You Exist Too Much: A Novel

I really enjoyed this honest story about a girl trying to find herself. I tore through this novel in a week!

Through the lens of her illnesses, a young Palestinian American woman (who remains nameless throughout the novel) enthralls us with the pain of hers and her mother’s disappointments with the trajectory their life has taken. For her mother it’s marrying the wrong man, for the protagonist it’s needing love to the point of filling her waking hours with illusions of being loved and accepted.A self-proclaimed bisexual, she falls into a pattern of numerous nearly-debilitating sexual relationships she mistakes for romantic love, never fully seeing that what she’s actually seeking is her mother’s love and approval. Almost always ending each relationship by treating her lovers, both male and female, with the same disregard and verbal abuse her mother unleashes on her.Realizing she has a real addiction to love, she checks herself into a 28-day program at a treatment facility. What happens afterward is an honest and powerful awakening of sexual and romantic desire akin to disturbing a hornets’ nest.What Zaina Arafat has written in the pages of her debut novel is nothing short of a painful reminder that we cannot conquer our weaknesses without changing how we fight them. Or else we wind up in a vicious circle where we lose site of the exit.

Our protagonist is a Palestinian-American woman who has been raised in the United States, but who frequently travels back to see her family who live in Gaza. She is bi and struggling with revealing this to her family, but especially to her mother.Her mother, who was born and raised in Palestine and only moved to the United States as an adult, can only be described as abusive to her daughter. We're told that in her upbringing she lived through a lot of trauma, which I don't doubt, but unfortunately we don't get a lot of details. We also see how her father, while there and appearing to 'pay the bills' so to speak, was also not a good parent. He appears to be cold and uncaring and the only time you glimpse any softness in his character has to do with him 'gazing upon his beautiful wife'. He's also a man who expects everything to be done for him, so when his wife finally divorces him he leans heavily on his children in his loneliness and also uses guilt as a manipulation tactic against them just like their mother.Even as a child her mother was extremely hard on her her, possibly because she knew that she would be different or also maybe because she saw so much of herself in her. She constantly uses her love and the threat of withdrawal of said love as a threat and a punishment to attempt to get her daughter to do what she wants her to do. She comments on her appearance and her intelligence and generally just makes her daughter, even as a child, feel like she has to perform, and perfectly at that, in order to gain her mother's love and approval. Which from the outside perspective is obvious that this is an impossible and unaccomplishable task.So, as an adult, our protagonist struggles with her complex feelings about her mother. She wants her approval, but after going to rehab for her love addiction she does find the strength to come to terms with the fact that her complex relationship with her mother is not her fault. Her relationships suffer as an adult, especially her romantic relationships, due to her not knowing what a healthy relationship looks or feels like. She seems to cling to people who are not good for her and some who are not even romantically interested in her, while treating the people who do love her terribly by cheating and lying to them. Throughout the novel we see her jump from one relationship to the next, without really seeing her mindset change which is a little disappointing, although as we discussed in book club it is probably more accurate to real life trauma.Our author uses dual timelines in order to give us a perspective both from the present day but also from our protagonist's childhood. I really enjoyed this aspect of the book until about the halfway point where the timelines stopped flowing into one another well.I thought the author's writing was poetic at times but at other times it felt rushed. Specifically before she enters rehab the book flows beautifully between the two timelines but after her stint everything feels very rushed and nothing feels very fleshed out as far as the plot goes. This was a general consensus in book club, that we felt that maybe the ending of the novel had been rushed and hadn't been given the time that the first part had because it felt like a different author had written it almost. I also really wished that we saw more about life in Palestine but we only got snippets of that from when our protagonist travels back to visit family. We do see a couple of scenes like her being made to wear pants because she wasn't allowed to show her knees in the mosque as a child, or her sitting for an entire day just trying to cross the border. I really wanted more like this, but I understand that it was limited because our character was only traveling back and forth and was doing so as a wealthy American which changes everything.This is a 3.5⭐ but rounded down because I am trying to not be so Oprah like with my 4 & 5 ⭐ ratings this year.This was my January 2024 book club pick and when I heard that it was written by a Palestinian American author I was pretty excited because I have recently been trying to read everything I can on the current conflict. I was hoping for a novel that would give me some insight into the way Palestinians have lived under occupation by the Israelis. Unfortunately that is not really what this book is about. I appreciate that the author did give us some insights, like towards the end where we see our main character sit at a border crossing all day for what seems like no reason other than the soldiers wanting to delay her crossing. I did enjoy this book even if it wasn't what I was expecting, and I would definitely read more from this author. I believe this is her debut novel and I think with a little more writing under her belt (and I hate saying that because she's a writer, she's got a lot of writing under her belt already, but not in novel form it seems) her work could be considered a great literary work. She also sent us signed book plates, which is really nice, not many authors do that for our book club but when they do it always feels special.

You Exist Too Much addresses a longstanding void of queer Arab-American literature. Zaina Arafat takes us through the narrator's multi-layered struggle of self-identity.On one level, she's a daughter of Palestinian immigrants. Every child of immigrants, myself included, can relate to our narrator's wavering between her inherited culture and American lifestyle. But in this case, her country of origin, Palestine, isn't even recognized by her country of birth, the United States. On a second level, and the crux of the novel, is her bisexual orientation, hardly accepted let alone tolerated in most of the Middle East. And finally, in the third and foundational level lies her relationship with her mother, who embodies the disappointment our narrator feels within herself.These internal conflicts reveal themselves through our narrator's multiple acts of self-destructive behavior. While she may not be likeable at times, she is very real. The reader follows her through self-exploration, self-reflection, and eventually a version of self-improvement.The writing is captivating and the storytelling is a page-turner. You won't want to put it down.

As someone who identifies as pansexual, I felt INCREDIBLY seen and understood by this book, which does not happen often. Zaina does an incredible job placing you in the shoes of the narrator. I felt everything.

Me ha gustado, aunque al final los comportamientos repetitivos de la protagonista hacen la novela algo pesada. Se deja leer.

Ich finde das Buch einfach ekelhaft. Es reproduziert einfach nur Stereotype und ist so geschrieben, dass es dem westlichen Leser gefällt. Es regt null zum Hinterfragen der eigenen Stereotype an. Antimuslimischer Rassismus vom feinsten. Das widert mich an!