You Exist Too Much: A Novel

by Zaina Arafat Narrated by Zehra Jane Naqvi

Overview

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a twelve-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother's response only intensifies a sense of shame: "You exist too much," she tells her daughter.



Told in vignettes that flash between the US and the Middle East, Zaina Arafat's debut novel traces her protagonist's progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as "love addiction." In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.



You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings-for love, and a place to call home.

Editorial Reviews

AUGUST 2020 - AudioFile

Zehra Jane Naqvi has a youthful sounding voice, which is put to good use as she narrates this novel about a young, unnamed Palestinian woman. Naqvi embodies the confusion, irritation, and rage of the heroine while growing up in Palestine. Naqvi gives voice to the narrator's ruminations about the gender double standards she increasingly confronts in her conservative society. Listeners will appreciate the ease with which Arabic names, words, and phrases are delivered. Naqvi brings a lilting energy to a story that explores the taboo of queerness in an Islamic society. She creates a vivid auditory journey to match the one the heroine takes as she moves from her Palestinian village to the freedom of Brooklyn, and life beyond. M.R. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

04/20/2020

Arafat’s poignant if uneven debut explores the love affairs and relationships of its narrator, a queer Palestinian woman. Arafat opens with the unnamed narrator in a relationship with a woman named Anna in Brooklyn. When the narrator’s mother visits, it becomes clear that she disapproves of her daughter’s sexuality, refusing to even entertain the idea of her being in a relationship with a woman. After Anna discovers sexually charged emails between the narrator and a former professor, along with other evidence that she’s been cheated on, Anna leaves. Spiraling in the wake of Anna’s departure, the narrator checks herself into rehab for love addiction. The narrative follows the narrator through rehab, then on to grad school in the Midwest, and a move back to New York, as she picks up and discards lovers along the way. Woven throughout are stories of childhood summers spent in Jordan, a semester in Italy after falling out with her college roommate/secret-lover, and, most crucially, the narrator’s beautiful, mercurial, and perpetually dissatisfied mother, whose approval and attention are what the narrator most desires. Despite the rushed final third, Arafat writes movingly of being caught between identities, homelands, and obligation and desire. This difficult but heartfelt wonder delivers an emotional wallop. (June)

From the Publisher

An Entropy Best Book of the Year

"At once complicated and engaging, this is the kind of debut novel that announces the arrival of a powerful new author who, besides writing beautifully, has a lot to say." —Gabino Iglesias, NPR 

"This story about love, identity, gender and family is brilliantly written and questions the effects of maternal love." —Good Morning America

"[A] provocative and seductive debut . . . Novels like these don't exist enough." ―O, The Oprah Magazine

"This multifaceted story reflects the ever-tricky journey to finding one’s place in the world." —Matt Ortile, Esquire

"Her novel is an unlimited space for those whose identities have always been too uncomfortable for society . . . When being a queer Muslim seems too complex for the world to handle, You Exist Too Much is a testimony as otherwise. There is nothing more of an attestation to our narratives than an LGBTQ Muslim author with a bisexual Palestinian-American main character." —Zainab Almatwari, Teen Vogue

"Thankfully we have moved beyond tedious questions about the 'likability' of fictional women, because the most interesting characters rarely are at all times. Arafat's heroine is no exception, but the author writes her with great tenderness and just enough self-aware dark humor to allow readers to become invested in this young woman's efforts to make herself whole." —Erin Keane, Salon

"As a narrative with an insistence on revisiting ruptures in memory, and unpacking the trauma therein, Arafat’s novel is a direct resistance to pinkwashing and other homo-nationalistic ideologies, one that centers Palestinian memory and generously unpacks the underlying sociopolitical contexts of Palestinian society for non-Palestinian readers." —George Abraham, Public Books

"You Exist Too Much gets desire at a deep level: where it comes from, how it pushes and tugs, and how it's virtually never just about who it's about. As the narrator pinballs from one disastrous affair to the next, we get more than the chronicle of a young full-blown love addict, but a keen study in how our wants are bound to place, race, gender, religion, psychology, and family. Zaina Arafat speaks for the persistently hungry." ―Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens

"What a breath of fresh air! Zaina Arafat takes a familiar figure―the restless, womanizing narrator of many a canonical novel―and reimagines it to mordant and delightful effect. Her queer, Palestinian American, love-addict protagonist is pining mostly for a sense of belonging and purpose. She's a deeply relatable character who beautifully conveys the anguish of trying to figure out a life between categories of various kinds. You Exist Too Much is 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, author of Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

AUGUST 2020 - AudioFile

Zehra Jane Naqvi has a youthful sounding voice, which is put to good use as she narrates this novel about a young, unnamed Palestinian woman. Naqvi embodies the confusion, irritation, and rage of the heroine while growing up in Palestine. Naqvi gives voice to the narrator's ruminations about the gender double standards she increasingly confronts in her conservative society. Listeners will appreciate the ease with which Arabic names, words, and phrases are delivered. Naqvi brings a lilting energy to a story that explores the taboo of queerness in an Islamic society. She creates a vivid auditory journey to match the one the heroine takes as she moves from her Palestinian village to the freedom of Brooklyn, and life beyond. M.R. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2020-03-29
A particularly bad breakup leads a young woman to reexamine her past and how it shapes her identity and her desires.

The unnamed narrator of this novel is a “love addict.” What this means in practical terms is that she treats her partners terribly, engages in a lot of casual sex, and develops fixations on people who are unavailable and unattainable. Reading about her describe her life is a lot like being friends with someone who needs to give you every detail about their exploits in self-destruction and is incapable of heeding or even hearing the tiniest bit of reasonable advice. For some of us, it might be a treat to live vicariously. For others, it’s exhausting. How you feel about this book will largely depend on where you land on this matter. What is most interesting is the way Arafat navigates her protagonist’s complex identity. The narrator is, in addition to being a love addict, bisexual and Palestinian American. She comes from a conservative family, which made it difficult for her to understand her own sexuality when she was younger. Her queerness also complicates her already troubled relationship with her mother. At the same time, this character is living with her female lover in Brooklyn and DJ-ing at clubs where she hooks up with women and men both. This isn’t a coming-out narrative. Similarly, while her mother’s ethnic and religious backgrounds present challenges that the narrator has to overcome, she is, essentially, an American. This is to say that this isn’t an “immigrant story” if that means that acculturating to a new country and new way of life is the narrative’s central concern. Arafat’s protagonist is a messy, complicated character who doesn’t fit neatly into any single “multicultural” category, and that, all by itself, is refreshing.

An uneven but, in some respects, intriguing debut.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176210620
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	06/30/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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