowering tedium which weighed upon him. In desperation, he had recourse to the perilous caresses of the professional virtuosos, but the only effect was to impair his health and exacerbate his nerves. Already he was getting pains at the back of his neck, and his hands were shaky: he could keep them steady enough when he was gripping a heavy object, but they trembled uncontrollably when holding something light such as a wineglass.

The doctors he consulted terrified him with warnings that it was time he changed his way of life and gave up these practices which were sapping his vitality. For a little while he led a quiet life, but soon his brain took fire again and sent out a fresh call to arms. Like girls who at the onset of puberty hanker after weird or disgusting dishes, he began to imagine and then to indulge in unnatural love-affairs and perverse pleasures. But this was too much for him. His overfatigued senses, as if satisfied that they had tasted every imaginable experience, sank into a state of lethargy; and impotence was not far off.

When he came to his senses again, he found that he was utterly alone, completely disillusioned, abominably tired; and he longed to make an end of it all, prevented only by the cowardice of his flesh.

The idea of hiding away far from human society, of shutting himself up in some snug retreat, of deadening the thunderous din of life’s inexorable activity, just as people deadened the noise of traffic by laying down straw outside a sick person’s house — this idea tempted him more than ever.¹²

Against Nature is a novel of quiet interiors. Its progression is measured not by the course of events but by the evolution of an idea. Jean des Esseintes spends the entire novel thinking—he considers the futility of desire, the exhaustion that attends all effort and indulgence, the nature of art and love and travel. You will find nothing of this sort in Worst Boyfriend Ever—a novel totally devoid of ideas. The most essential conflict in Worst Boyfriend Ever, the war against the world of “SSRIs and birth control,” (a topic that could have been explored intellectually) always remains peripheral.¹³ Mr. Boyfriend gestures at this conflict, but it remains forever unexamined.

There is also something to be said about Worst Boyfriend Ever considered as a tangible object. This is an oft-neglected element of the reader’s experience, particularly in the case of internet novels. Like most self-published, Kindle Direct novels, Worst Boyfriend Ever looks amateurish—it’s awkwardly formatted (5.5 x 8.5 is probably too large for a 171-page novel), the cover art is a copyrighted, low-resolution image rip which Mr. Boyfriend didn’t even bother to upscale, and the back cover is just an iPhone screenshot. The prose is readable and conversational, but often stale, uninventive, shop-worn, and banal. It reads essentially like the transcript of a bad Twitter space. Part of the problem is that Mr. Boyfriend has only a single register. He cannot move from recitative to aria. He cannot summon any kind of grand style or lyrical power. Every line is the same, and thus the whole novel just becomes this flat, toneless desert. At the sentence level, the problem is that Mr. Boyfriend cannot escape a vocabulary of stock phrases and dead metaphors— “lazy piece of shit,” “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere,” “break the rules,” “I guess it’s good to know,” “Maybe next time,” “she loves me a lot,” “reality set in,” etc. There are almost no novel descriptors in this book—breasts are “big;” girls are “decent;” hookers are “fuck-able.” Mr. Boyfriend cannot seem to detach common nouns from common modifiers. His brain just extrudes worthless American idioms. If there is a purse, it is being “rumaged through;” if there is a bill, it is being “run up;” if there is a silence, it will soon be “broken.” Of course, the problem with such phrases is that they have no evocative power. They don’t mean anything—they’re just the recycled packing material that takes up empty space in conversation. Here’s an example, selected almost at random:

“Now it’s time for the ‘Cocktail Reception.’ It’s 5 o’clock somewhere. It’s time to go upstairs and drink wine and talk to scary wealthy people. I try to delay my arrival, be fashionably late, but fail miserably. . . . I sit awkwardly alone with my dark purple wine glass and expensive fried seafood dish feeling like the weird kid at school who nobody likes.”¹⁴

Here’s another:

“Sitting in A Pizza Mart. Unsuccessfully cruised for a hooker tonight. Got absolutely nothing done. Look up at TV. Beach Volleyball. Nice.”¹⁵

And another:

“I’m in Denver with my sister and her friends from work. Nobody found love at the club, so we went to a strip club instead.”¹⁶

Another literary oddity here is that Mr. Boyfriend often describes a scene simply by naming it: “Asian Massage Parlor,” “At da club,” “Yoga class,” “office.” The problem with providing only a lean sketch of the scene is that the author relies on the reader to supply the details and thus introduces ambiguity. I can conjure some generic features when prompted with “Yoga class” or “office,” but without a vivid description supplied by the author, I inevitably imagine my own office or offices I have seen. Thus, by providing only “office,” characters in the novel are left stranded between the office in Mr. Boyfriend’s mind and the office in my own. To resolve this, the writer needs to place the character somewhere in particular. For instance, instead of simply saying, as Mr. Boyfriend might, “November. On the street.” Dickens says,

Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Of course, no author can provide such a lively description of every street corner and café, but refusing to provide a single description or set a single scene with any kind of eager inventiveness or creativity strikes me as a kind of rank literary laziness.

Some would reply that Dickens’ maximalist style is too opulent and Victorian, too tactile and corporeal for the 21st-century world of screens and simulacra. “The modern age” they say “calls for something raw, something real—none of this flowery stuff.” Even if they’re right, does this mean that autofiction has to be our solution? Why does “something real” mean Worst Boyfriend Ever and not the unembelished prose of James Salter or Ernest Hemingway? Why can’t A Sport and a Pastime or A Farewell to Arms be the model for young writers who hope to cast off their mawkish forbearers and dispel the intoxicating fumes of Romantic sentimentalism? Though I would prefer to count myself with Yeats among the last of the Romantics, I’ll certainly take Salter and Hemingway over Mr. Boyfriend, the king of bad internet books.

Salter’s style is terse, muted, telegraphic, but his prose has a kind of crystalline beauty—hard angles, sharp lines, clean planes—all glittering like a thousand tiny suns. Here is the opening of his 1967 novel A Sport and a Pastime:

September. It seems these luminous days will never end. The city, which was almost empty during August, now is filling up again. It is being replenished. The restaurants are all reopening, the shops. People are coming back from the country, the sea, from trips on roads all jammed with cars. The station is very crowded. There are children, dogs, families with old pieces of luggage bound by straps. I make my way among them. It’s like being in a tunnel. Finally I emerge onto the brilliance of the quai, beneath a roof of glass panels which seems to magnify the light.

On both sides is a long line of coaches, dark green, the paint blistering with age. I walk along reading the numbers, first and second class. It’s pleasant seeing all the plaques with the numbers printed on them. It’s like counting money. There’s a comfortable feeling of delivering myself into the care of those who run these great, somnolent trains, through the clear glass of which people are staring, as drained, as quiet as invalids. It’s difficult to find an empty compartment, there simply are none. My bags are becoming heavy. Halfway down the platform I board, walk along the corridor and finally slide open a door. No one even looks up. I lift my luggage onto the rack and settle into a seat. Silence. It’s as if we’re waiting to see the doctor. I glance around. There are photographs of tourism on the wall, scenes of Brittany, Provence. Across from me is a girl with birthmarks on her leg, birthmarks the color of grape. My eye keeps falling to them. They’re shaped like channel islands.

I think this is an apt comparison for both stylistic and thematic reasons. A Sport and a Pastime and Worst Boyfriend Ever are essentially about the same thing: a torrid love affair, the buried life, a boy who leaves the comfort of home for strange lands and the excitement of the unforeseen. Salter’s style is quiet and restrained, but like Hemingway, his prose has a kind of biblical simplicity. Mr. Boyfriend’s style is simple too, but no one could imagine his prose graven on those old Mosaic stones.

Eventually I saw one girl who looked fuck-able. Her face could have been under 25. Her body was sufficiently magnetic. Pretty pretty. Pretty different from what I have now, which is what I was going for. Maybe hispanic. In a pink thin lingerie slut costume. Decent breasts, barely clothed. She was the only decent girl out there, to my eye.¹⁷

How does this compare with the clear, proud, Anglo-Saxon verse of Hemingway? Here is the opening of A Farewell to Arms—you be the judge.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.

If you want to do stylistic restraint, if you want to be minimalist, that’s how you do it. “Pretty pretty . . . Maybe hispanic . . . Decent breasts” isn’t the clean, earthen prose of Hemingway; it isn’t the dense, gnomic verse of Pound—it’s just bad writing.

I will of course be critiqued here for “not getting it”— “you see, the austerity of the verbal architecture, the harsh planes of minimalist abstraction, these contribute to Mr. Boyfriend’s poetics of absence and create in the novel a sense of negative space that mirrors the world his characters inhabit—a world deprived of sense, texture, and meaning.” The move here is always to create intentionality to disguise incapacity. Can Mr. Boyfriend write like Dickens? Can he even write like James Salter? I don’t think so. Mr. Boyfriend is not Picasso, who had already mastered the human form before attempting to deconstruct it. He is just a hack with an overinflated head and too much pharmaceutical meth.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh on a book that’s intended as light humor, not serious literature. There are, to be fair, amusing scenes, and the book is fine if you want two hours of frivolous, light entertainment. Frankly, I don’t know Mr. Boyfriend’s intentions. I don’t know how he conceives of this book, though he does declare that it is certainly “a novel” and “not a collection of essays.”¹⁸

If the popularity of Mr. Boyfriend’s blog is any indication of his sales, we can assume the novel is quite a success—at the time I’m writing this (late May, 2025), he is the no. 3 rising author in fiction on Substack. This warrants our attention. People clearly like this book. Some find it an encouraging new development in fiction. I can only echo the critic William Logan—“It’s not clear if we should be depressed by the attention paid to [this] work, the publicity and hard cash showered upon [the author], or should just throw up our hands and say, ‘That, that too, is America.’”¹⁹

Part III: Envoi

Yeats once wrote that all his masterful images “[g]rew in pure mind but out of what began? / A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, / Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can.” Mr. Boyfriend too has found himself in the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” but has given us no masterful images, no enchanted isles, no painted stage—only “[o]ld iron, old bones, old rags, [and] that raving slut / Who keeps the till.”²⁰

There is great hunger in this world, I believe, for a new kind of artist, one who does not believe in what Nietzsche called the “old age of mankind” or the “dangerous mood of irony” and “cynicism.”²¹ To this new artist, the world does not seem as it seemed to Celine—“so slow, so heavy, so sad”—for he is unburdened by the past, unburdened by the present. His movements now are light, and down from the mountain he comes with heaps of broken tablets and a hammer in his hands.

1. Letter to Nora Barnacle Joyce, September 7, 1909.

2. “The Decay of Lying,” Oscar Wilde.

3. “Of The Novel,” Guy de Maupassant

4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Tree on the Hill,” Nietzsche.

5. Ibid.

6. “The Wanderings of Oisin,” W.B. Yeats.

7. Twilight of the Idols, §24.

8. “Terrence, This is Stupid Stuff,” A.E. Housman

9. “The Decay of Lying,” Oscar Wilde.

10. Twilight of the Idols, §20.

11. The Genealogy of Morals, Essay 1, §17.

12. Against Nature, 22-23.

13. WBE, 6.

14. WBE, 80-81.

15. WBE, 119.

16. WBE, 131.

17. WBE, 24.

18. https://substack.com/@worstboyfriendever/p-160589363

19. “Companions of the Past,” New Criterion.

20. “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” W.B. Yeats

21. On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, §5