While you spend most of your time double taking over what is said by this chauvinistic narrator, it’s the mystery that you keep reading for. While I was uncertain about the novel because of the main character, I couldn’t help but find the book quietly brilliant. While this is uncomfortable to read and infuriating that as readers we don’t know if the book is even autobiographical or fiction as the story is plausible while still retaining realistic drama intertwined with the skill of the anonymous writer, which adds even more to the mystery of the story. The writer shows the realistic side of alcoholism and the effects of abuse from the point of view of the abuser. Not the romantic, or subdued type of stories I usually read. It was realistic in comparison to what I became so accustomed to in my teen years. It felt like the first adult book I had ever read. It was the first time I read something that challenged how I thought of adult relationships. When I first began to read this book first, I was baffled.
The looming sense of punishment throughout the novel reminds you that fiction or not, what goes around comes around. The anonymous writer is quite brilliant in using the main character’s paranoia to show his remorse for his misogynistic behaviour in his past and using a young woman to do the same to him and possibly following in his footsteps.
Enter the unnamed barely legal photographers assistant that he can’t seem to shake, but now it is his turn to be the prey and the humiliation of being used by the opposite sex for the entertainment of the New York photo scene of the early 2000s. However as the narrator points out “you’re not punished for your sins, you’re punished by them” and karma’s a bitch with a camera in this case. His pattern remains the same until he takes it too far and decides to change his life around and move to the United States and refrain from any relationship with women for a decade. Self-proclaimed decent looking and wealthy enough to attract women. Is it fiction or non-fiction? We are instead met with an emotionally abusive graphic designer in London preying on women to use and once they’ve fallen for him, he publicly humiliates them. In fact, you’ll be questioning yourself every time you think of it after reading it. For more on the topic of admen turned fiction writers, read this piece on James Patterson.When you think of the novel’s title ‘Diary of an Oxygen Thief’, you could link it to romance, action or adventure, but you’d be sorely mistaken when coming across this book.
#Oxygen thief how to
The sonofabitch really knew how to hustle. Today, Diary of an Oxygen Thief has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and nobody can put their finger on who exactly wrote it. He even set up a bookstand downtown where he sold the book directly to interested readers. He strung up posters (of said carrot-cocked snowman) all over New York City. He redesigned the cover, making it a nasty image of a noseless snowman with a carrot for a cock. He posed as an independent publisher to get his books into Barnes & Noble. This interest among bookstores prompted in A what Kurt Vonnegut once coined “ moxie” and so he went ahead and printed another 5,000 copies and decided to go all-in on promoting Diary of an Oxygen Thief. The anonymous author –– whom we will call “ A” –– was living in Europe at the time and began flashing Diary of an Oxygen Thief around at local bookstores –– before he knew it, the book was being carried in Paris’s Shakespeare and Co. (Side note: for those unfamiliar with how much it costs to print a book, this was one hell of an opportunity –– each individual copy of After Her and One Minute, Please? which are both paperbacks, cost me $5.) Magic in Paris.
#Oxygen thief free
“The answer is no.”Īfter the book was rejected, again and again, by a handful of literary agents, a friend of the author’s offered to print him 1,000 hardcover copies, free of charge. Diary of an Oxygen Thief was first published fifteen years ago by an anonymous British Adman who had honed his advertising chops at agencies ranging from London to New York to the Netherlands.