Free Read You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat - WUN

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 mothers response only intensifies aOn 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 mothers response only intensifies a sense of shame: ?You exist too much? she tells her daughter.Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East?from New York to Jordan Lebanon and Palestine?Zaina Arafats debut novel traces her protagonists 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 and obsessions with other people. 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.Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural religious and sexual identities You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings?for love and a place to call home.(less)

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