Someone Who Will Love You in all Your Damaged Glory
by Raphael Bob-Waksberg
I love a story of romance gone wrong. I’ve listened to the Lauren Waterman interview during the prologue of the 2007 This American Life episode about break-ups an amount that some might consider troubling: her line, “Everyone you know broke up with everyone they ever dated, until maybe the person they’re with right now if they’re with someone right now,” has been stuck in my head in one form or another for more than a decade (I just listened to the prologue and the Starlee Kine segments in their entireties while intending only to pull that quote). The weird sadness and unsecret longing bursts through the radio: Lauren and Starlee are literary figures representing broken desires—Juliets or Janes Eyre—where hopelessness seems reasonable. The truth, though, is what Lauren says at the top: the banality of most ended relationships is comical.
That sentiment is the heart of Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory.
The series of goofy blurbs on the back included Rachel Bloom, whom I find hilarious, so I figured I was in safe, comical hands.
And then the first of the long short stories almost lost me. “Curse you, Rachel Bloom, you tricked me,” I thought, and not for the first time (absolutely for the first time). It was interesting writing, sure, but it was simple narrative stuffed into an incredibly stiff series of absurdist metaphors. Even the longer stories are still short, though, so I figured reaching the point that they’re either funny or over should come quickly enough.
That first Bloom-cursed story’s stiffness did settle out; the constant sense of différance allowed the satire to really sing. Which, if you’re not into that whole Derrida thing, is a fun way to say that laughing at how ridiculous goat sacrifices to the Stone God are at a wedding is really no different from recognizing and laughing at our own absurd customs, just estranged from cultural familiarity.
Right, ok, that’s enough about deconstruction. Did I laugh? Yes. Here is a sample from the story You Want to Know What Plays Are Like?, which centers around a discussion of what plays are like:
“Okay, okay, but can we— Okay, but can we talk?” says the one on the bed.
“Drink first, then talk.”
“Virginia, can we talk, though? Can we talk, Virginia?”
People are always saying each other’s names in plays. That’s like the number one thing that happens in plays, is people just wedging names into sentences.
I’ll stop you there to say this is a pretty standard humorous observation, which made me laugh knowingly, so as to show the book that I knew enough about plays to find this amusing. Sorry, back to the story:
“You think I don’t want to talk, Maggie? I am well aware there are things about which we need to talk.”
“She’s pretty.”
“Am I drinking yet?”
“But she’s pretty. You have to give her that.”
“Well, of course she’s pretty, Maggie. This is Dennis we’re talking about. You think he’s just going to date some old possum that fell off the back of a truck full of boots?”
Sorry, me again. I did laugh here, not to impress the text with my erudition but because this seemed funny to me. Okay, now—and I don’t want to ruin anything—now, we’re at the part that is really funny. Or, it would be if I wasn’t destroying the flow. And overhyping. Sorry!:
This gets a big laugh from the audience, and it’s like: Why? And I’ll tell you why. It’s because the standards for comedy in plays are very low. Like if you heard someone say that in a movie, you’d be like, “Where is the joke?” But I guess because this is a play and, damn it, it’s out there doing the best it can, we’re all just willing to meet it halfway and laugh at some of its words.
Yeah. Yeah! Rarely have I found myself reading a humorous short story and found an amusing observation that rings true: never has said observation been both funny and novel to me. Maybe my guard was down because I had just interacted with the “people say their names a lot in plays” joke, and I had found it funny in the “I should laugh at this” way. Maybe it was because I did automatically laugh at the “possum off a boots truck” joke, because the scene was set in one of those extremely small and extremely crummy theaters that are instantly recognizable if you’ve spent any amount of time living in NYC, and I felt like I was there.
When the story full-on told me why I was laughing right to my dumb face, I laughed for real. “This isn’t funny but we all laugh because it’s theatre!” Very excellent.
You Want to Know What Plays Are Like? and The Average of All Possible Things were my personal favorites in this collection, but the whole thing is funny and smart, which is really all you need from a book of short stories. If Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory were an infinite number of stories in length, I would simply continue to read it.