Tag Archives: therapy

Sophomore Sapphic Novel Doesn’t Disappoint: Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin

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Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin (she/her) is one of my new favorite books. Within the first few pages, Austin personified a tampon box, lamented the indignity of celebrating baby genitals (read: gender reveals), and made the astute, albeit morbid, observation that one of the perks of being a lesbian is that it’s less critical to vet whether your date will kill you. I was so intrigued and entertained, I couldn’t wait to keep reading.

If Austin’s name sounds familiar to you, you may have heard of her debut novel, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, which followed a twentysomething atheist lesbian who could not stop ruminating about death. The book was long listed for The Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award, and a finalist for the Ottawa Book Awards. 

Austin’s sophomore novel follows another endearing and unique protagonist: space-obsessed and true-crime-loving Enid, a twenty-six-year-old neurodivergent lesbian who is deaf in one ear. When she is not working at the Space Agency or listening to a seemingly endless loop of true crime podcasts, Enid is going out with a steady rotation of women/non-binary people from dating apps. She has it down to a science. She has never dated anyone exclusively and is quick to cut people off before things get too serious.

Enid’s most important relationship is the one she has with her mother.  When she was young, her father cheated on her mother and started a new family. At the start of the novel, he has recently passed away and Enid is trying to cultivate a relationship with her two half-sisters while maintaining loyalty to her mother, who she lovingly peppers with interesting facts about space to show she cares.

Early on, it is clear that Enid has some unresolved trauma. She is inexplicably terrified of bald men. She has trouble accessing and trusting her memories. She is convinced that she is being followed. She believes she may have a parasite, that she is a shell for something bad. In the midst of all this, Enid meets Polly, who bypasses Enid’s carefully constructed emotional safeguards and makes her start wondering if she wants more.

Austin does a masterful job of working through Enid’s issues with humor and empathy. While Interesting Facts About Space has several engaging sub-plots, the most engrossing aspect of the novel is Enid’s journey of self-discovery. Part of what endeared me to Enid was that I felt like I bore witness to her reckoning. I watched her grapple with questions like “Am I a good person?” and “Do I deserve love?” – questions I have asked myself. The ability to explore such emotional depth in a book without sounding contrived is a skill. Austin made me feel so connected to Enid that I wished I could continue following her journey.

If you read and love this book like me, check out Austin’s backlist, which includes Oh Honey (a novella) and Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead (her debut novel). Austin’s third novel, We Could Be Rats, is expected in January 2025.

Trigger warnings for discussions of mental health issues, including hypervigilance, PTSD, dissociation, hyperarousal, depression, anxiety, and self-harm; and graphic descriptions of true crime scenarios.

Raquel R. Rivera (she/her/ella) is a Latina lawyer and lady lover from New Jersey.  She is in a lifelong love affair with books and earned countless free personal pan pizzas from the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program as a kid to prove it.

A Debut with Staying Power: Please Stop Trying to Leave Me by Alana Saab

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Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is a deeply engrossing, frenetic, and thought-provoking debut by Portuguese-Lebanese-American writer and screenwriter Alana Saab (she/her).

The story is narrated by Norma, a twenty-seven-year-old, privileged young woman living in present-day New York in the wake of a mental health breakdown. Described by Saab as “experimental”, the novel unfolds over eight months of Norma’s therapy sessions, which are interspersed with short stories from her manuscript. In therapy, Norma explores the “oblivion” that has plagued her since childhood. Though Norma previously only ebbed in and out of oblivion, she now finds herself stuck in it, unable to finish her manuscript and overwhelmed by the signs she believes God is sending her to break up with her girlfriend.

Early in the book, Norma’s therapist diagnoses her with major depressive disorder, depersonalization/derealization disorder, and immense anxiety. Norma’s therapist surmises that Norma is projecting meaning onto her external environment (i.e., signs from God that she should break up with her girlfriend) so that she does not have to do the internal work of reflection. Norma’s therapist believes that this is likely because Norma has experienced significant trauma.

Reading Please Stop Trying to Leave Me was an immersive experience. As someone who struggles with anxiety, Saab’s writing was so authentic that I had to put the book down several times to stop myself from getting swept up in Norma’s chaotic energy. Saab displayed such a high-level understanding of mental health issues and the ways in which they manifest that I was not at all surprised to learn she has a Masters in Psychology. It was also really refreshing that Saab wrote with such unflinching honesty about not only Norma’s traumas, but the reality of being in a healthy adult relationship, including the fact that ambivalence is a normal part of every relationship, romantic or otherwise.

My favorite short story from Norma’s manuscript was “Fertile Ashes”, wherein she charted her main character’s lifelong coming out journey and compared the art of fearlessly choosing for ourselves to the self-immolation and rebirth of a phoenix. I also really enjoyed how clever and incisive Norma was throughout the novel. No matter how heavy the subject matter, she managed to bring levity–whether she was criticizing the arrangement of the pillows on her therapist’s couch or cursing out Joe Biden for lying to the American people and upsetting her girlfriend.  

Saab is a masterful storyteller. Although I found Please Stop Trying to Leave Me difficult to get through at times, it was only because Saab had so expertly crafted Norma’s world that its chaos was palpable. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who’s ever wondered about how the mind works of someone who struggles with depression, anxiety, or dissociation, and to anyone who believes in the healing properties of writing.

Saab lives in New York with her partner.  She teaches writing workshops to survivors of domestic violence, human trafficking, and sexual assault through the non-profit Here There and Everywhere. She also mentors incarcerated writers with PEN America’s Prison Writing Program. You can find Saab on Instagram at @alana.saab.

Trigger warnings for discussions of mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and depersonalization/derealization disorder; recreational and prescription drug use; child sexual abuse; suicidal ideation; and graphic detail of a medical procedure.

Raquel R. Rivera (she/her/ella) is a Latina lawyer and lady lover from New Jersey.  She is in a lifelong love affair with books and earned countless free personal pan pizzas from the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program as a kid to prove it.

Traumatized, Angsty Bisexuals: 6 Times We Almost Kissed (and One Time We Did) by Tess Sharpe

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Penny and Tate’s mothers have always been best friends—but the same cannot be said about the daughters’ relationship. Having clashed their entire lives, they must now put aside their bickering when Penny’s mom agrees to become a liver donor to Tate’s mother, as both parents have decided to combine households for the summer. Although this will help the families get through this physically, emotionally, and financially difficult period, it will certainly not help Penny and Tate’s ever-confusing dynamic. Because, for some reason, they keep almost kissing. And even though they made a pact to keep the shared home drama-free, living across the hall from each other makes it increasingly more difficult to continue pretending that nothing ever (almost) happened between them.

As a fan of Sharpe’s writing, I can confidently say this is her best work. I’d read The Girls I’ve Been and Far From You in the past and really enjoyed them, but neither of those books got close to packing the same kind of emotional punch that I experienced while reading 6 Times We Almost Kissed.

Now, granted, it may be unfair to compare two thriller/mysteries to an angsty romance, and, granted, I am a very emotional reader. But this book… This book had me sobbing the entire way through. I know this is usually said (often by me) in a hyperbolic way. But it is a factually accurate assessment of my reading experience to say that tears were streaming down my face, non-stop, throughout the entirety of this story. I refused to read this book out in public because it was a guarantee that I would embarrassingly start crying in front of unassuming strangers on their daily morning commute.

I’d know from her other novels that Sharpe was particularly skilled at writing teenage characters who have suffered through unimaginable trauma. Therefore, it should have been no surprise that the cast of characters in this story were equally well-written, if not more so. The complexities of their family dynamics felt extremely raw and realistic, and I couldn’t help but deeply root for each of them to grow and heal. It is in fact quite a heavy story, but it felt almost therapeutic to read through, to the point that even though I knew it was going to cause me irreparable emotional damage, I could not put it down.

Sharpe does an excellent job of showing how a parent’s illness, a parent’s death and/or a parent’s grief will affect their child in the short- and long-term. The book really is an in-depth look into the ways our reactions to collective trauma impact those who were also affected by it, and the ways in which their own coping mechanisms can bend and mold the person that we become after the fact.

I do have a soft spot for sapphic main characters with complex mother-daughter dynamics, which ultimately are at the core of this novel. Yes, it is about romance and love and allowing yourself to believe that people can care deeply for you even after witnessing you at your lowest. But it is also about how difficult it is to be a mother after facing life-altering events; how painful it is to be the child of a parent who struggles to recover from pain, suffering, and loss; how limited rural medical access can force people to put themselves at risk for the sake of those they care about; how you can hurt those around you, but it does not necessarily make you a bad person unworthy of forgiveness and love.

If you’ve read some of Sharpe’s other novels and appreciated either the character analysis or her iconic non-chronological style of storytelling, you will love this book. She definitely included much less mystery than in her other YA novels, but she makes up for it tenfold in angst, love, and tears.

Representation: bisexual main characters

Content warnings [as listed by the author]: emotional abuse, neglect of a daughter by a mother, PTSD, accidental death of a father, ovarian cancer, remission, oophorectomy, liver donation, mentions of suicidal ideation and pain medication being monitored, mentions of a past interrupted assault, anti-therapy and anti-medication attitudes