THE THIRD PERSON

One man’s attempt to escape grief begets a journey of revelations and misadventures in this SF-tinted memoir.

Stoffel was shaken by his breakup with Warboy, who’d been both a lover and a best friend. Not long after, someone offered to sublet Luke’s New York apartment (via an Airbnb app) for an entire month; the author, seeing this as a chance to escape, used the money to fly out to Laos, a country he’d been to before and remembered fondly. After landing in Laos, he quickly reunited with Ohme, someone else he’d once loved. Stoffel traveled around Vietnam as well, from Hanoi to Ha Long City. While he savored many a sight, like any other tourist, he also faced plenty of trouble, including the subletters’ recurring problems in New York, worry that his damaged iPhone couldn’t be fixed, and quite a few unsavory hotel rooms. All the while, the author could only hope that his grief would subside, along with his loneliness, which he’d been feeling even before his split with Warboy. Despite many obstacles, Stoffel remained in Southeast Asia and eventually got the sense that he was “climbing back to himself.” Throughout the narrative, scenes with an AI chatbot intermittently appear; this AI, which the author had previously turned to for advice, observed and analyzed Stoffel’s experiences during his trip (presumably as it happened). At the same time, the AI gradually began to “empathize” with the human and may have evolved into something more than it was.

Stoffel delivers the bulk of this real-life account in a third-person voice. The story still feels personal, as readers are privy to what’s going on inside the author’s head. (“This wasn’t the first time he’d spun out like this, burning through patience, second-guessing every choice, longing for ease and punishing himself when it didn’t come.”) Many of the difficulties he endured are relatable, like impatiently waiting for someone to answer a text during a crisis or getting on the wrong bus. Rapidly dwindling funds were a constant concern, even before he caught his initial flight out of the States, lending the story a tension that rarely lets up. There’s no doubt that Stoffel wrestled with overwhelming emotions during his journey; he occasionally broke into tears and at one point felt completely detached while immersed in Vietnam’s lovely environment (a lapse for which the author admonishes himself). Stoffel effectively spotlights the terrain he traversed, including the beauty of chaotic Hanoi streets and a picturesque village that he compares to the Hobbits’ Shire and describes as “walking into a dream.” The generally lighthearted moments with the AI don’t hinder the book’s nimbleness, since they’re relatively brief and often stylized as coding (“// observational.log.013 …thinking… 5.1 seconds elapsed”). The AI’s observations tend to be both insightful and funny, such as its conclusion that “hookup platforms reinforce rejection as ambient norm.” It engagingly chats with the author as it begins to understand both him and itself, solidifying this memoir’s tie to Stoffel’s book Boy, Refracted (2026).

An absorbing real-life portrait of self-discovery, whether human or otherwise.