If You Love It, Let It Kill You

"A refreshingly irreverent novel about art, desire, domesticity, freedom, and the intricacies of the 21st century female experience, by the acclaimed novelist Hannah Pittard Divorced and childless by choice, Hana P.-the metafictional version-has built a cozy life in Lexington, Kentucky, teaching at the flagship university, living with a fellow academic, and helping raise his pre-teen daughter. Her sister‘s sprawling family lives just across the street, and their long-divorced, deeply complicated parents have also newly moved to town. One day, Hana learns that an unflattering version of herself will appear prominently-and soon-in her ex-husband‘s debut novel. For a week, her life continues largely unaffected by the news-she cooks, runs, teaches, entertains-but the morning after baking mac ‘n‘ cheese from scratch for her nephew‘s sixth birthday, she wakes up changed. The contentment she‘s long been enjoying is gone. In its place: nothing. A remarkably ridiculous mid-life crisis ensues, featuring a talking cat, a visit to the dean‘s office, a shadowy figure from the past, a Greek-like chorus of indignant students whose primary complaints concern Hana‘s auto-fictional narrative, and a game called Dead Body. Playing with the subtleties and strangeness of contemporary life, If You Love It, Let It Kill You is a deeply nuanced and disturbingly funny examination of memory, ownership, and artistic expression for readers of Miranda July‘s All Fours and Sigrid Nunez‘s The Friend"--