April 13 2026, 15:37

Diary of an Oxygen Thief

Author: Anonymous

First published: 2006

The question of whether it is fiction, autofiction, or autobiography colours the experience of reading this book from the start. The opening line is, 'I liked hurting girls'. The author is anonymous. And for the next fifteen pages he describes in malicious detail how he manipulates a woman into falling in love with him before dismantling her emotionally just because he enjoys seeing her in pain. I had to make a decision at that point if I wanted to continue.

It's written well. The voice is narcissistic, amusing in places (but nowhere near as funny as it thinks it is), self-aware, and dripping with self-loathing. He foreshadows a comeuppance at the end to try to make the details of his emotional abuse worth reading, as if it's all okay because revenge was had, and this is also an attempt to manipulate the reader. It worked on me, because I finished it.

The drawn out and complicated plot to professionally undo our anonymous voice is woefully inadequate compared with the many women he abused before he became sober. It's a strange story, and it comes back to the central conceit. There is art, there is the artist, but what to make of something whose origin is deliberately obscured? It could be an artfully constructed fiction. That's impressive. It could be a narcissistic damage limitation exercise by a terrible person. That's something else altogether. It seems to me that the Anonymous moniker only serves the commercial interests of the publisher.

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