“You exist too much”, the narrator’s mother tells her. The narrator’s mother is needy, and manipulative, and homophobic, and devouring; the narrator has grown up censoring and hiding different parts of her self in turn, lying and blending and adapting and code-switching (and part of the brilliance of the book is that it’s sometimes not clear whether this comes out of desire or survival instinct). The narrator is rearranged like a kaleidoscope sometimes by chance and sometimes by circumstance until a relationship crisis forces her to choose try to find–or create–a stable core.
The narrator is bisexual, recovering from anorexia, ‘love-addicted’, and Palestinian-American, and unnamed–the daughter of Laila Abu Sa’ab in the same way that Rebecca’s successor is the second Mrs de Winter. Her parents’ parents’ displacement and the catastrophes behind this form part of the maze around which the narrator and the narrative bounce like marbles:
[Laila] planned to get a master’s degree, and eventually a PhD. “The thing about education,” her father told her the day of her college graduation, which coincided with a sharp increase in Israeli settlement construction on confiscated land in the West Bank, “is that no one can take it away from you. Everything else can be stolen. Everything else can be lost.” (160)
Laila’s volatility, and the narrator’s father’s distance and lack of interest in his daughter, are carefully not fully excused by intergenerational trauma, but it lurks in the shadows, something else the narrator elides and eludes unless she is forced to confront it, which she often is–visiting extended family with the wrong stamps in a passport, being “jokingly’ called ‘The Terrorist” by school friends in America, and in even more stealthily corrosive ways: “Yet it’s the idiosyncrasies of culture that keep me an outsider, and leave me with a persistent and pervasive sense of otherness, of non-belonging. Basic but nuanced knowledge; the stuff that no one really teaches you.” (141)
At the same time, because everything does always exist too much, this book is wry and confessional and raw about relationships, and living in New York, and skewering MFA course pretensions and dating scenes (which so often overlap), and being a bisexual woman (chaotic bisexual is a trope used by the Youth, I believe, and there is a lot of often enjoyable, often wincingly relatable chaos here),* and being locked into a pattern of expecting different results from the same repeated actions. This is, of course, a definition of insanity, as the narrator is frequently informed, not least at her rural recovery retreat for love addiction where she goes to try to address her constant need to be un-present in relationships, projecting her full desire, her excessive existence, onto unattainable objects of attraction. There’s no easy fix or answer, which is also part of the brilliance of the book–but there is a sense that ricocheting around like a pinball can be transformed into a meaningful journey, which is weirdly reassuring.
I hugely enjoyed it, and I’m thinking about it a lot, and I’m looking forward to further fiction by the author, and I’m making my way through her journalism, available here
*If you liked Fleabag, e.g. you might enjoy this?
Content notes: Islamophobia, homophobia, eating disorders
