IF YOU LOVE IT, LET IT KILL YOU

An autofiction about a writer in the throes of a crisis.

Hana P., the narrator of Hannah Pittard’s new novel, begins to unravel after learning that her ex-husband is about to publish a novel about their failed marriage and his affair with her best friend. Unable to resist the urge to Google him, Hana also discovers that he published a story several years earlier in which a character based on her is stabbed to death by a homeless man. Though a note at the beginning of the book insists that “what follows is pure fantasy,” a reader would be forgiven for doubting this since Pittard’s divorce and her ex-husband’s affair were also the subject of her previous book, subtitled “A Memoir [Kind of],” and in fact, her ex-husband, the writer Andrew Ewell, published both a novel and a short story that very much resemble the works described in Pittard’s novel. Hana’s best friend tells her that her ex’s portrayal of her is “smug” and “insecure.” “If I were an angry and unsatisfied man,” Hana replies, “that’s exactly how I’d describe a woman with ambition, too.” The narrator’s ensuing crisis involves playing a game with her boyfriend where she pretends to be dead, not returning a lost cat to its owner, drinking a lot with different members of her family who have all recently moved to Kentucky, exchanging slightly flirty texts with a man with whom she might have had a one-night stand before she knew about her ex-husband’s affair, and going to a writers’ residency. Pittard’s prose hums with wit and verve, paragraphs and pages ricocheting from one sharp or devastating or shocking observation to the next. Ultimately, though, the novel never quite transcends its backstory or makes meaning of its protagonist’s ennui, though Hana’s relationship with her depressed father is poignant.

A wild romp of a novel that might have been more successful if the writer weren’t still out for revenge.