You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat
Review of You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat
“But did it count as deception if it was done in the name of self-protection? Withholding vulnerable information was a habit born of survival. I’d been lulled into letting my guard down before, only to later regret it, the admissions used against me as I bore her wrath.”
You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat (2020). Published by Catapult.
About halfway through December 2022, I rediscovered my love for finding out you could easily download books through the library and onto your Kindle. I blew through several books over the course of three days, making my Goodreads goal hit over 260 books right before the year of 2022 ended, and this was one of the books I found from the depths of someone else’s Instagram story highlights.
I find my books to read through a myriad of methods, but I remember I found this book because I was looking for more novels by SWANA authors. It’s commonly known that the publishing industry, especially in the United States, clearly has a diversity problem, and it is rare to find SWANA writers, let alone ones writing about LGBTQ+ romances.
And so, in December 2022, I ended up on my fourth LGBTQ+ story in a row. I’m very proud of myself because of this fact, especially because it demonstrates that I am genuinely diversifying the kind of stories I read.
It’s so easy to fall into a rut of the same old things, which one might say me reading four of these stories in a row is, but storytelling teaches so much empathy in a way that other mediums cannot. I’d read Palestinian poetry before, but this diaspora narrative was insightful in a way that allowed the readers to drop right into the head of its narrator.
Enough rambling. Let’s begin the review.
A Palestinian-American girl reconciles with her addictions and strained relationship with her mother.
At the beginning of You Exist Too Much, things seem to be going quite well for our protagonist. She is in her thirties, got admitted to a creative writing MFA that’s prestigious in the Midwest, and has what looks to be a healthy relationship with her girlfriend, Anna.
However, the novel goes back and forth between the past and present to show how her past impacts her even today. The protagonist’s father left them and married another women when she was a young girl, and her mother, a Palestinian immigrant, is very traditional and seems to suffer with the weight of the world.
There’s acknowledgement of her mother’s struggles: she works as a real estate agent in the Washington D.C. area and raises two kids all by herself—a stigma for a woman of this culture. At the same time, she is deeply traditional, and in a scene where Anna, the protagonist, and her mother gets dinner, the mother ends up becoming furious at what is happening and storms off.
This isn’t a novel where the protagonist is going to be outrightly struggling with her heritage; the only conflict that comes from it is the traditional expectations and how she deals with her mother. Our protagonist moves back and forth between Jordan and the United States, and, in one scene, she admits she outed another girl while pretending to be straight herself.
We learn not much longer after that the protagonist has a love addiction. She’s been continuously cheating on Anna for the newest object of her affection, a professor in New York City, and Anna finds out while and emails the protagonist that it is over while she is away.
She returns home only to discover Anna has moved out in the time since she found out, and, in order to try and fix herself, she enrolls into a rehabilitation program to try and overcome this. As it turns out, this isn’t nothing new. Every time she finds a somewhat stable relationship, it becomes too mundane and she seeks out a different outlet in the form. Often these people are unattainable, making the thrill of the chase become even more apparent.
A good chunk of the book happens at the rehab, where she befriends people much older than her and in differing circumstances. One of her newfound friends does end up getting himself killed via an overdose right after finishing the program, and there’s a connection between that and our protagonist herself.
Towards the end of the program she admits she has fallen in love with one of the counselors, spiraling back in a way to the root of her problems and the reason why she’s there to begin with. When she leaves the program, she adds the counselor on Facebook and is very discouraged not to get special treatment and the affection back, then she moves to the MFA program, where she dives deep into an affair with an Argentine writer.
The last portion of the novel is dedicated to the affair, where he is not so discreetly cheating on her with another writing student, and then a relationship she engages with a girl named Anouk.
Essentially, this novel is studying this one protagonist’s life through her relationships with others and how she engages with them rooted in trauma practices. It stems from her upbringing and relationship with her mother, and while she denies her mother access to her for awhile, she does let her back in.
Her mother tells her she exists too much, and that really is the heart of this novel. She spirals back into the same destructive habits because of who she is and the trauma she has experienced, but it never works out for her in the end.
Even as she engages in this new relationship towards the end, after all the cheating and rehab she went through, it never seems like she might actually go fully clean when it comes to her former habits. I can see why readers might not like this one, but, at the same time, it’s blaming the narrator just like her mother did for all of her faults.
She isn’t likable, but she’s struggling. That doesn’t excuse her actions. Her going to rehab is just the first step in many, and the overdose death of the one member of her cohort is a wake up call.
The relationship with the Argentine is another one, exposing how self-destructive she is to get back with him despite knowing he cheated. When she chooses not to visit in Argentina it is a mark of progress. That makes this a novel about recovery and slowly learning how to be a functional human for others and showing up to their relationships.
Overall Thoughts
I will say, from the premise about Bethlehem and the narrator’s ankles showing, I thought this novel was going to be completely different than what it was pitched to be about.
You Exist Too Much definitely throws a lot of curveballs in a repetitive way, which is understandable if you take the time to map out how each of these things manifests through the narrator’s experiences.
Would I read this again? Probably not. I think it was a one time deal. If you’re interested in it check the novel out at your library.
Support a SWANA writer by buying it. But if it’s not something that appeals to you, I don’t think it’s worth your time. I appreciate the writer’s work and what they made with this novel, but I can also see how it divides people and how they may get accusatory in its depictions of bisexuality in tandem with the narrator’s actions and decisions.
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