Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory: Stories

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About this item:

Written with all the scathing dark humor that is a hallmark of BoJack Horseman, Raphael Bob-Waksberg delivers a fabulously off-beat collection of short stories about love--the best and worst thing in the universe.

Featuring:

- A young engaged couple forced to deal with interfering relatives dictating the appropriate number of ritual goat sacrifices for their wedding.

- A pair of lonely commuters who ride the subway in silence, forever, eternally failing to make that longed-for contact.

- A struggling employee at a theme park of U.S. presidents who discovers that love can't be genetically modified.

And fifteen more tales of humor, romance, whimsy, cultural commentary, and crushing emotional vulnerability.

Review

"Continues to surprise and delight." --The Washington Post

"Wonderfully weird." --Vulture

"Complex, daring, emotional, and unique." --B. J. Novak, author of One More Thing

From the Back Cover

Written with all the scathing dark humor that is a hallmark of BoJack Horseman, Raphael Bob-Waksberg's stories will make you laugh, weep, and shiver in uncomfortably delicious recognition. In "A Most Blessed and Auspicious Occasion," a young couple engaged to be married is forced to deal with interfering relatives dictating the appropriate number of ritual goat sacrifices for their wedding. "Missed Connection--m4w" is the tragicomic tale of a pair of lonely commuters eternally failing to make that longed-f

About the Author

Raphael Bob-Waksberg is the creator and executive producer of the Netflix series BoJack Horseman. This is his first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Serial Monogamist’s Guide to Important New York City Landmarks

Towering over the east side of Fifth Avenue, between Fiftieth and Fifty-First Streets, you’ll find the majestic St. Patrick’s Cathedral, historically significant as the place where you and Eric sat on the steps and ate frozen yogurt that time.

Should you happen upon this neo-Gothic-style still-active Roman Catholic church, you’ll be instantly transported to that ancient day, several summers prior, when the two of you were finally getting along again, for the first time in what seemed like forever. It felt like old times, this excursion into Manhattan, and you smiled as the sticky-sweet swirl of hazelnut and banana melted down your arm.

At one point, Eric looked at you and, grinning, said, “Hey, you’ve got a little . . .” and as he reached for your face, you instinctively jerked away from his hand. You didn’t mean anything by it, this flinch—it just happened—but in an instant, the whole day fell apart.

You and Eric looked at each other, in the shadow of that cathedral, and you saw Eric’s face fall, as you had often seen it fall, in that just-so-Eric way.

“What are we doing?” Eric asked, and you shook your head and said, “I don’t know.”

And then the two of you sat on the steps of the cathedral for a very long time without saying anything.

Later, you and Eric went back to his apartment and had sex. But it was too late. The damage had been done.

***

New York City is full of history. Take, for example, the Waverly Diner down in Greenwich Village. It was at this very spot you and Keith stayed up all night talking over pancakes, after ducking out of Emily’s twenty-sixth birthday party.

There was so much to say to each other, you and Keith. It was right after you and Eric broke up, and Keith was so not Eric. Keith was like the opposite of everything Eric stood for.

If you had been thinking rationally at the time, you probably could’ve guessed that you would end up hurting Keith in ways he didn’t deserve. But that night everything seemed so perfect. You wanted Keith, and you felt like you had earned him somehow. It felt like all your life had been persistently preparing you for meeting this man.

You still sometimes pass the Waverly Diner, down in Greenwich Village, on the Avenue of the Americas, but you rarely go inside it, and you never order the pancakes.

***

Was ever a city so ruined by history, so smothered in the blood of past conflagration? Once, while haphazardly browsing the Restoration Hardware on Ninth Avenue and Thirteenth, killing time before meeting Boris’s parents for a walk up the High Line, you idly picked up a loose spatula that suddenly reminded you of a fight you’d had two years earlier in Keith’s kitchen.

The conversation had started innocuously enough when Keith asked, “What do you want in your omelet?” and somehow ended two hours later when he shouted, “I don’t think you really love me; I think you’re just terrified of being alone,” and you, gesticulating wildly with the spatula, spat back without thinking, “I am alone; you have no idea how alone I am,” as if that were some kind of comeback.

The spatula you now held in the Restoration Hardware was the same, the architecture of it surprisingly familiar, the weight of it in your hand alarmingly potent, and when you breathlessly explained to Boris the story of the artifact’s eerie significance, he scrunched up his nose and said, “If the two of us are ever going to move forward, at some point, you’re going to have to stop looking backward.”

***

You’d already started dating Sean when Boris called, late, drunk, and asked if you wanted to go to Staten Island. You’d never been to Staten Island, and Boris had never been to Staten Island, and since Boris was about to move to Philadelphia, this seemed like as good a time as any to visit Staten Island.

Boris had also invited you to go to Philadelphia with him, but that felt too far, too much, too soon, too Boris. Instead, you chose New York. You broke up with Boris, got your own place in Bushwick, and started dating Sean, the cute bartender at Union Pool. You didn’t think you’d see Boris again, but on his last night in New York he called you, late, drunk, to invite you on an adventure.

The truth is there’s not much to see on Staten Island, not after midnight anyway. The boat ride there is awfully romantic, but once you get there . . . well, there’s the elevator ride up to the top floor of the ferry building, and if you’re bored, you can take it back down again.

There’s a fish tank in the ferry building and some reading material posted at the base of it about the logistics of housing a fish tank in the Staten Island ferry building. It’s a very large fish tank, so heavy the floor has to be supported with iron beams. “It’s a big deal, this fish tank; a lot of work went into it,” says the placard at the base, to the best of your recollection (you haven’t been back). “We did this all for you, visitors to Staten Island, so you’d better appreciate it!”

You remember standing next to Boris and reading the fish tank placard. You would have thought there’d be more to say to each other this night before you said good-bye forever, but it turns out you’d already said everything. So instead of going through it all again, you stood side by side in the silence of the ferry building and read the information at the base of the fish tank.

“Welcome to Staten Island,” it probably said. “We hope you enjoy your visit! Maybe if things were different, maybe if one of you weren’t about to leave the city for good, you could come here again sometime. Maybe this could become something special, something bigger than just a thing you tried once because, hey, why not? But on the other hand, it’s probably best not to think about it too much. Just enjoy this for what it is. You’ve still got the boat ride back to Manhattan to look forward to, and if you load yourself up with too many might-have-beens, the ferry will sink under all that weight.”

***

This area, New York, once called New Amsterdam by its early Dutch settlers and Lenapehoking by its native Algonquin peoples, is overflowing with its own half-buried past. The subway tunnels are nearly unnavigable, flooded by a thousand overlapping adventures. Should you, in your travels, zoom by the Lorimer stop on the L under Williamsburg, look closely at the swiftly passing platform and you’ll see a young woman waiting, hair disheveled, makeup smeared—it’s you during those six weeks when you would stumble home from Sean’s apartment at three o’clock in the morning, high heels in hand, just because you didn’t want to be one of those girls who spent the night.

***

The town is full of these triggers, and the longer you live here, the more land mines you set. There’s the Gap at Astor Place, the bathroom at the Crocodile Lounge—the odds of stumbling into the lingering smoke of an old flame are staggering, and increasing still with every new significant instant spent with another significant other.

But of all the tributes to the fallen heroes and tragic victims of your fickle heart, a list as long and exhausting as a full avenue block, there remains one place more than any other you know you can never return to.

You know where it is and you go out of your way to not see it, to not be reminded of the thing that happened there. It’s too much, this place. It would swallow you whole, this void, this pit, this unassuming two-story brownstone in Carroll Gardens that houses the one-bedroom apartment a much younger you and the man now listed in your phone as “DO NOT CALL HIM” were ever so foolish as to refer to as “home.”

Sometimes you imagine DO NOT CALL HIM also not going there. You picture the two of you both not going there at the same time and not meeting each other outside on the sidewalk; you not taking the opportunity to tell him all the ways he wronged you, not explaining that even though you were over it now—so, so over it—you just wanted to make sure he didn’t try that shit again with the next girl, for her sake.

“Because you’re such a f*cking humanitarian,” he would not say, and you would wonder why you’d bothered to not meet up with him in the first place.

***

And then there’s the Bronx, which is where people decide to get married—specifically the zoo part of the Bronx, specifically the part of the zoo that’s in front of the Monkey House, and specifically your grandparents, who visited the Bronx Zoo Monkey House after six weeks of courtship and decided to get married.

“How did you make such a big decision after six weeks?” you once asked your grandmother. “You barely even knew each other.”

“In those days, people didn’t drag their feet so much. If you loved someone, you married him.”

“But how did you know?”

“It was easy,” she replied. “I asked your grandfather, ‘Do you think we should get married?’ And he said, ‘Let’s ask the monkeys. Hey, monkeys! You think we should get married?’ And the monkeys were laughing, and he said, ‘I think that’s a yes.’ ”

“That’s it? You got married because the monkeys were laughing?”

Your grandmother shrugged. “I thought it was a sign.”

You took Alex to the Bronx Zoo once—or was it Anthony?—to see if the primates might make some magic for you, but the Monkey House was gone. It had been torn down in 2012.

You decided that was a sign.

***

In Astoria, Queens, sits a small studio apartment in which Carlos, love of your life for the moment, puts together his applications for grad school. During slow days at work or long rides on the N, you’ll catch yourself daydreaming about Carlos getting accepted somewhere—and you following him—far, far away.

You imagine spending the rest of your life with this man, as you’ve imagined with all of them—not because you think you will necessarily, but just because you can’t help but wonder.

You imagine the kids you’ll have, the family vacations and anniversary dinners, the way you’ll help each other with the dishes, the way you’ll interrupt and editorialize each other’s stories and jokes, the way you’ll promise to never go to bed angry, even if that means—as it often will—staying up all night arguing.

But mostly, you imagine living somewhere else, miles and miles from this cramped and crowded once-thriving capital of the twentieth century. You could live in Austin, you think, or Minneapolis. You hear Seattle is gorgeous and you’ve never even been.

One morning, over breakfast and tea and the weekend Seattle Times in your spacious new downtown loft (or whatever kind of apartment people get in Seattle), Carlos will smile at you and you’ll smile at him, and he’ll scratch the back of his head in that shaggy Carlos way of his, and he’ll say, “Hey, why don’t we plan a trip to New York sometime? We can see a Broadway show, catch up with old friends . . .”

Carlos will clear the two cereal bowls, part of the brand-new set you bought when you moved here, and on the way to the sink, he’ll kiss you gently on the forehead, the very forehead that’s been so gently kissed by so many men, a marker amid thousands in a graveyard of kisses.

And you’ll smile at this man and wonder to yourself if he too, like all those who came before him, will someday be a bittersweet memory, will someday be felled by the same foolish blunder of knowing you a little too well and yet also somehow not enough.

“What do you say? You want to go back to New York, see the sights?”

“No,” you’ll say. “There are too many ghosts there.”

Review:

4.7 out of 5

93.85% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars I love this

E. · 25 September 2022

What a weird, sad, lovely, heart wrenching, and at times profound collection of stories. If you like BJH you’ll love this too.

4.0 out of 5 stars Love Stories for Those who Don’t Like Love Stories

J.A. · 24 March 2023

This is a collection of alternative love stories - zany and unpredictable, and as a set holds the reader’s attention for its sheer variety in scope.There are quite a few that lingered in my mind way after I’ve read them. One of them is “Missed Connection,” a story about two strangers who meet on a train and is just about the make a connection but each is just too shy to make the first move, and so they wait - and keeps postponing getting off the train. It is both absurd and implausible yet it is poignant and entertaining.A little bit of sci-fi is evident in “We Men of Science” that pays an ironic homage to Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” though much of the twisted imagination is the author’s own.A prose poem of sorts, simply titled “the poem,” is about a love poem gone awry was one of the experimental pieces that worked well - a sort of self-referential and metafictive piece that sang.Another story that stood out was the (in comparison) quite a middle-of-the-road office romance turned sour in “The Average of All Possible Things.” But the central character Lucinda and her inner struggles are so realistically portrayed that you can’t help but feel for her as she tries to maintain a stoic front at work.Family drama abounds in “You Want to Know What Plays are Like?” when a sister is invited to watch her brother’s play that she swears is based on their dysfunctional family, opening up some wounds and unleashing not a few family secrets.There is much to recommend in this collection for fans of stories that are a little irreverent and unpredictable.

5.0 out of 5 stars I love this book. In all its damaged glory.

L. · 15 June 2024

A wonderful collection of short stories. Just do yourself a favour and read it!

5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it! Bring the Hardback back

C. · 15 August 2022

The book meets the expectations set by the author's prior work. I feel kind of special to have bought the original hardback with torn up pages. It looks like they've stopped producing it now.

3.0 out of 5 stars Quality of the Content- Great

H. · 24 March 2020

A great collection of stories- akin to BoJack in the way they are subtly heartbreaking but also inherently comedic. The major problem was that my copy had pages nearly falling out and just generally didn’t seem very well put together. Happy with the content but disappointed with the quality of my copy

5.0 out of 5 stars Painfully Beautiful

M. · 24 August 2019

Painfully beautiful

4.0 out of 5 stars Funny, dark, sometimes uncomfortably 'real' collection

J. · 12 April 2021

I'm a huge BoJack fan, and was very pleased to find that Raphael's unique voice translates to the form of short fiction. As with all short story collections, there are hits and misses, but I think every reader will find deep levels and interpretations of meaning within these stories based on their own personal experiences. The blending of surreal humour with dark, disturbing emotions and situations is artful, and probably his greatest strength as a writer. Some stories pull off this blend better than others but the ones that hit the mark will stay with you for a long time.

5.0 out of 5 stars We're all gloriously damaged

M. · 29 October 2020

We should all stop for a moment and appreciate the ragged edges of the pages. It's by no means a mistake, but a clever choice that not everyone seems to have picked up on.I, for one, love this book in all its damaged glory. Would never recommend enough! Touching and bonkers.

A bittersweet collection exploring the transient nature of love.

K.C. · 7 May 2024

As the title implies, this collection takes a look at love -- the good, the bad, and the downright weird. This isn't your happily-ever-after kind of love, these stories dive into its bittersweet transience: how people grow apart, how things don't work out, how hearts get broken, bandaged up, and put out there just to get banged up again. The opening and closing pieces make perfect endcaps to this theming: the book opens with a woman on a first date, wondering if the man she's with is worth trusting or if she's going to get hurt again, while the last piece features a one night stand where a couple comes to know each other completely, only to become strangers again in the morning. Throughout the collection, Raphael Bob-Waksberg plays with the concept of love -- along with the form of his poems and stories -- in order to view the traditional love story through a fresh perspective. We get a love story told through the point of view of the boyfriend's dog. The love poem about writing love poems. The rules list for a game of Taboo that explores the things you can and can't say in relationships. Whether it's playing with form, or inserting superheroes or Satanists into age-old tales of marriage or growing up, each story has something that makes it feel like it's never been done before.The writing style isn't overly flowery, but the narrative spends a lot of time contemplating the nature of people, things, love, etc. Any plot or action is used as a framing device for the emotions or atmosphere Bob-Waksberg is trying to communicate. Even pieces that are more plot-driven don't seat us inside the action; the focus is always on the internal and interpersonal drama playing out around it. If you enjoyed Bojack Horseman but found it a little dark, this collection may be just right for you. While many of its stories are bittersweet, it's not nearly as hopeless as Bob-Waksberg's popular Netflix show. It may make you feel lonely and like finding love is utterly hopeless, but it won't make you hate the rest of humanity (hopefully).The book has such a powerful emotional impact that it's hard not to dwell on some of these stories, even months later. If, like me, you love that sour punch of bittersweet love and loss, you won't be disappointed with this collection.TL;DR: 5/5 stars. A bittersweet collection exploring the transient nature of love.

Genial

D. · 12 March 2024

Esse livro é muito gostoso de ler, com narrativas não óbvias, engraçadas, tocantes e que se transformam dependendo das suas experiências e época de vida. Não sou fã de Bojack, mas esse livro entrou para o topo dos favoritos.

Surprisingly Thoughtful Short Stories

D.O. · 29 September 2023

I will be honest: I mostly bought this because the cover is such a pretty pink and I am, in my heart, a barbie girl. That being said, this is an incredible book rec for Barbie girls- and not the Malibu Barbie. I'm talking disillusioned, deeply inquisitive, depressed Greta Gerwig Barbie. Each short story in this book is wildly creative and fantastical while still offering relatable and often heartfelt metaphor and real-world applicability. I was surprised to find this was written by the creator of Bojack Horseman because they seem so wildly different, but this book is so clever and witty at times that it's quite clear the creator is a comic.My favorite short story was a really macabre feature about a couple planning their wedding- it's deep, it's gory, it's awe-some and ridiculous, and most of all it is hauntingly, frustratingly relatable. I would definitely recommend this to anyone, especially if you're new to the weird and bizarre.

Amé

E. · 6 March 2023

Lo compré en kindle así que no tengo comentarios del tiempo de envío o el estado del paquete.Hablando del contenido del libro: me gustó mucho.Siendo un libro de relatos se presta a que unos gusten más que otros o haya algunos que se sientan flojos; pero en general disfruté mucho este libro. La narración cambia de tono dependiendo de la historia y eso lo hace muy refrescanteConsidero que es un libro muy bien escrito, que toca temas y experiencias universales de manera honesta, original, cruda, ácida y divertida.Muy recomendable

Amazing

f.p. · 29 August 2022

Must read, loved it so much

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Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory: Stories

Name: Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory: Stories
Brand: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
SKU: K0525432728
Price: 8.66 BHD
Availability: InStock
Rating: 4.3 (13 reviews)

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