Ambivalence, the state of having contradictory feelings or ideas about something or someone, runs like a dark river through Zaina Arafat’s powerful debut novel. Told in vignettes that flash between the US and the Middle East, You Exist Too Much is an unusual bildungsroman that looks at the arrested development – from shy teenager to confused adulthood – of its unnamed narrator, a second-generation Palestinian girl who grows up in a wealthy family in Washington DC.
The narrator has plenty to feel ambivalent about: her love/hate relationship with her mother, bisexuality, an eating disorder, the feeling of not being wholly American or Palestinian. The latter is searingly obvious throughout the book in cleverly detailed ways.
On trips to Jordan and the West Bank in her childhood and teenage years, she witnesses the actively homophobic culture of friends and family members, which leaves her ashamed of her own sexuality and desperate to hide it from others. Even ordinary events can leave her feeling conflicted: "Anytime I heard of another Arab girl's engagement, it immediately snapped me out of my gayness."
Most homophobic of all is the narrator’s mother, Laila, a privileged beauty disappointed by marriage and the downward trajectory of her own greatness. Attempts by the narrator to come out to her mother, or to introduce her to girlfriends in later sections lead to anger and rejection. It is a pattern ingrained since childhood, where any perceived offence sends the mother into a violent spiral: “She would complain to me about her life, as though I were an objective observer. ‘I should’ve had better,” she’d say. ‘I deserved so much more than this.’”
Ambivalence is mined again as the narrator reflects on a period in her life during college when she had outpatient treatment for an eating disorder. These vignettes feel slighter than other narrative strains due to their retrospective quality, but the paradoxes of eating disorders are evident, the denial set against enormous need, the starvation amid plenty, the rejection of and desire for different aspects of femininity, the ferocious visibility of an illness whose sufferer yearns to go unseen.
Arafat skilfully mirrors these themes with other aspects of the narrator’s life: her job as a DJ, “the ecstasy of performance, the unrelenting command of attention,” and the multiple affairs throughout the book as she seeks out sex or obsessively focuses her attentions on various unattainable people to dampen other more painful emotions.
Treatment for this so called “love addiction” forms the core of the book. A month-long stay at a centre in Kentucky sees her confront her past and the seminal moments along the way.
Structurally, this doesn’t quite come off. The vividness of earlier sections – a break-up with a loyal girlfriend, a road-trip with a no-nonsense best friend, scenes with the effervescent Laila – gets diluted amid a tendency to hop from partner to partner, country to country, and then loop back again to the treatment centre. Gaps in information begin to grate: the family’s wealth, their position within Arab society, the narrator’s relationship with her father, her seeming indifference to her own privilege when it comes to money and travel.
These are small matters in a book that remains captivating throughout. Arafat has a considered prose style and eye for choice detail that brings clarity to a busy narrative. The themes of her book, and the level of perception within, recall debuts from the likes of Alexandra Kleeman, Mona Awad and Nina Renata Aron's recent co-dependency memoir Good Morning Destroyer of Men's Souls.
The cultural backdrop to Arafat’s book sets it apart, with specifics on the Iran-Contra scandal, the intifada of the 80s, the difficulties accessing the West Bank, and even the stereotypes that exist within the various Arab cities all smoothly inserted into the story, adding further layers of interest.
Palestinian-American Arafat's stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Granta, The Believer, the Atlantic, BuzzFeed, VICE and NPR. She holds an MA in international affairs from Columbia University, an MFA from the University of Iowa and is a recipient of the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts.
With You Exist Too Much, Arafat announces herself as a provocative and insightful writer willing to delve into unpleasant aspects of family and society. The level of self-awareness elevates the novel from misery literature.
In treatment, the narrator considers the other patients and feels “embarrassed by the similarities of our experiences, the way they overlapped, the banality of what had been so painful to me”. And yet, the particulars of this story seem so unique: “I’m aware I can be exhausting—‘you exist too much,’ my mother often told me.”
The book is a search for the narrator’s own identity, reclaiming the voices inside her head and making them her own.
