You Exist Too Much
Author: Zaina Arafat
Publisher: Catapult
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-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 U.S. and the Middle East ― from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine ― 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 and obsessions with other people. 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.
Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings ― for love, and a place to call home.
TL;DR Review
You Exist Too Much is an engaging story about a young Palestinian-American bisexual woman that raises all sorts of questions about depiction, family trauma, and mental health.
For you if: You like character-driven novels where the characters grapple with tough challenges, particularly related to culture and queerness.
Full Review
Big thanks to Catapult for providing me with an early review copy of this book!
You Exist Too Much is a book that really got me thinking — about stereotypes, about complexity, about family and generational trauma, and about the way books can depict all those things.
The book is about a young Palestinian-American bisexual woman. She’s struggling to figure out how to bring the different pieces of her life together, as her mother will not be supportive of her queer lifestyle. Indeed, when she tries to tell her mother that her roommate is her long-term girlfriend, it’s a disaster. But her relationship with her girlfriend is also at risk.
As we will come to learn stems from deep-seated family trauma (“Good luck finding someone to love you like I did,” her mother hurls at her), the main character is notoriously unfaithful and treats romantic encounters like addicts treat drugs: as a distraction from reality, a way to feel something, a way to avoid dealing with her fears. She becomes obsessed with the version of a person she builds up in her mind and will destroy her own life against the rocks as she pursues them.
The story follows the main character as she seeks addiction therapy and begins the long journey of breaking her unhealthy compulsions and learning to build healthy relationships, with herself, with romantic partners, and maybe with her mother as well.
There is a lot about this book that I don’t have first-hand experience with — queerness, addiction treatment, family trauma, cultural disconnect — and so I can’t really speak to how well these were represented. That being said, here’s how they seemed to me, an outsider.
This is the first book I’ve ever read depicting queerness through a Palestinian-American lens, and that feels important. But it also brings up the question of whether this book harms bisexual people by playing into stereotypes about them being chronically unfaithful, throwing themselves at anyone and everyone. Personally, I felt like the author did this character justice, giving her a big, round enough background that it was clear her unhealthy behaviors were not because of her sexuality but because of the family trauma she’d experienced her whole life. That feels like a way to make space for stories that may be someone’s real truth, even if parts of them align with stereotypes.
I also find myself meditating on the question of how different this book would be if the main character had these unhealthy behaviors, but was straight. I think in many ways, one could tell this story that way, in that the triggers and backstory could plausibly cause it. And that is why it feels nuanced enough to move past the stereotypes. And yet also, you cannot change the fact that she’s bisexual without losing a sense of this book’s urgency and truth, because the character would not be her strong, rebellious, nuanced self without it. You would lose the half of the story that is not directly about her addiction.
I would really love to hear other people’s perspectives on this point in particular. As I said, I am an outsider to these experiences.
I do think that the way mental health and addiction treatment is depicted in this book felt like it was not as nuanced as it could be. But since her treatment is only the first half of the book and her recovery — which has so many bumps along the way — is the second, it seems like that may be because there was not a lot of space devoted to it,
Still, I think this book is absolutely worth your read, if only to spark you to contemplate these things, like it did for me.
Trigger Warnings
Addiction, substance abuse, alcoholism, and overdose
Eating disorders
Homophobia and familial non-acceptance
Infidelity
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