| Palestinian American girls -- Fiction. |
| Lesbians -- Fiction. |
| Lesbian fiction. |
| Girls, Palestinian American |
| Female gay people |
| Female homosexuals |
| Gay females |
| Gay women |
| Gayelles |
| Gay people, Female |
| Homosexuals, Female |
| Lesbian people |
| Lesbian women |
| Sapphists |
| Women, Gay |
| Women homosexuals |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Fall River Main | FIC ARA | Stacks | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Taunton Public Library | ARAFAT, ZAINA | 1ST FLOOR STACKS | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... West Bridgewater PL | FIC ARAFAT, ZAINA | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A "provocative and seductive debut" of desire and doubleness that follows the life of a young Palestinian American woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities as she endeavors to lead an authentic life ( O, The Oprah Magazine ).
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.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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)
Guardian Review
Zaina Arafat's debut novel follows an unnamed young Palestinian-American woman through "a misguided and self-destructive quest for love", as she repeatedly falls for unattainable men and women. She winds up in therapy, trying to work out why she always wants what she can't have. Her mother, naturally, is partly to blame: she's an emotionally manipulative figure, suffering from borderline personality disorder. The desire to please her mother - or be free from her - seems to shadow her daughter's every move. The first-person narrator has a distinctive voice and is a magnetic presence on the page; the scenes with her mother are electric. Arafat is a Palestinian-American herself, and these parts of her novel intersect most vividly with a wider context. The values and expectations of the protagonist's family and the culture she's immersed in during holidays in the Middle East clash with those she's surrounded by in the US, and with her own identity. Her bisexuality is a particular source of disappointment to her mother. The minutiae of failing relationships are also caught with precision, but can come to feel repetitive - part of the point, with the narrator struggling to break out of the cycles of "love addiction". But group therapy sessions occasionally seem like a needless device, given Arafat's evident deftness when moving between anxious present and pertinent memory. If Arafat has a tendency to overexplain the emotional beats of each romantic encounter ("maybe I needed to protect myself against debilitating and devastating heartbreak"), she's more subtle in revealing how her characters' backgrounds influence their behaviour. Throughout the book, the dates of 1948 and 1967 - when Palestinians were exiled in huge numbers - crop up repeatedly, in a seemingly offhand way. But you can also feel this sense of displaced "otherness" as a background driver of the mother and daughter's restless dissatisfaction. It's only in the last pages that the link is made explicit, the narrator likening their pursuit for unattainable love to the quest "for a homeland that may not exist". A nuanced, sparky debut.
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The "demarcation" begins over a wardrobe malfunction: a 12-year-old girl, improperly, according to the local men, dressed in shorts, arrives at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem with her mother and uncle. Exchanging the forbidden shorts for her uncle's "baggy trousers" gives her a sense of freedom: "Ambiguity was an unsettling yet exhilarating space." The brief respite, however, engenders separation "from my mother and her lineage" that in adulthood would "send [her] on a misguided and self-destructive quest for love." A disastrous first relationship with her college roommate begins a pattern of imploding affairs with far too many partners, but it's the possibility that she's gay that nearly destroys her intolerant mother. She drifts through cafés and DJ-ing, is plagued with anorexia and love addiction, leaves NYC for a Midwest MFA, and eventually returns to Brooklyn. In the tedious wake of self-destruction, at least she recognizes her self-absorption: "I'm aware I can be exhausting -- 'you exist too much,' my mother often told me." Debuting novelist Arafat's damaged cast might resonate with untethered millennials, but utmost patience is a must.