You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

DOTTERS PICK - Quarantine Reading List From Catapult: For fans of Garth Greenwell and Weike Wang, a startling debut novel of desire and doubleness following the life of a young Palestinian American woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities  On a hot day in Bethlehem, a twelve-year-old Palestinian American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter. Told in vignettes that flash between the United States and the Middle East—from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine—Zaina Arafat’s debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first