Todo es una mierda y eres una mala persona

by Daniel Zomparelli, Raquel G. Rojas (translator)

Todo es una mierda y eres una mala persona es la primera obra de ficción del escritor canadiense Daniel Zomparelli. En esta colección de relatos poco convencionales, interconectados y que incluyen mensajes de texto y publicaciones de Facebook, los gais buscan el amor, roban material de oficina, ligan en Grindr, hornean pasteles, acuden a terapeutas, tienen tríos con fantasmas y temen a la felicidad.

Con un humor irónico y un corazón cautivador, Todo es una mierda y eres una mala persona es una indagación socarrona y tragicómica del amor, el deseo y la disfuncionalidad en el siglo XXI.

«Escritas con una prosa llana y sincera que recuerda al movimiento ‘Alt-Lit’, las historias de Zomparelli extraen el humor de la banalidad de las vidas dedicadas al sexo anónimo, las aplicaciones para móviles y las redes sociales» The New York Times

«Brillante no es una palabra exagerada para describir Todo es una mierda y eres una mala persona. También vienen a la mente adjetivos como divertida, perversa, conmovedora, irreverente y triste. Una bomba de libro envuelta en 32 relatos. Una explosión de aire fresco» Vancouver Sun

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, LGBT, Queer, Gay, Contemporary, Canada

254 pages, Paperback

First published May 16, 2017

About the author

Daniel Zomparelli is the founder of Poetry Is Dead magazine and the host of I'm Afraid That.

Reviews

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was the things I love: funny and sad and insightful and queer and of a time (the time is this time). While some books evoke a strong sense of place, this one evokes a strong sense of this moment. I was aware while reading it that it will become (according to my youthful students) a period piece quickly, and I love that.

Plus mental health issues! Loss! Online dating. It's good!

[Billy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un brillant livre entre le roman et le recueil de nouvelles. Les amours entres hommes mais pas juste ça... L'amour de soi, aussi. Un livre moderne sur les amours, les rencontres, les désillusions... la famille, les amis : la vie, quoi ! Écriture moderne à des années lumières de bien d'autres œuvres du genre qui ont été publiées récemment... À lire absolument!

[Haley · Rating 3 out of 5]

*I received advance readers copy in exchange for an honest review. Thank you Edelweiss and Arsenal Pulp Press*

I liked this book, but it wasn't what I was expecting. This book contains short stories all somehow relating to each other. I kind of got how they were relating to each other, but at the same time I really didn't I found some stories to be hilarious and others to be just not my type. Overall I liked this book, but I don't think this author's writing is for me. I'm happy I went out to read a different kind of book and this isn't a type I'm used to with short stories as the main concept of the book. I wouldn't recommend this book because it just wasn't a book I would recommend.

[Dina Bucchia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is beautiful and hilarious, smart, thought-provoking and full of spot on feels. It will give you so much amazing literary enjoyment that you will get to the end and thank it for being written. You might even want to kiss it.

[David Ly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Supes gay. V amazing. Read it

[Kitty]

I like how tiresome gay men and lesbians find each other’s interpersonal issues. This made me feel like I was at the world’s longest brunch

[Andy Bird · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this collection of short stories - they were at turns sad (dealing with the loss of a parent, rejection , loneliness) funny (dating🙃) and weird (you'll see). Recommended! I particularly liked "fake boyfriend" and "phone call".

[AJourneyWithoutMap · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything is not appalling or dreadful as the title suggests. And you are not horrible or hideous either. Wickedly honest at the point of being sacrilegious, Everything Is Awful and You're a Terrible Person by Daniel Zomparelli is a striking, stunning and side-splitting book with neat, provocative, challenging and spot on feels bound together in thirty-two short stories which are surprisingly interlinked in one way or the other.

Everything Is Awful and You're a Terrible Person is not just another bone cracker but manages to draw a whole gamut of emotions with a variation in the stories. While some deals with denial and rejection, some with loneliness, some with loss, there are some which are downright an out-and-out laugh-out-louds. And there are stories which will force you to pause, sit straight, take a deep breath and think. And still, there are some which are creepy and unusual. Readers will find great delight in the maverick and eclectic cast of characters from Derek to Jared, from Ryan to Darryl, from Steve to Erik, from Anthony to Kevin, and the rest of the lot.

Stories like Progress, Fake Boyfriend, Phone Call, Tongue Out Smiley Face, The License, Dream Boy, Sex Date, and every one of them are hilarious. If you haven’t closed a book with a smile in a long time, this book of pure enjoyment and fun will make you do that. Certainly a change from the usual fare which we are so accustomed to, author Daniel Zomparelli has turned literary delight on its head with his no-nonsense characters and their stories. But if you are stiffly opposed to profanities, keep away from this book.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is hands down unlike anything I have ever read. Zomparelli builds an alternate Canada filled with unfulfilling sex and misadventures on dating apps. The stories widely vary in form and have some loose connections which definitely had me flipping back to the table of contents to try to weave some threads. In this collection, Zomparelli explores what seeking happiness looks like through casual sex, long term relationships, friendships, and traditional familial relationships. Characters have varying levels of success. The stories all focus around the lives of men who are interested in having sex and/or relationships with other men usually using technology as a guide. The results are hilarious, heartbreaking, and remarkably mundane. I so enjoyed this collection because I never knew what was coming next and how it might link to the previous stories. I appreciated the author's occasional touch of the supernatural--it flowed very well and made all the stories seem more believable. I recommend for all friends looking for something a bit different. It's not your typical short story collection but it's not quite poetry either. Another volume of queer Canadian lit that has way exceeded my expectations.

[Megan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't get through this book as there was nothing of substance here. Even keeping in mind I am not the intended audience as a woman and not a gay man, I'm not sure how many would feel like this book is worth their time. The writing is monotonous and monotone. It's not funny it's not sad or tragic it's just extremely mediocre and the author's attempts at insights into Grindr hookup culture are better gleaned from twitter than this book.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

like spending time with a quirky, neurotic friend. i enjoyed the collection.

[Modesto García · Rating 1 out of 5]

Media estrella. Me ha parecido horrible. Se nos muestran situaciones sin ningún tipo de contexto y sin ningún desarrollo de personajes de forma que cuesta muchísimo entender qué está pasando, quién lo está viviendo o por qué. Ni siquiera se identifica bien si son relatos independientes o si tienen que ver unos con otros.
Tampoco he entendido el tono, que era muy inconsistente siendo a veces cómico, a veces serio (ni te ríes ni te emocionas, por cierto), a veces realista, a veces fantasioso y excéntrico…
Terrible, en serio.

[Aaron Bergunder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was really beautiful and relatable in so many ways. I felt like I'm a dozen different characters that drift through the periphery of these stories. Also a hilarious surprise when a friend actually popped up in it as a character.

[Lizzy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really didn't like this one 😭 though I know I wasn't the target audience so I guess I shouldn't have been reading it in the first place

[Rick H · Rating 4 out of 5]

;p

If you’re gay & live in Vancouver you know these terrible guys.

[Catu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jenny Slate posted about this so I didn't hesitate to check it out. Weird, sad and funny.

[Hasan Namir · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book ! It was hilarious, well-written and very engaging! Mr. Zomparelli reinvents the short story genre and his stories and characters are unforgettable. Highly recommended!

[kp · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fragments that make up this book are often savagely funny, but what really impresses is the way they come together to create a story not just of looking for love in wrong places but also of pain, self-doubt, and the burden of having a mind and a heart. Disaffection, pain, absurdity, and a curious kind of tenderness.

[Laura Sackton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection does not pretend to be anything other than what it is, and that is its strength. It's a collection of interconnected stories about gay men dating and in relationships. There's a sameness to it that I found quite compelling. Zomparelli returns to the same themes, over and over again, in many guises: online dating, hookup culture, self-absorption, loneliness, breakups, disillusionment. There were a few longer stories, including the first one, about a man living with his boyfriend and his boyfriend's ghost, and a later story about anxiety, that really spoke to me. The short vignettes describing dates were often darkly funny, and sometimes exhausting. There is a lot of pettiness and cynicism in these stories, which makes the moments of connection, when they come, even more poignant. I also really appreciated the overall narrative arc of the book. After a while, you start to notice the character's showing up in each other's stories. There's a recurring character whose mother has just died, and as the book goes on, themes of grief, and the way that grief affects relationships, become more prominent.

I also really appreciated the wisps of the strange and surreal in this. Every so often a story would verge into fabulism, and those stories were some of the best in the collection. Overall this is the sort of story collection I love: it's so focused. It sets out to capture some of the particulars of a particular kind of gay culture, and it does that so well. And at times the humor was just so, so spot on.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Few things in it are awful, and even the most terrible persons in it are handled with care. "Everything Is Awful and You're a Terrible Person" is entertaining, but it feels like it's building up to a climax that never comes. In that way, it loses impact as a collection even as some individual stories are especially profound. The short, Grindr interludes are equal parts moving and horrifying, and I keep thinking of the phrase "The Gardens Were Hardly Lush" so many weeks after. Still, it's willingness to buck traditional contemporary-writer trends is impressive and so many of its stories call out for discussion.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favourite stories in no particular order (I'm bad at rememberingtitles): The title story 'Everything is Awful and You're a Terrible Person' set on a roadtrip through the Maritimes; the one about the father with the gypsy curse; the one about the recently dead mother; the stories about the monster with the loose skin who doesn't want to go out tonight and just wants to watch Blue Planet, though I was kind of hoping it was an alien not a monster, though I know that's dumb; the office story about the milk latte and the nice shorts; the one about the ghost boyfriend; the one about not getting into the spirit of Pride Week and then baking a lot of pies.

[Maicon Araujo · Rating 1 out of 5]

It’s not really my type of book, mostly because it made me feel kinda depressed specially towards the ending ( I should expect that based on the title). As for the beginning, it made me feel annoyed and uncomfortable due to the characters’ personality. In summary it didn’t add much to my life.

[Andrés J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vaya cuadro.

[Gregory Walters · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stumbled upon this as a reading option but I laughed out loud just from the title. Ballsy. Some people will be put off from that alone. I wanted to hunt it down. If nothing else, this guy has a point of view. When I picked it up from the library after placing a hold on it, the librarian who retrieved it for me laughed, too. So there. It’s not just me.

There’s so much promise in Zomparelli’s writing. The book offers thirty-two stories in two hundred pages, making for a quick read. Some characters and stories recur though I suspect I may have missed a few of the connections. Zomparelli often dives into his stories with things in progress and it’s up to the reader to catch up, trying to figure out the context. The characters are often unnamed at the outset so it can be challenging to know whether the story involves an already introduced character. Sometimes I didn’t want to have to work that hard because sometimes the situation I seem to have walked in on was disorienting enough. There’s a sleepwalking boyfriend who is cheating on his partner by still carrying on with his ex who happens to be a ghost. Um, what? My reaction to how they try to resolve the situation: Um, what?! There’s another story about a guy with extremely loose skin that he has to tape to stay in place. I had to abandon that piece. I’m ridiculously squeamish and the idea of skin falling out of place, however farcical, made me too uncomfortable. The character comes back in a later piece that I tolerated, the loose skin not seeming as icky. It’s possible that, by then, it even made some some sense. Really, I could have done without these stories, too out there for me. I think these pieces would have worked well enough without the experimental elements, but I suspect other readers might like the novelty that is added to the works.

A dozen of the stories involve the gay dating experiences of a character named Ryan. These are funny, often slightly tragic. Dating is messy. Here’s an excerpt from the first, titled “Date: What’s His Face”:

Ryan stared intently at what’s his face, taking in every feature.
His eyebrows were perfect. He could stand a nose job. Ryan
noticed the breakouts in the corners of his forehead.

“You’re kind of weird,” Ryan smirked.

“Why?”

“I can just tell. There’s something weird about you.” Ryan,
three beers in, began his ritual flirtation device of
insulting his dates.

“You don’t know me.”

“Oh, I know you. I can tell.”

What’s his face became irritable. “Maybe I should go now.”

“Why don’t I walk you home.”

Dating as a game. I never got my hands on that playbook, but there are plenty of Ryans, supposedly looking for love or maybe just sex or maybe a chance to mess with people’s minds. Ryan is flawed and yet someone to root for in these awkward, amusing encounters. Not everyone can be Prince Charming.

Another recurring story involves a character dealing with the death of his mother. We get fractured pieces of the relationship and what happened. Sometimes the mother appears in dreams. I’m not sure I got all I wanted out of this thread, but I was intrigued enough to want to read more.

There are so many nuggets in this work that are humorous and relatable. Just writing this, I was flipping back through the book, nodding, smiling and getting the impression that a second reading would be more rewarding, having a better sense of the bigger picture instead of just the wonderful details. Zomparelli’s writing is memorable. He’s a writer whose career I want to follow.

[William · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got my library to find this (there is not a single copy in the Maine library system) since I generally like collections of short stories with an unusual approach (both in content and format). Well, it had the usual style, but the content disappointed me. Maybe this is a book intended for a particular audience of which I am not a part, but I have enjoyed other gay fiction...just not so much this one.

The upside is Zomparelli's excellent ear for dialogue. The stories read as if the things the characters say were said in real life. There is also a poignant quality, and it seems like most of the characters need a good hug more than a hook-up.

But in general, the stories are very short (about half are four pages or less, and a few are only a couple of words). They are supposedly linked, and "Ryan" turns up frequently, but having just finished the book, I have no sense of who this guy is. And the stories all seem sort of the same. Do I hook-up or not? Do I stay, if I do meet someone? (Most of the characters seem to bolt from the scene before anything of consequence happens). In a sense, the book is more about not having sex than having it.

And the characters all seem the same -- neurotic, socially awkward, uncertain, lonely -- which makes the stories, though different in setting and format, too often seem the same. There is a prevailing sadness and a sense of a lot of lost boys.

Maybe this is just a potential cult book for those whose life it describes. But as an outsider who
reads all kinds of fiction, I'm afraid it did not work for me.

[Colin Jackson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really excited for this one, and its description made me think it was really going to be up my alley — sadly, it was a real slog for me, and took me a few months to get through despite its brevity. I may have enjoyed it more if I’d gotten through it faster. A few of these vignettes were quirky in a good way and enjoyable to read; Zomparelli has a dark, mordant sense of humor and a keen satirical eye toward modern gay hookup culture (often depicted here in its most dehumanizing extremes, with characters who read more like stereotypes than real people).

But too much of this book was, for me, trying really hard to be fragile and poetic and not succeeding all that well. I rolled my eyes at more than a few passages narrating a disconnected series of sensory or affective impressions with little substance behind the words, but written in simplistic present-tense clauses to give an effect of immediacy. The constant dream imagery and magical realism — which I am not at all opposed to a priori — were heavy-handed here and wore thin for me. Most readers here seem to have had very different experiences with this one, though, and I did find several vignettes poignant and worthwhile.

[Garrett Roney · Rating 4 out of 5]

“‘You never told your mom you're gay?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘She was so sick, and the doctors said she
couldn't handle much shock. Her heart was so bad.
I couldn't tell her. I was afraid that if I told her, it
would break her heart, and I'd be the last person to
break it.’
‘Oh, Daniel."
‘It feels like all we ever do in this world is
break each others' hearts.’"

“I ask him if he is happy, and he says he's not sure. He asks me if I am happy, and I say I'm not sure—I don't really know if I've been the ‘happy’ everyone means when they say the word. I know I've felt joy, and I've felt many moments of joy chained together to form happiness.”

This is not a collection for everyone. The writing style feels simplistic, but that adds to the sardonic and feckless tone that is pervasive through all of the stories. While darkly funny, each story deals with the complexities of gay hookups and relationships, insecurities, overwhelming anxiety, and ultimately a fear of happiness, or at least a lack of understanding of how to be happy.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know that I've ever had a one-word review before (and obviously I'm not starting now...) but I'm tempted to; "fractured."

Neither the stories nor the people in the stories are fully broken but neither do they constitute a whole; the stories are not quite a novel, the characters are not quite self-aware.

The writing itself, however, is entirely cohesive. It can be funny and profoundly sad, often strangely insightful in ways you don't expect. I found the most interesting stories to be the few that contain otherworldly creatures but the majority of the stories are solidly rooted in the world we know and don't suffer from it.

Because it appears that I'm currently doomed to reading a number of completely unconnected books that all end-up dealing in explicit sex, I will mention that this does have some sex scenes, none of which the average movie-and-TV-watching person should find offensive in 2018.

[Patrick Brennan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Odd and enjoyable book. My good friend Jeremy gifted this book to me and I'm very glad he did! In the modern gay community, there are certain perils that plague all gay men of a certain age. The transactional nature of Grindr, the delayed adolescence that thwarts productive adult relationships, the reality of having one partner but keeping your eyes open for the next best thing... This book touched upon all of them, with a hefty dose of humor to accompany it.

From the vapid & self-serving IG influencer to the compulsive liar who does it for sport, these are tropes of gay men we all have met at some point in our lives. There was one character I didn't understand -- his skin would constantly fall off when in uncomfortable situations? Not sure if this was intended to be a metaphor for "not being comfortable in your own skin" but it didn't quite land. Still, the book was a fun, albeit brief read.

[Rhea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book is like sitting down with a group of friends; each one of them telling you snippets of their sexcapades and dating stories from last summer. In a stylishly choppy and conversational prose, Daniel Zomparelli drags you to the table and make you listen stories that will make you go, "awww", "oh no she didnt", "spill the t sis", ":(". My favorites have got to be Ryan's dates, "Fake Boyfriend", and Ryan's date with NotallIcan.

The style of the prose is not my taste (I prefer very traditional long paragraphs). But, the author's chosen style is really the best suited one for this colleaction... so I wouldn't have it any other way tbh! I still would recommend this. Those of us who missed going out for a beer since the rona will be one of the ones who would enjoy this, I think (like meeee).