You Exist Too Much

A Novel

By: Zaina Arafat

Narrated by: Zehra Jane Naqvi

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother's response only intensifies a sense of shame: "You exist too much," she tells her daughter.

Told in vignettes that flash between the US and the Middle East, Zaina Arafat's debut novel traces her protagonist's progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as "love addiction." In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.

You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings - for love, and a place to call home.

©2020 Zaina Arafat (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

The unvarnished honesty

There was so much I related with, although my demographic background differs. The red threads of trauma running through generations. Shame, love, impotence, care, longing

Wonderful, Rich and Entertaining Narrative

I really enjoyed exploring this main character’s world. It was profound and thought provoking but also funny at times and definitely entertaining.

Interesting, but disjointed and hard to follow

This is a tremendously flawed and troubled character, and it is easy to understand how she has come to be as she is. This is not so much novel, or even short stories, so much as a piecing together. There are times that it is quite disjointed. There is no signal that the narrator is taking us elsewhere. She swings from one moment to the next and back again, and it can be disorienting. It feels like it could have been organized better. It is also tricky to follow the voice of the narrator because, at first she uses a more baby-like voice for secondary characters, but starts slipping into it with the main character, so it takes a while to figure out who is speaking. It may be easier to read than listen to.

Narrator is distractingly bad

What could have been a wonderful book to get lost in turned into a painful slog because of a really poor narrating job. The narrator uses a quasi-Indian accent for Arabic speakers throughout the book, mispronounces Arabic words like Ramallah and teta. Other accents are equally bad—noticeably French and Spanish. It was appallingly bad, and I feel very sorry for the author of this book. This audio recording massacres her work. Is it possible to re-record with a more competent narrator? Haram.

Interesting but tough to follow

The story was interesting and entertaining, but the order of events was difficult to follow at times