Sapphic Book Club
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July 28th @ 6pm
Cha House with remote options available
Our first book will be… 🥁🥁🥁
✨You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat✨
TW: EDs, self harm and self sabotage, infidelity and delusion, addiction due to parental neglect, premature sexualization and early internet chat room behavior mention, ethnically motivated violence, DV
On a hot day in Bethlehem, a twelve-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.
Cha House with remote options available
Our first book will be… 🥁🥁🥁
✨You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat✨
TW: EDs, self harm and self sabotage, infidelity and delusion, addiction due to parental neglect, premature sexualization and early internet chat room behavior mention, ethnically motivated violence, DV
On a hot day in Bethlehem, a twelve-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.
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Where is it happening?
Cha House Bham, 131 41st St S,Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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