by Norris Rettiger

As someone who has graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing, I know there’s a strangely consistent correlation between writing that tries to “break down conventions and experiments with the form” and writing that is utterly unreadable. I’ve read it, hell, I’ve written it. We all know it, because sometimes it manages to pass through the filters of the publishing sphere and maybe lands itself squarely in the “revolutionary” or “visionary” box, and it is hailed by critics as being the hottest book you’ve ever laid your sensitive little bookworm hands on… but it still has that remarkably under-mentioned quality of being painfully unreadable.

Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s book, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory breaks down conventions in the conventional “breaking conventions” genre by being an absolute joy to read from cover to cover. Rarely will the comments “brilliant disregard for deeply-entrenched constraints of prose” and “the funniest summer read on the shelf” sit so close to each other as they do with this gem of comedy and insight.

There’s so much that could be said about the humor, the creativity, the style, and so on, but the real reason to fall in love with this book is: this book has already fallen in love with you. That “You” in the title? That’s you. And that “someone” is Raphael Bob-Waksberg, who has filled this book to bursting with absolute, undying affection for the human condition in all its damaged glory. This is a book that doesn’t only feel like it was written about you (it’s the most relatable thing ever), it feels like it was written for you. Bob-Waksberg writes like a good friend coming up with magnificent and personal stories that will help you through late night anxieties and those sudden moments of hopelessness that can make us all feel like we’ve missed something important. Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory might be about the ways we mess up and struggle to live honestly and meaningfully in a messed up world, but in those hard and sometimes bizarre moments we are at our most human, and Raphael Bob-Waksberg is celebrating and loving that humanity with every page he writes.

Whether it’s finding strange beauty in nonsensical wedding rituals or that moment of eye contact on a train that sometimes lasts a lifetime, no story loses touch with humanity, even if they do tend to spin off from reality. With creativity and a heightened sense of events, Bob-Waksberg takes our quirks, fears, loves, and wonders and explodes them up in bursts of narrative genius that make you laugh for pages on end, thinking to yourself that surely nothing could be so accurate and so ridiculous, but then, when each moment lands, he allows us to feel the honesty of what he wrote, and the emotions of what we’ve been laughing at.

Sometimes, I think, we start to believe, mostly subconsciously, that the best books are written by the best liars; lie upon lie, creatively layered so deep and dense until we believe it, until we are convinced. But this book reminds me that’s just not how it is. The best books are written by the truth-tellers. Raphael Bob-Waksberg is a truth teller. These stories tell the truths we forget and the truths we tell ourselves are lies, the truths that are hard to stare in the face and the truths that can only be shouted after a long silence. Truth is quiet, truth is unpredictable, truth is big, truth is weird, truth is too much, and truth is everything. I guess you might say truth is us, and maybe that’s why we like it so much.

For anyone who recognizes the fact that nothing will ever be quite as strange as people, these creative and completely original stories will be a comfort, a wild ride, and a mile or two in the never-ending marathon of human empathy and our desire for connection. This is the book for anyone looking for a fresh, modern, and incisively humorous take on human relationships and the many ways we just can’t seem to stop making a beautiful mess out of our strange and brief time on earth. It’s one of my favorites of the year.

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