“You Exist Too Much” by Zaina Arafat

“You Exist Too Much (2020),” written by Zaina Arafat, summarizes itself as a coming of age story about a young Palestinian American woman. 

The story was told in a series of confusing vignettes, jumping between the protagonist’s past and present. The main character, whose name is never revealed, shares tales of her summers with family across the Middle East to time in New York City and Italy, yearning for something or someone that’s unattainable. Unfortunately, this constant jumping from past to present made the story a bit hard to follow. 

On top of struggling with her love life, the main character tries to navigate her strained relationship with her overbearing and homophobic mother, as well as an eating disorder. Arafat tries to do a lot in this novel; some parts she pulls it off, but in others she doesn’t. 

What worked in this book is the exploration of the main character’s fractured sense of belonging to the US and Middle East. As a child, her American friends nicknamed her “the terrorist,” and she was “othered,” but when she traveled to Jordan or Palestine, she still felt like an outsider because she was too American. It’s an interesting phenomenon that many American children of immigrants can relate to. 

The portrayal of a complicated immigrant mother-daughter relationship was one of the best things about this book. Towards the end of the book, the main character was still able to have empathy for her mother because she realized that her mother was just a girl who still carries the sadness from all the sacrifices and pain she went through in life. 

As for the main character, she isn’t very likable and doesn’t make up for the story’s lack of plot. Throughout the book, she becomes constantly obsessed with women she can’t be with because they’re married to men or because she’s too afraid to come out of the closet. 

The main character’s story started out interesting, but watching her repeat the same unhealthy behaviors over and over again felt redundant and tedious. Maybe the point of the book was to have a messy character that doesn’t develop much, but the character or some of her stories weren’t compelling enough to make that work. 

This story had a lot of potential. It centered around a queer Arab woman caught between two cultures, unfortunately, it didn’t deliver. This is a book for people who are interested in the story of a chaotic and messy bisexual woman of color.