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Self Care
An electric examination of women and men, sex and love, self-loathing and twenty-first century loneliness.
Between Daily Self Care, the weekly column she writes for the website The Hype Report, and managing her mood stabilizers, Gloria navigates her quasi-relationship with Florian and commiserates with Isabel, her best friend, about dating apps and dick pics, married men and questionable boundaries. But when she makes a glib pass at Darin, a stranger wearing a sad face pin on a subway platform crowded with young male protestors leaving an anti-immigration rally, and finds him waiting for her outside her health club the next day, curiosity leads her not to consider a restraining order, but to talk to him.
Claiming she wants to interview him for an article she’s writing on the incel movement, Gloria meets Darin for coffee and soon invites him back to her apartment—where his strange earnestness and painfully restrained desire inspire her to dominate him sexually. As their sexual relationship intensifies, so does their emotional connection, and Gloria can’t shake her sense that she’s headed in a dangerous direction. An electric examination of women and men, sex and love, self-loathing and twenty-first century loneliness, Self-Care is a devastating novel about all the ways we try to cope—with ourselves, and with each other.
Between Daily Self Care, the weekly column she writes for the website The Hype Report, and managing her mood stabilizers, Gloria navigates her quasi-relationship with Florian and commiserates with Isabel, her best friend, about dating apps and dick pics, married men and questionable boundaries. But when she makes a glib pass at Darin, a stranger wearing a sad face pin on a subway platform crowded with young male protestors leaving an anti-immigration rally, and finds him waiting for her outside her health club the next day, curiosity leads her not to consider a restraining order, but to talk to him.
Claiming she wants to interview him for an article she’s writing on the incel movement, Gloria meets Darin for coffee and soon invites him back to her apartment—where his strange earnestness and painfully restrained desire inspire her to dominate him sexually. As their sexual relationship intensifies, so does their emotional connection, and Gloria can’t shake her sense that she’s headed in a dangerous direction. An electric examination of women and men, sex and love, self-loathing and twenty-first century loneliness, Self-Care is a devastating novel about all the ways we try to cope—with ourselves, and with each other.
288 pages, Paperback
Published October 21, 2025
12 people are currently reading
334 people want to read
About the author
Russell Smith
136 books25 followersRussell Claude Smith is a Canadian writer and newspaper columnist. Smith's novels and short stories are mostly set in Toronto, where he lives.
Smith grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He attended the Halifax Grammar School and Queen Elizabeth High School, and studied French literature at Queen's University, the University of Poitiers, and the University of Paris III. He has an MA in French from Queen's.
Russell Smith is one of Canada’s funniest and nastiest writers. His previous novels, including How Insensitive and Girl Crazy, are records of urban frenzy and exciting underworlds. He writes a provocative weekly column on the arts in the national Globe and Mail, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Guelph. He hates folk music.
Smith grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He attended the Halifax Grammar School and Queen Elizabeth High School, and studied French literature at Queen's University, the University of Poitiers, and the University of Paris III. He has an MA in French from Queen's.
Russell Smith is one of Canada’s funniest and nastiest writers. His previous novels, including How Insensitive and Girl Crazy, are records of urban frenzy and exciting underworlds. He writes a provocative weekly column on the arts in the national Globe and Mail, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Guelph. He hates folk music.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
September 23, 2025
I rage finished this book in two days.
People are going to look back at this book and think “what the fuck was going on in the 2020s”. And honestly, I don’t know man. Things were bad. Why are the nazis back. Of all the groups. How did this happen. People are not okay.
Anyway. If you want to read the horrors while living the horrors. Dig in.
People are going to look back at this book and think “what the fuck was going on in the 2020s”. And honestly, I don’t know man. Things were bad. Why are the nazis back. Of all the groups. How did this happen. People are not okay.
Anyway. If you want to read the horrors while living the horrors. Dig in.
September 30, 2025
Self Care is an addictive and compelling reflection of what young Millenials are enduring in today's time of sensory bombardment that has left them in a state of what appears to be constant emotional and mental exhaustion. The story's main characters are incredibly flawed, yet it is within those flaws that we are able to see their humanity, in all its glorious discomfort. Even when exploring the world of incels, Russell Smith does so with empathy, not condoning their views or behaviour, but simply showing it for us, the readers, to form our own opinions. A page turner in every sense, Self Care is a book that after reading, immediately makes you want to walk around the streets of Toronto and see the world so vividly shown in its pages.
August 20, 2025
First review what!! That’s a lot of pressure. Spoilers ahead btw
This book held my attention throughout but I didn’t find anything particularly surprising about it in the end… Like men’s rights incel guy turns out to be unhinged, beautiful woman who has a lot of sex dies, FMC’s life is left in shambles and I guess I was expecting the story would reach for something less tropey and land on a more substantial commentary, but I couldn’t figure out what that was supposed to be so even as the ending was kinda satisfying it was also kinda womp womp
I did love the wholehearted Ontarian-ness of it and all the sharp irreverent dialogue that kind of sweeps you along. It felt very of this moment without having that terminally online feeling that’s a bit depressing to encounter in a novel. Curious what other folks will have to say about it
This book held my attention throughout but I didn’t find anything particularly surprising about it in the end… Like men’s rights incel guy turns out to be unhinged, beautiful woman who has a lot of sex dies, FMC’s life is left in shambles and I guess I was expecting the story would reach for something less tropey and land on a more substantial commentary, but I couldn’t figure out what that was supposed to be so even as the ending was kinda satisfying it was also kinda womp womp
I did love the wholehearted Ontarian-ness of it and all the sharp irreverent dialogue that kind of sweeps you along. It felt very of this moment without having that terminally online feeling that’s a bit depressing to encounter in a novel. Curious what other folks will have to say about it
December 13, 2025
this book was really fucking weird
November 26, 2025
Damn. Pretty nuts. Shows a nasty underbelly that is sometimes hard to get through but I found it so compelling and a real (and scary!) glimpse into what a lot of people are dealing with. Yowzaaaa.
December 2, 2025
3.75 I think.
I picked this book up blind at a local bookstore in an attempt to read something for once that had not been influenced by online reviews.
Man, this felt like witnessing a train wreck. Not that the book was badly written, I enjoyed the pacing and the dialogue, a breath of fresh air in comparison to what I had been reading lately. And normally I don't enjoy reading books that are set in Toronto, but the use of the setting here was not overbearing, which I liked.
Gloria, though, continues to make worse and worse decisions and it physically filled me with dread. There are many parts of her I can see in myself. Her unfiltered thoughts are realistic and her overthinking is compelling by just virtue of its familiarity. But while she can recognize her negative traits, she just indiscriminately indulges in her vices without enough consideration for the consequences. I feel like that could be said about many of these characters. Each time you begin think Daryn might not be a bad guy, he does something terrifying unprovoked. There was absolutely no positive character development in anybody. The ending was not surprising given all of the events that led up to it, but it did not make me feel any less terrible.
It was very interesting to read about all these broken people, hoping that things might change for the better only to be disappointed. I was uncomfortable and and upset while reading this but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
I picked this book up blind at a local bookstore in an attempt to read something for once that had not been influenced by online reviews.
Man, this felt like witnessing a train wreck. Not that the book was badly written, I enjoyed the pacing and the dialogue, a breath of fresh air in comparison to what I had been reading lately. And normally I don't enjoy reading books that are set in Toronto, but the use of the setting here was not overbearing, which I liked.
Gloria, though, continues to make worse and worse decisions and it physically filled me with dread. There are many parts of her I can see in myself. Her unfiltered thoughts are realistic and her overthinking is compelling by just virtue of its familiarity. But while she can recognize her negative traits, she just indiscriminately indulges in her vices without enough consideration for the consequences. I feel like that could be said about many of these characters. Each time you begin think Daryn might not be a bad guy, he does something terrifying unprovoked. There was absolutely no positive character development in anybody. The ending was not surprising given all of the events that led up to it, but it did not make me feel any less terrible.
It was very interesting to read about all these broken people, hoping that things might change for the better only to be disappointed. I was uncomfortable and and upset while reading this but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
October 24, 2025
This book!! 🤯
October 30, 2025
Genuinely such a gripping book. This one was in a genre I often don’t read but it was able to lock me in tight. There is something about it being based in a setting so real that resonated with me and the plot line itself had me on the edge of my seat. Gloria has her faults no doubt and did she maybe take it too far with a man who clearly needs some help but also is very vulnerable, yes, but something about her character speaks to me. There were some areas of the book that I felt needed higher concentration to understand but overall really interesting and well written.
October 8, 2025
I stayed up until 5:00am reading this novel unable to stop. Smith captured a raw and real experience of being a young adult in Toronto.
Will be recommending this to all my Toronto friends.
Will be recommending this to all my Toronto friends.
December 12, 2025
For his first novel in fifteen years. award-winning author Russell Smith fully embraces his well-deserved reputation as a cultural anthropologist of urban life in the city.
Self Care is a brilliant novel which seems to be effortlessly built from Smith's trademark insights of keenly observed social anthropology. A chance meeting between Gloria and Daryn, two twenty-somethings living in Canada’s largest city is all the pretense Smith needs to work his considerable storytelling magic.
Gloria, a part-time columnist for a website called The Hype who writes about urban general interest subject matter ranging from sex to suicide seems an unlikely love interest for Daryn. He is a part-time electronics store worker who lives at home and is apparently connected to a loosely organized incel subculture of men who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one.
Strangely fascinated by Daryn, Gloria uses the journalistic pretense of interviewing him for her column to get to know him better, and perhaps confirm some of her worst thoughts of him.
Despite their own misgivings and reticence, a peculiar intimacy begins to form between them and the narrative takes flight
In Smith's capable hands, Self Love offers a cautionary tale with an irresistible emotional core that presents the complex intricacies of love and intimacy in today's fast-moving world of information and digital awareness in a thoroughly readable fashion.
Despite technology making multiple forms of communication possible, Smith ensures that pure conversation, and its many pitfalls, plays hard against the many forms of digital engagement we sometimes take for granted today. His talent for capturing conversation and it's nuances is truly remarkable
Unconventional, unforgettable but absolutely not improbable, in Smith's capable hands, Self Care weaves together the strands of today's societal norms and preoccupations into one of the most unique love stories we've had the pleasure of reading for some time.
Self Care is a brilliant novel which seems to be effortlessly built from Smith's trademark insights of keenly observed social anthropology. A chance meeting between Gloria and Daryn, two twenty-somethings living in Canada’s largest city is all the pretense Smith needs to work his considerable storytelling magic.
Gloria, a part-time columnist for a website called The Hype who writes about urban general interest subject matter ranging from sex to suicide seems an unlikely love interest for Daryn. He is a part-time electronics store worker who lives at home and is apparently connected to a loosely organized incel subculture of men who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one.
Strangely fascinated by Daryn, Gloria uses the journalistic pretense of interviewing him for her column to get to know him better, and perhaps confirm some of her worst thoughts of him.
Despite their own misgivings and reticence, a peculiar intimacy begins to form between them and the narrative takes flight
In Smith's capable hands, Self Love offers a cautionary tale with an irresistible emotional core that presents the complex intricacies of love and intimacy in today's fast-moving world of information and digital awareness in a thoroughly readable fashion.
Despite technology making multiple forms of communication possible, Smith ensures that pure conversation, and its many pitfalls, plays hard against the many forms of digital engagement we sometimes take for granted today. His talent for capturing conversation and it's nuances is truly remarkable
Unconventional, unforgettable but absolutely not improbable, in Smith's capable hands, Self Care weaves together the strands of today's societal norms and preoccupations into one of the most unique love stories we've had the pleasure of reading for some time.
October 28, 2025
Self-care is bleak. Michel Houellebecq-level bleak and Houellebecqian in its satire of personal relationships. It is dark and funny and heartbreaking and all too relevant -- the perfect book for our times where gooning is becoming the new, grotesque level of sexual isolation and struggle to connect. The characters are deeply flawed and deeply human, and their youth and inexperience is evident, which only made me hope, despite myself, that there might still be a happy ending, or at least a merciful one. The dialogue is Smith's signature hilarious and the sex scenes are slightly revolting but refreshing in their bluntness: precum, sweat, moles, and squeak of rubber -- it's all there. It's a compulsively readable book that despite its bleakness has many moments of tenderness and accidental grace. With Self-Care, Smith reminds us that even in our most narcissistic, deranged, and self-sabotaging states, the impulse to connect tends to triumph all the other impulses.
August 20, 2025
Review of Self Care by Russell Smith
Russell Smith’s Self Care is sharp, unsettling, and impossible to turn away from. Gloria, a young freelancer juggling unstable work and bad relationships, agrees to profile Daryl, an incel, for an article. Instead, she slides into a dangerous, obsessive affair with him. What follows is ironic, disturbing, and painfully believable.
Smith has always had a gift for skewering city life, and here he turns his gaze on the precariousness of millennial survival — the hustle, the loneliness, the strange intimacy of dating apps and casual sex. The book is uncomfortable, but that’s its brilliance: it makes us sit with the contradictions of desire, power, and self-image in the twenty-first century. Smith hasn’t published a novel of fiction in some time, and Self Care is certainly worth the wait.
Russell Smith’s Self Care is sharp, unsettling, and impossible to turn away from. Gloria, a young freelancer juggling unstable work and bad relationships, agrees to profile Daryl, an incel, for an article. Instead, she slides into a dangerous, obsessive affair with him. What follows is ironic, disturbing, and painfully believable.
Smith has always had a gift for skewering city life, and here he turns his gaze on the precariousness of millennial survival — the hustle, the loneliness, the strange intimacy of dating apps and casual sex. The book is uncomfortable, but that’s its brilliance: it makes us sit with the contradictions of desire, power, and self-image in the twenty-first century. Smith hasn’t published a novel of fiction in some time, and Self Care is certainly worth the wait.
December 23, 2025
What it means to be a young adult trying to navigate yourself through the constant bombardment of information in this dystopian nightmare we've created where every single voice has a platform to scream their opinions at you any chance they get.
The insufferable conversations, the intense opinions - how everything is so black and white these days (love how the book showed us the many shades of grey), trying to make something of yourself in a city that's unaffordable, the way meds are prescribed for every little thing, the performative nature of so much of what we do now that social media has infiltrated our lives. Phew. This was exhausting.
Read it in two days and couldn't put it down. All I could think the entire time was how grateful I was to not be in my twenties trying to figure myself out while trying to navigate a dating scene that feels like the Wild West.
The insufferable conversations, the intense opinions - how everything is so black and white these days (love how the book showed us the many shades of grey), trying to make something of yourself in a city that's unaffordable, the way meds are prescribed for every little thing, the performative nature of so much of what we do now that social media has infiltrated our lives. Phew. This was exhausting.
Read it in two days and couldn't put it down. All I could think the entire time was how grateful I was to not be in my twenties trying to figure myself out while trying to navigate a dating scene that feels like the Wild West.
September 27, 2025
Talk about a page turner. Could not put it down. The story is very gritty and very honest, both of which I appreciated. It's refreshing to see a novel that addresses the toxic and terrorising incel culture from the woman's point of view, never shying away from the complexities therein. Sex scenes felt honest and relatable, rather than stylized or extra glossy, and the push and pull of trying to love someone you know is bad for you really shone through. Expertly done! A fascinating read and also such a snapshot of what women are dealing with right now - ie, men feeling like they are entitled to our bodies, our time, and even our attention. Will make you angry in some sections, but in a good way.
November 17, 2025
Part of me loves Russell Smith’s writing, part of me hates what he writes. It always makes me uncomfortable but, it also gets my brain working in a different direction than I’m used to.
His books are not something one would want as a steady diet. The need for antidepressants would be as great as it is for his characters!
This book is completely true to his style. Yet softer. Like most people, even writers get with age. I liked it a little more than his others. It’s still gritty, raw and emotional. The middle was a little saggy.
It’s written about millennials I think but the issues are no different from what we Gen X-ers went through in our youth. Life really hasn’t changed as much as people think. Same issues just in different packages.
His books are not something one would want as a steady diet. The need for antidepressants would be as great as it is for his characters!
This book is completely true to his style. Yet softer. Like most people, even writers get with age. I liked it a little more than his others. It’s still gritty, raw and emotional. The middle was a little saggy.
It’s written about millennials I think but the issues are no different from what we Gen X-ers went through in our youth. Life really hasn’t changed as much as people think. Same issues just in different packages.
November 27, 2025
This book is unhinged. In a good way; if you like unhinged things. I feel like Russell Smith really dug into the dark underbelly of the twenty somethings in Canada caught in the darkness and anxiousness of this time. The constant emotional and mental state of despair. The cellphone, the loneliness, the self- loathing, the weird sex and the love. He captured the isolation and angst perfectly in my mind. This book disturbed me but also made it hard to look away. Gloria hates Darin but she also loves the power she has over him. Can she get out of this odd sexual power relationship in time to avoid danger? And should she text Florian back?
November 17, 2025
Favourite book I’ve read for any class this semester. so incredibly haunting. So many of the things Self-Care satirizes are things that we tend to blindly accept in our little bubbles. it will use one character to blow these features massively out of proportion, and (in some cases) a separate character to have an absolute lack of said feature.
I had a feeling I knew how it was going to end, but even then I held out hope for a happy ending. I’m still reeling from this, so not entirely sure how to feel. Really excited to be able to discuss this in my class.
I had a feeling I knew how it was going to end, but even then I held out hope for a happy ending. I’m still reeling from this, so not entirely sure how to feel. Really excited to be able to discuss this in my class.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 7, 2025
4.5 stars, rounded up.
Like watching a car crash in slow motion. Over and over.
Dread saturates every waking moment. Peril lurks around every corner.
A gradual descent into darkness, where physical and emotional peril awaits.
The events slide one after another. Inexorably, perhaps inevitably.
For once, a novel's self-description fits:
"...sex and love, self-loathing, and twenty-first century loneliness.
"...women and men, what they want and what they say they want, and the violent tension between the two."
Or, perhaps more succinctly: "This will all end in tears."
Like watching a car crash in slow motion. Over and over.
Dread saturates every waking moment. Peril lurks around every corner.
A gradual descent into darkness, where physical and emotional peril awaits.
The events slide one after another. Inexorably, perhaps inevitably.
For once, a novel's self-description fits:
"...sex and love, self-loathing, and twenty-first century loneliness.
"...women and men, what they want and what they say they want, and the violent tension between the two."
Or, perhaps more succinctly: "This will all end in tears."
December 22, 2025
I found this novel during a “peruse the local independent bookstore instead of being responsible” episode. Something told me to read what it was about after seeing the cover.
If you’re a part of society and dating culture nowadays, I recommend. Ties together so many things young people think about, experience, do and don’t do. And how freaking stupid and in need of help we are 🫢
If you enjoy ridiculous yet realistic fiction that makes you think about your own life/how others may think, def worth it.
Plus, smut lol
If you’re a part of society and dating culture nowadays, I recommend. Ties together so many things young people think about, experience, do and don’t do. And how freaking stupid and in need of help we are 🫢
If you enjoy ridiculous yet realistic fiction that makes you think about your own life/how others may think, def worth it.
Plus, smut lol
September 23, 2025
Binged over two tired nights; like a trainwreck you can’t look away from, Self Care is a gripping tragedy that’s hard to put down. How do you reconcile deep desires that go against your fundamental beliefs? Healing begins with honesty and self-reflection - I hope that we can all one day get there.
Bonus: Torontonian readers will love the localization and easter eggs.
Bonus: Torontonian readers will love the localization and easter eggs.
November 18, 2025
Overall: easy read, exciting, sexy, finished in 2 days..
howeverrrr…. There are SO many interesting themes in this around modern sex and gender performance and incel culture and mental illness which had me very excited to read, but unfortunately I felt things fell flat and nothing was really said or discovered. But maybe that wasn’t the point. FMC was annoying AF like damn!
howeverrrr…. There are SO many interesting themes in this around modern sex and gender performance and incel culture and mental illness which had me very excited to read, but unfortunately I felt things fell flat and nothing was really said or discovered. But maybe that wasn’t the point. FMC was annoying AF like damn!
December 18, 2025
I’m not sure what to make of this novel, but it was an interesting read. Overall, this felt dark, melancholic and depressing, with moments of satire. I found the setting of this novel very small and focused, about lifestyles and communities that I have no experience with. I struggled to relate to the characters, but I was also fascinated by them, and the choices they made. (3.5 stars)
November 3, 2025
I’ve been a Russell Smith fan since I was in university (ageing myself here). So I was really excited to read his latest. Unfortunately this was not my favourite book of his. Still happy to see him writing though.
September 22, 2025
Y I K E S. predictable but def a page-turner
dnf
October 10, 2025I thought it would give sally rooney vibes but i was mistaken. will not continue, stopped at 10%
November 23, 2025
i feel like shit now (3 and a half)
December 16, 2025
really don’t know how to feel about this one. weird bad. very bleak!
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews