YOU EXIST TOO MUCH

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.