“I needed help, I thought to myself, and then remembered that I was getting help. But it just didn't feel like I was getting any better. I thought of that slogan: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I never confessed; I just hoped the feelings would go away. But instead they spread like a disease, rushing through my veins and lining my stomach until I felt nauseated. I then stopped and stood still as another slogan seeped into my head: Secrets keep us sick.”
TITLE—You Exist Too Much
AUTHOR—Zaina Arafat
PUBLISHED—2020
PUBLISHER—Catapult (US) or Dialogue (UK)
AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR—Zehra Jane Naqvi
AUDIOBOOK PUBLISHER—HighBridge Audio
GENRE—contemporary fiction—autofiction
SETTING—NYC & the Midwest + flashbacks to Palestine & DC
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—queer identity, coming out to one’s conservative/traditional family, love & relationships, how trauma informs our ability to love others & ourselves, mother-daughter relationship, bisexual Palestinian FMC, mental illness, secrets & lies, codependency, addiction, therapy & rehab, connection & vulnerability, academia, tenuous & transient living spaces—a search for home in all its iterations
“When guilt morphed into resentment and grew so big that I was blinded by it, it seeped out of my pores and left me feeling powerless. And so I raged…”
Summary:
"The heart of You Exist Too Much is the heart of every queer experience—nay, human experience—the search for love and a place to call home.” — The Advocate
"A moving, irreverent, darkly entertaining novel about the agony of family, the mysteries of romantic love, and the painful work of learning where we stop and others begin. Arafat is a true original." — Nina Renata Aron
My thoughts:
This book was really interesting. At first it came across as a very sort of typical contemporary fiction novel but as it develops you get stronger autofic & even literary vibes vis-a-vis elements like structure, character depth, & voice. I don't normally like reading about folks' therapy/ rehab journeys but for some reason the deep honesty & vulnerability of the MC made it all feel very relatable & engaging. I also think I liked how even though the therapy structure, activity, & language was extremely cringe & overall just super corny (which the MC acknowledges) she still ended up finding it helpful so seeing her humility in those spaces was actually really inspiring.
I loved the MC. She was pure bisexual chaos. I also found her concerningly relatable in a lot of ways & even to a degree that was at times deeply unsettling… the way I felt called out by this book at times… 👀 I’ve seen many reviews describe her as “unlikable” but I definitely didn’t feel that way at all—I actually found her incredibly honest & sympathetic & I think this was largely due to her struggle with her very particular form of addiction. My heart just went absolutely out to her.
I did have a bit of trouble grasping the full dynamic between her & her mother. I felt like I was just having to take her word for some of it & I didn’t really feel like I was being shown all of the complexities behind the nature of their relationship so it was a bit hard to really follow the MC’s thoughts, feelings, & growth in respect to those parts. In a way it almost felt like her mother was less of a “real person” & more like a symbol of a larger loss of family, a loss of community, on a deep, indigenous level, a rooted-in-the-land, kind of level, due to the occupation & the effect of trauma on multiple generations.
I also think this could be considered a romance on some level as it was pretty spicy & Arafat’s writing during those parts & scenes was absolutely excellent. It reminded me a bit of Olivie Blake’s books which I also loved.
I would recommend this book to readers who read lit fic, contempo fic, contempo romance, generational dramas, & gravitate towards themes of cultural displacement, identity, family dynamics, queerness, & art. This book is best read while on the move.
Final note: This book probably also has the best bi rep I’ve ever encountered in a book before excepting maybe only AM Weald’s EVEN IF WE’RE BROKEN (which was just a slightly different kind of bi rep but also excellent).
“Above all, I longed for the smell of the jasmine flowers that were outside every apartment building, though curiously I hardly noticed them while I was there. It seemed I could only ever smell them from thousands of miles away.”
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
CW // abusive relationships, codependency, addiction (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)
Season: Summer
Music pairing: “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!,” by Molly Sandén; “Terrible Things,” by April Smith; “Caught A Body,” by Iniko
Further Reading—
THIS ARAB IS QUEER edited by Elias Jahshan
ANNIE JOHN by Jamaica Kincaid
JONNY APPLESEED by Joshua Whitehead
THE SKIN AND ITS GIRL by Sarah Cypher—TBR
NAMESAKE by NS Nuseibeh
Review coming soon!
BLOOD ORANGE by Yaffa As—TBR
ROUGE by Mona Awad
Read my review for ROUGE here.
ALONE WITH YOU IN THE ETHER by Olivie Blake
Review coming soon!
EVEN IF WE’RE BROKEN by AM Weald
& in a way I would almost say that Ottessa Moshfegh’s MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION would be in a lot of ways like the counter-point to this book…
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Favorite Quotes—
“All I could do was strategically try to calm myself, to remember that the anticipation was heavier than the thing itself.”
“In acquiring my gender, I had become offensive.”
“Wearing my uncle's baggy trousers, I enjoyed occupying blurred lines. Ambiguity was an unsettling yet exhilarating space.”
“I forgave Renata her misplaced annoyance. She had put up with me panicking about nearly everything for years. ‘Your worries are like water,’ she often said. ‘The moment one flows out, another floods in to fill the space.’”
“Without the security of a relationship, longing felt less safe. It felt lonely.”
“Worse than anger was indifference: her approval was my compass, even when that meant resisting it.”
“The notion that everyone will eventually cease to exist brings me great comfort and temporary courage. Often I try to visualize the coming apocalypse: barren tree branches, scrap metal, tumbleweed. As the images appear in my head, a wave begins to curl in my stomach. Together they propel me forward, and I act.”
“As people around the room shared stories of sons' arrests and daughters' relapses, husband anger, parental neglect, panic crept up inside me. Those weren't the kinds of stories I'd expected to hear, and they were resonating a little too well. I felt embarrassed by the similarities of our experiences, the way they overlapped, the banality of what had been so painful to me.”
“As I sat in the lodge lapping up coffee, I looked around at the posters on the walls. There was one with a gnome walking down a long fairy-tale trail. Beneath him was a quote by Proust: ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.’”
“If my mother was Hamas—unpredictable, impulsive, and frustrated at being stifled—my father was Israel. He'd refuse to meet her most basic needs until she exploded. Then he would point at her and cry, ‘Look at what a monster she is, what a terror!’ But never once did he consider why she had resorted to such extreme tactics, or his role in the matter.”
“‘Secrets keep us sick,’ Richard said during group on Day 4. It sounded like the tagline for a horror movie, too melodramatic to have any impact. ‘They keep us from being our authentic, real selves. So we're each going to tell one.’”
“But did it count as deception if it was done in the name of self-protection? Withholding vulnerable information was a habit born of survival. I'd been lulled into letting my guard down before, only to later regret it, the admissions used against me as I bore her wrath.”
“Getting me to stop smiling was a goal for all the counselors. According to them it was part of my armor. ‘We wear masks to protect ourselves, but they also keep us from being vulnerable,’ Richard announced the first week. ‘They keep us from achieving intimacy.’ During the Wednesday night Big Book meeting, a recovering alcoholic defined intimacy as "into-me-you-see.” I’d written it down on the back page of my journal.”
“In an attempt to escape my thoughts, I'd solicit and seduce others to the point of mental annihilation…”
“‘I don't know,’ I said, feeling a pinch of guilt for being in Italy and not the West Bank, volunteering with refugees or resisting the occupation, or at least something related to my heritage. Every country outside of my own felt like a luxury, and at twenty-three, I wanted to indulge. In a way I felt I deserved to.
“‘I have no responsibilities here,’ I said. ‘And no ties to anyone.’
“He smiled, and his white beard spread like smoke. ‘You'll find that having someone who has a claim on you, and who you can claim, it's one of the greater things in life.’”
“…then she mouthed, "elephant shoe." I had taught her that trick, that when you mouth those words, it looks like ‘I love you.’”
“I am not an object—I’m not just Laila's daughter. I exist!”
“I’m aware I can be exhausting—“you exist too much," my mother often told me.”
“I admit that in the years since 2003, I've begun to expect significantly more when it comes to knowledge about the Middle East. I'm troubled by the number of people who lump all Arabs and Muslims into one large, threatening category, support U.S. intervention in the region under the guise of "spreading democracy," without any contextual understanding of the situation on the ground, and vote for xenophobic, uninformed candidates who also have limited knowledge of the region. My expectation is in some ways hypocritical, as I myself have displayed a great lack of political and cultural knowledge in the Middle East. In moments of fury my mother has suggested I write a book called The Way It Should Be for Everybody but Me.”
“Yet it's the idiosyncrasies of culture that keep me an outsider, and leave me with a persistent and pervasive sense of otherness, of non-belonging. Basic but nuanced knowledge; the stuff that no one really teaches you. That an invitation for eight o'clock really means nine thirty. In Beirut, I once arrived at a rehearsal dinner on time, and the restaurant's staff was still cleaning up from the night before. That no one wears flip-flops outside the house except to the pool. That noting one's weight gain is an expression of love, and that every price, rule, and border can and must be negotiated. And yet, in the U.S. I'm just as much of an outsider.”
“Besides, we both knew it was too late: we had already started to shatter.”
“Baggage. No one ever breaks free from it. Everyone has to figure out how to go on living, to be decent, in spite of it.”
“When you don't want to lose someone, it's so tempting to deceive them.”
“…especially from my mother. For a long time, I've imagined telling her that I want everything she's wanted me to pursue—a marriage, children, a lucrative career. But growing up in her house, subjected to her erratic rages, I didn't have the energy. I was exhausted just trying to survive.”
“‘Better safe than sorry,’ everyone says. But for a while I’ve been afraid I could never truly be either.”
“I sent her another essay a month later, about unattainable love as a quest for the familiar, a quest for home, for a homeland that may not exist. A quest for a mother.”
“Until now, it's never occurred to me that my mother was—my mother is—a child, forever stunted by her own traumas. I reconsider everything that was inflicted upon her. That she grew up under military occupation, that she was married by twenty and pregnant the following year, that her husband's ambitions undermined her own and further displaced her, casting her into exile with a fragmented sense of home. All of her present power—her fearful rage, her enviable status, her unrelenting beauty—fades against this reality.”