If You Love It, Let It Kill You — Hannah Pittard

Recommended Summer Reading according to The New York Times, Elle, Zibby Owens, and the Minnesota Star Tribune

“A dishy work of autofiction that everyone will be talking about.”
-- The New York Times

A refreshingly irreverent novel about art, desire, domesticity, freedom, and the intricacies of the twenty-first-century female experience, from the acclaimed writer Hannah Pittard

A novelist learns that an unflattering version of herself will appear prominently -- and soon -- in her ex-husband's debut novel. For a week, her life continues largely unaffected by the news -- she cooks, runs, teaches, entertains -- but the morning after baking mac 'n' cheese from scratch for her nephew's sixth birthday, she wakes up changed. The contentment she's long enjoyed is gone. In its place: nothing. A remarkably ridiculous midlife crisis ensues, featuring a talking cat and a game called Dead Body.

Steeped in the strangeness of contemporary life and suggestive of expansive metaphoric possibilities, If You Love It, Let It Kill You is a deeply nuanced and disturbingly funny examination of memory, ownership, and artistic expression.