Tori Lemon
Lantern Staff
Photo by Publishers Weekly
For many readers, love is an interesting topic. There all kinds of variations of romance novels- from juvenile love stories like “The Fault in Our Stars”, to the over exaggerated romance novels that have Fabio’s flowing hair and ripped muscles all over the cover.
“Diary of an Oxygen Thief”, however, takes a new spin on a love story.
It’s from an alcoholic, lonely, hurt, misogynist male’s perspective. Even on the first page, the content is hard to take in: “I liked hurting girls. Mentally, not physically, I never hit a girl in my life. Well, once. But that was a mistake. I’ll tell you about it later. The thing is, I got off on it. I really enjoyed it.”
It’s understandable why readers would feel a little uneasy, even just at the very beginning of the story. Problematic would be an understatement when describing the narrator’s first impression.
Our narrator takes on a dual personality here; he tells the story and is also the protagonist. “Diary of an Oxygen Thief” is his awful version of a romance story. By awful I do not mean it is a horrendous book, for it is actually quite amazing. Awful can be used to describe how he hurt people, and awful can also be used to describe how karma came right back around and gave him what he deserves.
It’s a bittersweet story that shows how “hurt people hurt people.” While breaking others because you feel broken should not be your go-to natural reflex, that’s exactly what the anonymous character does here.
The storyline follows all the interactions the anonymous Irishman comes across as he travels to Manhattan, the Midwest and Dublin for his new job. It seems like he’s chasing his love interest, but in all honesty he ends up realizing he was just trying to chase his own self-love. What starts out as his history of mentally hurting women turns into him being mental hurt by the one woman he actually falls in love with. It is funny how the tables turn.
The story is wonderfully written. Even with all of the cynical thought processes that were flowed into the sentences, the words on the pages are genuine. They’re real accounts of a person’s feeling towards love and loss. The author makes his characters easy to over-identify with. He balances the messy lives we live, the not so smart relationships many put themselves through, and the pain of thinking you have loved all figured out and the disappointment of realizing you were way off.
In between the hurt, there’s the mystical work of karma. The idea that life is all about getting what you put into the world is hiding behind the words. The author learns firsthand how if you do harm to others intentionally, the universe will find a way to make you pay for that. As he said, “You’re not punished for your sins, you’re punished by them.”