Please Stop Trying to Leave Me

By: Alana Saab

A debut novel about love, family, queerness, and losing your mind in the modern world marks the arrival of a truly original, haunting voice in fiction who will make you laugh, cry, and scream, all in the same breath.

In the midst of god sending her signs through Instagram and Spotify telling her to break up with her girlfriend, twenty-seven-year-old Norma meets a new therapist for one reason: she really needs to write again. With only one story left to finish her collection, Norma is desperate for an answer: should she leave her girlfriend in order to finish her manuscript?

When her new therapist diagnoses her with depersonalization/derealization disorder, Norma insists she doesn't have it: it's just Oblivion, the thing that started happening to her when she was two and a half. Haunted by SSRI side effects, her girlfriend's kindness, her father's incessant calls, and a world that becomes less hazily fictional by the day, Norma has never felt crazier. And whenever she attempts to write The Last Story, Norma is faced with the reality and unrealities of her past, the society she lives in, and everything that she's ever believed about life, writing, and love. Against the backdrop of climate change, racial injustice, Google ads, and the metaverse, Norma begins sharing other stories, hoping that they'll help her connect the dissociative dots once and for all. Maybe it's crazy not to be crazy in a place like this. And in the midst of it all is Norma's girlfriend, who may well be an answer in Norma's search for meaning.

Told alternately through Norma's barely fictional fiction and through 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.