If You Love It, Let It Kill You — Hannah Pittard

A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year

A refreshingly irreverent novel about art, desire, domesticity, freedom, and the intricacies of the twenty-first-century female experience, by the acclaimed writer Hannah Pittard

Divorced and childless by choice, Hana P. has built a cozy life in Lexington, Kentucky, teaching at the university, living with her boyfriend (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 recently 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 enjoyed is gone. In its place: nothing. A remarkably ridiculous midlife crisis ensues, featuring a talking cat, a visit to the dean's office, a shadowy figure from the past, a Greek chorus of indignant students whose primary complaints concern Hana's autofictional narrative, and a game called Dead Body.

Steeped in 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.