The unnamed narrator of You Exist Too Much, the debut novel of the Palestinian-American author Zaina Arafat, published in 2020, discusses her bisexuality frequently throughout the novel. She is a Palestinian-American woman in her twenties, who is navigating relationships, eating disorders, mental health struggles, love addiction and not being accepted by her own mother for being bi. She often feels like she doesn’t fit in, both in terms of her bicultural identity and her bisexuality. Throughout the novel, the narrator is deliberately unnamed.
She explores her deepest desires; as a teenager, she had hidden her longings and true identity, and in her twenties, she experiences various romances and obsessions with other people, or as it’s referred to in her therapy sessions, as “love addiction”.
In the novel, the narrator discusses her childhood memories of being told what is “haram” (“religiously forbidden” or “taboo” in Arabic), and from a young age, she thinks deeply about not only her sexuality but also her gender.
The narrator describes how, when she had first told her mother on the phone that she likes “both”, her mother had asked: “Is it official?” The narrator explains to us: “I was unsure of what ‘official’ meant, in the context of sexuality. I imagined it to mean ‘are you sure’ or ‘is there no way you could just not be that way?’”
She lies to her mother, at times, pretends that she has a boyfriend when she actually has a girlfriend. When the mother finds out, both times, she reacts in a nasty way, falling out with her daughter. The narrator often refers to the intolerance of LGBT people amongst her relatives but also amongst Americans.
The statement that the unnamed narrator “exists too much” is countered in such a lovely way by her decision to take up space and proudly exist on her own terms, in between two cultures and in between sexualities.