Please Stop Trying to Leave Me: A Novel - Softcover

Saab, Alana

 
9780593686782: Please Stop Trying to Leave Me: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593686780 ISBN 13: 9780593686782
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

An "engrossing, affecting, and singular" (Publishers Weekly) debut novel about love, family, queerness, and losing your mind in the modern world.

While god is sending her signs through Instagram and Spotify demanding she break up with her girlfriend, Norma meets with a new therapist for one reason: she really needs to write again. With only one chapter missing in her manuscript, Norma is desperate to know if she needs to leave her girlfriend in order to write The Last Story. The new therapist diagnoses Norma with Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder, but Norma isn’t having it. It’s just Oblivion.

Haunted by SSRI side effects and life becoming less hazily fictional by the day, Norma has never felt crazier. Does anyone else see the world’s poorly crafted plotline? Like, who even wrote this story? Norma begins sharing her manuscript with her therapist, hoping to connect the dissociative dots once and for all—or at least enough so that Google ads stop giving her panic attacks. But soon Norma is questioning everything she’s ever believed about life, writing, and love. 

And then there’s Norma’s girlfriend, the one with a crack of light in her eyes. Could she be Oblivion’s antagonist, the manuscript’s savior? Or is she just a human? 

Told alternately through Norma's barely fictional fiction and her crackling stream of consciousness, Please Stop Trying To Leave Me is an honest, comedic, horrifying, and heart-wrenching story about existing in today’s world, challenging all we’ve been taught about the distance between fiction and reality, sanity and insanity, mental illness and healing.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alana Saab is a literary writer and award-winning screenwriter. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from The New School, a Masters Degree in Psychology from Columbia University and her Bachelors from New York University in the Phenomenology of Storytelling. She lives in New York with her partner. Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is her first novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE STUDY OF OBLIVION

seven weeks since breakdown

How long is this thing?

It’s two hours.

Is it always going to be this long?

No, this is just a consultation to see if it makes sense for us to work together.

Work together? Like collaborate?

Like if it makes sense for me to take you on as a client.

Ohhh, so this is like a pitch.

My new therapist looks at me and blinks twice. I explain further:

Like you’re an agent deciding if you want my manuscript and maybe by the end of this, you’ll sign me.

She smiles, but by the way her mouth shifts, it almost looks like she’s just eaten something sour. She says, where would you like to start?

With oblivion. Obviously.

My new therapist says, what’s oblivion? She says this nonchalantly as if oblivion was a dog I had during my childhood who I should not still be mourning at the age of twenty-seven.

I say, well, let’s begin with its etymology.

Oblivion. Noun. Fourteenth century.

State of forgetting, forgetfulness, loss of memory.

Directly from Latin. Oblivionem. Forgetfulness; a being forgotten.

A being. Forgotten.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary:

Oblivion is supposed to have originally stemmed from the breakdown of ob- and lēvis. Together meaning: to even out, smooth over. However, linguists (“de Vaan and others”) say:

a semantic shift from to be smooth to to forget is not very convincing.

This quote is followed up with:

However no better explanation has emerged.

Also from the Online Etymology Dictionary:

For sense of oblivion’s evolution, compare oblivious and obliterate.

I never understood the relationship linguistics is trying to draw between these words, so let’s continue:

I began calling it oblivion when I was twenty-four. Three years ago, and long after it began. Of course, the word had already been famously used in John Green’s novel The Fault in Our Stars, but I didn’t get the word from there. In fact, when I learned that oblivion had been used in that book, I almost changed the name. But then I didn’t, because I’d been calling it oblivion for so long, and I’m lazy.

She doesn’t laugh.

Anyways,

Oblivion began when I was much younger. Four is my earliest memory of it. And it is the second memory I have of my entire life.

My first memory is me at two and a half. Looking at my father and saying:

I. Two a half.

I don’t remember why I started calling it by the name oblivion three years ago, but that’s the only word that came to mind. And I needed something to refer to it as instead of just that thing that happens to me, so I settled on oblivion. And so far:

No better explanation has emerged.

That said, my new therapist seems to have one and will tell me in approximately forty minutes.

I think I was writing at my desk when the word came to me, but I can’t really remember. Oblivion tends to mess with my memory. It messes with a lot of things.

Like my life.

You see, oblivion didn’t creep in, like most things do. It didn’t slide under the weathering foundation of my life, dripping, accumulating, like a slow leak. There are mixed metaphors of water and gas here, but it wasn’t, isn’t, and won’t ever be an element nor a property. In a similar respect, it can’t be found on the periodic table or located in a lab. However, it can be, with language, pointed to, like a person with no eyes trying to point at a flying, silent, bird. In this way, it also cannot be pointed to, but still I can try. This is one of my many attempts:

A tarot reader once walked with me along Henry Hudson Parkway. She told me that animals, after they are traumatized, or chased to be hunted down, or if a dog does something “embarrassing” (these are all forms of trauma according to her), shake their bodies viciously for a moment as if trying to shed themselves of the memory. Or, she also offered, as if they are moving the trauma through their animal bodies so it doesn’t create blockages in consciousness.

Another man who was not a friend but someone who wanted to have sex with me (though he explained it as wanting to hold me) once said he believed consciousness lived not in the brain but in our fascia.

That’s the first time I heard the word.

The word fascia. Not oblivion.

what is fascia? About 90,000,000 results (0.65 seconds)

Fascia is a thin casing of connective tissue that surrounds and holds every organ, blood vessel, bone, nerve fiber and muscle in place. Fascia has nerves that make it almost as sensitive as skin.

Johns Hopkins says related searches are hypnosis, Chinese medicine, and imagery (whatever that means).

Fascia, like the brain, confuses scientists and doctors, so they often don’t talk about it.

My second memory is of the world emptying. I was in my parents’ bedroom when it happened. I’m not sure where they were, but I know I was walking to the bathroom. I blinked my eyes and then they stayed shut. And in that moment when my eyelids wouldn’t open, I saw my family home. My parents, in the middle of whatever they were doing—washing dishes, fixing a light bulb, fighting in the kitchen—suddenly vanished. Where they were, a haze for a moment, a poof, and then just and only the background. The room, empty. Then I was in my sister’s room and she vanished too. Then the vision zoomed out to my town, and everyone there was suddenly gone. Then it zoomed out again, like a camera lens. All the humans in the country, vanished. Zoom out again. Then all the humans in all the continents, gone. All the homes once so violently lived in were empty. Only place and nature left. I was still unable to open my eyes from the blink when the homes disappeared too. Then every structure on earth, small or large, gone too. Then the animals.

Then the vision zoomed out for a fourth time, and I saw the entirety of the spherical earth with obsidian space in the background. From there, I watched as the grass and trees disappeared; the water, dried. The once green-and-blue earth, which I had only ever seen in photos, was gray and desolate. The earth became a bald mass. Not desolated by existence but just that every trace of life disappeared from the planet as if it never existed in the first place. All color drained. All life, void. Then the blackness came. The sun I knew, disappeared too, burning itself once and for all. In the utter blackness of space, time ceased to exist; there was nothing to keep time. There was no sun. Then the vision zoomed out again, and I saw our whole solar system. There, every planet, not just earth, was devoid of any life. Though still spinning. Spinning because that’s all there was left to do. Then the vision zoomed out one final time, and I saw a chunk of the universe with its hundreds of galaxies, and in each of those hundreds of galaxies, only empty planets spinning and spinning and spinning.

Oblivion confuses me, so I have to talk about it.

Unlike scientists or doctors, I have nothing to prove.

Oblivion has gotten much worse recently.

Which is why I began to see this new therapist. I mean you.

When I say much worse, I mean I used to ebb in and out of oblivion. Now I’m just stuck here. And I can’t stop crying.

When my eyes finally opened, which they did only a second after they closed (it all happened so fast and yet simultaneously infinitely), I came down from space and found myself back in my parents’ room. I continued my walk to the bathroom. I had to pee. As I sat on the toilet, I couldn’t get the vision...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593686780
ISBN 13 
9780593686782
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
416
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
36244
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781316503133: Please Stop, Sara! Pink a Band (Cambridge Reading Adventures, Pink a Band)

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1316503135 ISBN 13:  9781316503133
Verlag: CAMBRIDGE, 2016
Softcover