You Exist Too Much, Zaina Arafat
You Exist Too Much, Zaina Arafat
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You Exist Too Much
A Novel

Author: Zaina Arafat

Narrator: Zehra Jane Naqvi

Unabridged: 7 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/30/2020


Synopsis

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.

About Zaina Arafat

Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian-American writer. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications including the New York Times, Granta, the Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, BuzzFeed, VICE, and NPR. She holds an MA in international affairs from Columbia University, an MFA from the University of Iowa, and is a recipient of the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts. She grew up between the US and the Middle East and currently lives in Brooklyn.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Roxane

Hypnotically meandering narrative structure. Deeply compelling protagonist. Lovely sentences. Sexy, in it's own way.......more

Goodreads review by emma

As someone whose main qualm with existence is how much of it there is, I had high hopes for this book. And as someone whose main source of great reads now comes from a made-up subgenre known the world over (or to me exclusively, same difference) as Literary Fiction About Unlikable Women, the hopes o......more

Goodreads review by Thomas

I enjoyed this book a lot more than I thought I would given its lower star rating on Goodreads. At the heart of You Exist Too Much lies addiction: addiction to love, romantic love, specifically romantic love that involves unavailable older women, false idealizations of potential partners, and reject......more

Goodreads review by Sunny

You’re On Your Own, Kid by Taylor Swift realness idk......more