“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 […]