Please Stop Trying to Leave Me
Please Stop Trying to Leave Me
Please Stop Trying to Leave Me
Description
Description
A debut novel about love, family, queerness, and losing your mind in the modern world marks the arrival of a truly original, haunting voice in fiction who will make you laugh, cry, and scream, all in the same breath. In the midst of god sending her signs through Instagram and Spotify telling her to break up with her girlfriend, twenty-seven-year-old Norma meets a new therapist for one reason: she really needs to write again. With only one story left to finish her collection, Norma is desperate for an answer: should she leave her girlfriend in order to finish her manuscript? When her new therapist diagnoses her with depersonalization/derealization disorder, Norma insists she doesn't have it: it's just Oblivion, the thing that started happening to her when she was two and a half. Haunted by SSRI side effects, her girlfriend's kindness, her father's incessant calls, and a world that becomes less hazily fictional by the day, Norma has never felt crazier. And whenever she attempts to write The Last Story, Norma is faced with the reality and unrealities of her past, the society she lives in, and everything that she's ever believed about life, writing, and love. Against the backdrop of climate change, racial injustice, Google ads, and the metaverse, Norma begins sharing other stories, hoping that they'll help her connect the dissociative dots once and for all. Maybe it's crazy not to be crazy in a place like this. And in the midst of it all is Norma's girlfriend, who may well be an answer in Norma's search for meaning. Told alternately through Norma's barely fictional fiction and through her crackling stream of consciousness, Please Stop Trying To Leave Me is an honest, comedic, horrifying, and heart-wrenching story about existing in today's world, challenging all we've been taught about the distance between fiction and reality, sanity and insanity, mental illness and healing.
About the Author
About the Author
Alana Saab is a literary writer and award-winning screenwriter. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from The New School, a Masters Degree in Psychology from Columbia University and her Bachelors from New York University in the Phenomenology of Storytelling. She lives in New York with her partner. Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is her first novel.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
A Ms. Most Anticipated Book of 2024: "Debut, contemporary, queer AF." "Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is a riveting, deeply funny, and acutely observed ride through the breaking down and rebuilding of self and connection. It's a full sprint toward (and away from and back again) real love and meaning. Sharp and existential and devastating and queer."
--Jules Ohman, author of Body Grammar "Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is the most delightfully unhinged and chaotic novel I've read in years and I am here for every page, and more."
--Chloe Caldwell, author of Women: A Novella "Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is an electric, delirious novel about how art-making, romantic partnership, and trauma make fractals of the self. Alana Saab is an intoxicating stylist, pulling off a heady and meta debut that feels like clawing your way out of the belly of some monster, rib by rib, only to find that the monster is you. Deadpan and tender, Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is a must-read for anyone who has ever white-knuckled their way through the wilderness of their own mind (it me)."
--Ruth Madievsky, author of All-Night Pharmacy
"Audacious, innovative and utterly absorbing, this beautifully written debut novel feels like a new form of realism. Structured as a series of therapy sessions, it does what Samuel Beckett asked of the contemporary novel -"to find a form to accommodate the shape of the mess." From overwhelming feelings of oblivion to climate crises and economic anxiety, here in a voice at once tender and funny, unsettled and deeply observant, is the texture of our age brought vividly into focus."
--Laurie Sheck, author of The Willow Grove, a Pulitzer Prize finalist "After a mental health crisis, a young woman seeks treatment in an attempt to reinhabit the outside world, and herself, again. . . . Acerbic, tenderhearted, and clever. . . . A well-crafted spiral of a story with hope at its center."
--Kirkus Reviews "A lesbian woman grapples with her literary ambitions and deteriorating mental health in Saab's engrossing debut. . . . [An] affecting and singular exploration of a woman's attempts to live and write with mental illness."
--Publishers Weekly
--Jules Ohman, author of Body Grammar "Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is the most delightfully unhinged and chaotic novel I've read in years and I am here for every page, and more."
--Chloe Caldwell, author of Women: A Novella "Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is an electric, delirious novel about how art-making, romantic partnership, and trauma make fractals of the self. Alana Saab is an intoxicating stylist, pulling off a heady and meta debut that feels like clawing your way out of the belly of some monster, rib by rib, only to find that the monster is you. Deadpan and tender, Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is a must-read for anyone who has ever white-knuckled their way through the wilderness of their own mind (it me)."
--Ruth Madievsky, author of All-Night Pharmacy
"Audacious, innovative and utterly absorbing, this beautifully written debut novel feels like a new form of realism. Structured as a series of therapy sessions, it does what Samuel Beckett asked of the contemporary novel -"to find a form to accommodate the shape of the mess." From overwhelming feelings of oblivion to climate crises and economic anxiety, here in a voice at once tender and funny, unsettled and deeply observant, is the texture of our age brought vividly into focus."
--Laurie Sheck, author of The Willow Grove, a Pulitzer Prize finalist "After a mental health crisis, a young woman seeks treatment in an attempt to reinhabit the outside world, and herself, again. . . . Acerbic, tenderhearted, and clever. . . . A well-crafted spiral of a story with hope at its center."
--Kirkus Reviews "A lesbian woman grapples with her literary ambitions and deteriorating mental health in Saab's engrossing debut. . . . [An] affecting and singular exploration of a woman's attempts to live and write with mental illness."
--Publishers Weekly
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Vintage
Pub date:
2024-06-25
Length:
416 pages
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