Diary of an Oxygen Thief

Description

An unnamed Irish advertising executive living in London opens his account with an admission: he once enjoyed emotionally hurting women. Now sober after attending Alcoholics Anonymous, he revisits the relationships, humiliations, and cruelties that fed both his vanity and his self-disgust. A move to the United States carries him into New York corporate culture, where class transition, culture shock, paranoia, addiction, and inherited pain unsettle the identity he has constructed. His love for an aspiring photographer appears to offer a different kind of intimacy, but remorse does not automatically make him trustworthy or kind. Presented as an abrasive anonymous confession, the novel examines misogyny, damaged desire, and whether self-awareness represents genuine change or merely another form of self-absorption.

Themes