thank you to netgalley for the eARC.
**3.5 stars on storygraph**

starting off, i really liked the writing style. i wasn’t a big fan of the lack of quotation marks when speaking, but i picked up on when someone was speaking fairly quickly. there were a few times where i thought it was dialogue but was actually their thoughts.

it took me a little bit to get into this book. before i started reading, i was so sure that it was going to be a five star read, but i realized it wouldn’t be early on.

the cover is beautiful and i love the title, but i wasn’t a big fan of the book.

i feel like the main character said everyone else’s names when it came to her writing, but her name wasn’t mentioned until a decent portion in. the same with her therapist. i don’t even think her girlfriend’s name was ever mentioned.

i did like the book at times. it touched on many topics that people often steer away from such as specific political candidates, environmental issues, etc. as for the ending, i really liked how it was written. i’m not entirely sure whose point of view it was written in though.

This book is about a 27 year old lesbian who has suffered a mental breakdown and is now trying to navigate her relationships and life in general. This story is formatted like nothing I’ve read before, it is essentially a collection of short stories that are all tied together through present day therapy sessions. During these sessions it is told stream of conscious style so at first I was expecting this book to be a ‘weird girl book’ but at about the 40% mark I realized it wasn’t going in that direction and stayed very heavy most of the time. I appreciated the mental health representation in this book as someone who suffers with many of the same problems as the MC , to be honest the ‘therapy’ portion in this was the most interesting and addictive part of this story. I will say what brought this down from a 5 to 4 was the ending. I was at the 80% mark and it felt like it just wouldn’t end, and at one point we get a new POV but the writing felt the same so it was hard for me to switch gears. Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed the actual ending of the story maybe just not the method of delivery I guess. Big thanks to NetGally for the advanced copy and I can’t wait to see more from this author.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

All my existential dread wrapped up in almost 400 pages of deeply emotional prose. Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is the story of Norma, who has just started seeing her new therapist. Told in alternating chapters that cover Norma’s conversations with her therapist and a collection of her short stories, we slowly learn about the deepest parts of Norma: her derealization/depersonalization tendencies known as Oblivion, her relationship with queerness, her relationship with her family, and her relationship with love.

This is not a light read. Throughout the novel we follow Norma through some of the roughest parts of her mental illness. Not only that, but Saab also raises some very real questions about how to operate in society when the ticking clock of climate change hovers over us, when our phones listen to us to provide a more relevant ad experience, and when we’re constantly exposed to violence, bigotry, and warfare on every screen?

Ultimately, this was a rough read for me, but necessary. I saw myself in Norma, and though Please Stop Trying to Leave Me didn’t necessarily provide any answers, it was cathartic to watch her journey crawling out of Oblivion.

This one was a little bit of a mind bender. It was hard to wrap my head around some scenes, some dialogue, some characters, etc, but I think that's the point, right? This book is about depression, and DPDR. I've never seen a book that tackles it so well, in a way that makes you really question what the hell is going on. You can tell the author has a background in psychology, as well as is an author, despite this being a debut book. It was a bit hard to tell when dialogue was happening without quotes and while I think that was a part of it as well, it took away from the experience as a whole, as well as the confusingness of it all, so that's why I took away two stars.

AHHHH! This was so profound! I am obsessed!

I am so thankful to Vintage Books, Alana Saab, Netgalley, and PRH Audio for the #free audiobook, the digital access, and the #gifted physical copy before this hot mess hits shelves on June 25, 2024.

Enter the scene with Norma at her new therapist's office, talking about oblivion and her other existential crises that are inflicting her life on a day-to-day basis. Norma is a struggling writer with loads of generational and inherited trauma. She is offloading most of that trauma to her girlfriend and new therapist via stories that she's written, which we get to experience as the reader as well.

Norma is definitely experiencing a taste of neurosis, going blind in her rage and medicated/unmedicated flow, which gets explained at the end, where she constantly pushes aside her support system of a girlfriend as she sabotages every relationship she enters. It's interesting to view this from an outside perspective, yet I wanted to reach into the pages of this book and take her pain and struggles and hug her until everything was better.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher Vintage for a free digital ARC of the book in exchange for an honest review.
This story is meandering in a good way. Reminiscent of Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin with its unabashed look into the mind of a mentally ill, neurodivergent queer woman who shares her most shameful thoughts with the reader and her therapist, similarly to I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki or Mr. Robot. As someone who was once diagnosed with depersonalization disorder myself, this was an intensely relatable look at dissociation and how it impacts one’s relationships. I haven’t seen dissociation and depersonalization disorder represented this well in a piece of media ever…except maybe playing the game Night in the Woods? The descriptions of what it feels like to not be present in your body, such as the feeling of being coated in saran wrap, were perfect. The humor is also deeply and darkly funny as the narrator obsesses over minute things that bother her, and I found myself laughing out loud often. The formatting of the story worried me at first with it being prose-like and absent of quotation marks, but I quickly got used to it and it wasn’t confusing. The storytelling method of switching between the author’s real life and her memoir-esque fictional short stories was very effective with the blending of these realities featuring magical realism and horror within the short stories being compared with the horrors and traumas of reality. I would suggest looking through the trigger warnings before reading this if you or someone you know has a history with mental illness and childhood trauma especially. One part towards the end that really hit me hard was this:
“What Norma meant to say with each metaphor was that her writing was doing what her mind had done for twenty-seven years. Her writing kept her pain at a distance from her. It kept her memories dissociated from her body. It kept her emotions trapped somewhere away from her heart. Writing was her attempt at transplanting her trauma into a character so she didn’t have to hold it. And when she transplanted it, she could edit the trauma the way she so badly wanted to edit her memories. Sometimes the pain was so difficult, she had to write a character who was writing another character.”
Just…damn. A lot of my experiences with trauma and mental illness and weird family dynamics were strikingly similar to Norma’s, so this book really hit me hard and I had to take my time with it. Will this book be what finally makes me go to therapy?

"Please Stop Trying to Leave Me" by Alana Saab is unlike any other story I have read before. Stick with me here. 

Our main character, Norma, a writer who thinks she's being sent signals from God, via social media, and just wants to finish her manuscript. But feels she may need to break up with her girlfriend to do so. She starts seeing a new therapist to help her discover if breaking up will help her write that last chapter.

   The therapist diagnoses Norma with depersonalization/derealization disorder, and we go back and forth between therapy visits, stream of consciousness thoughts,  SSRI hazed side effects, Norma's sort of fiction fictional stories used to convey what's happened to her.

   This was not an easy read for me, it was a challenge, but full of so many gems that really made parts of Norma's story shine.  It's a heart wrenching and honest, darkly comedic at times story of not only having a breakdown, but having one in this digital age where the lines of reality are getting blurred for all of us.

This book is about learning to live, love, trek and manage life amidst trauma and I appreciated this perspective very much. Plus queer?! YES PLEASE. There were some triggering bits for me, but reading such a candid take on mental health, therapy and trauma-it’ was necessary and worth the triggering bits.

This is my first DNF of the year. I got 20% of the way and just couldn’t do it…
This book was so chaotic and made 0 sense. I hated that there wasn’t any grammar indicators for when people were talking. It definitely felt like being in the mind of someone having a mental breakdown and I just couldn’t keep up with the thought process. Unfortunately I don’t see myself picking this one up again either.

Thank you to Penguin Random House for an early release of this book.

Thank you NetGalley and Alana Saab for this ARC in exchange for my honest review!

3.25 stars

This is tough because, I think this probably is an excellent book, but it just really wasn't for me.

It is written from the POV of Norma, who is an unreliable narrator and writer. Norma is navigating a number of mental health issues (disassociation, anxiety, depression, etc.) and most of the book is conversations that Norma has with her therapist, thoughts that Norma has about her therapist, and excerpts from Norma's manuscript.

Admittedly, I don't know much about being in therapy- not because I don't need therapy, but because I unfortunately live in a place where it is very difficult to find affordable therapy- but I got the feeling that Norma's progress had nothing to do with the therapist. There is also a quote in the book that says something along the lines of, "our illnesses exist to heal us from trauma" (I'm very much paraphrasing). Anyway, it was an interesting perspective on mental health, and, I think if I were more of an intellectual (or just, really into psychology) I would very much appreciate what the author was doing here.

Although she comes off as selfish and maybe even narcissistic at times, I liked Norma. Her character was very real and dynamic. There is a lot of awkwardness and some humor (both things I enjoy). And because Norma is a writer herself, the narration itself has a sort of rhythm to it. The words are used in interesting ways. Kind of halfway in between poetry and prose.

Overall though, for ME, it was a bit too chaotic and artistic. I found myself quickly becoming frustrated and bored. I am sure many others will love this though.

Absolutely loved this book. It was so wickedly creative and the dark humor kept me laughing. Saab manages to walk the line between a chaotic inner life post-breakdown and the realities of the world beautifully. The way bits of information come to light at the right moment and show us what's really happening with our protagonist was smartly done. Saab pulls this off beautifully and I am impressed, because this was a really ambitious and creative way to tell a story.

2.0

Setting: New York
Rep: lesbian protagonist; bipoc author

This started out so strong and I thought it could be a 5* but it slowly declined as it got more and more annoying to read and more of a chore. I liked the therapy aspects but Norma's stories were so boring and I was skimming by the last 20%. This could've been at least half its length and been way more powerful.

A story seen through the eyes of a single character, and told within the confines of therapists office.

Norma is unstable and unwilling to separate fact from fiction, and her therapist diagnoses her with depersonalization/derealization disorder.

Believing she’s seeing signs all around her to break up with her girlfriend in order to write her novel, she begins to share her manuscript with her therapist to make sense of her random thoughts.

This novel was enjoyable but somewhat slow to read. While I enjoyed the complex inner dialogue that Norma brought to the table, I also liked how her world became entangled with the non-reality of her diagnosis. I felt the confusion and the need to find herself. I just wish there was a bit more substance to keep me engaged one hundred percent.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This novel just wasn't for me. The writing style is what irked me the most. It's broken down into little paragraphs, and it's VERY repetitive. Certain phrases are repeated to death. It made for a very challenging and frustrating reading experience. Once a novel starts to feel like a chore that's when I become pretty checked out from the overall story. It's such a shame because the synopsis of the plot is very interesting. I like stories that are dark and brooding, but if the writing style would've been stronger than I think I would've enjoyed this more. The cover art is absolutely gorgeous, I think that is the only positive thing I can say about this book.

I couldn’t have chosen a better time or month to read this ARC.

Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is a truly remarkable piece of work.

It deals with the struggles of mental health (the main theme of the book IMO), and on healing from trauma while dealing with mental illness.

It’s a beautiful, brutal, captivating read with some hard truths and facts buried inside. I was completely enamored with the writing — my mind blown away at how easily the words flowed and the story came together in the end.

I think this debut novel is an important read, one that is filled with the realities of being a human dealing with a lifetime of trauma and overcoming a mental health crises.

This book was beautiful and challenging. As someone with DPDR it was really fascinating to see that expressed in fiction — it was at times quite difficult because of how much this stream of consciousness resembled my own but in a way also affirming. The writing was experimental and unique and I felt perfectly matched the story and really dropped readers into Norma’s mind in a way that was intentionally uncomfortable but made the internal explorations all the more impactful.

this one was so hard and so interesting to read. let me explain... if you personally struggle with your mental health, then you'll kind of understand the main character. whatever your diagnoses, our mental chatter is almost the same: chaotic, all-encompassing, overwhelming, loud, nonsensical, intrusive, unstable, morbid, confusing etc. and all of that makes up a lot of this novel.

the main character, Norma, goes to therapy in hopes of getting her to finish writing her manuscript. through these therapy sessions, we get a lot of insight of what's going on in Norma's head. from her train of thoughts, past trauma, romantic & familial relationships, introspection & self-awareness, her book, etc. it's all over the place at times. it gives an idea of what may go on in the mind of a person who's going through a severe mental psychosis. sometimes things make sense, sometimes we don't know what it is we're thinking/doing, sometimes we just seem... unhinged.

the lack of quotations may be hard for some to look past, but i think it suited the story. as if Norma's occasional incoherence and lucidity is laid out for the reader to experience as well. if she can't make sense of what she's feeling, thinking, experiencing... why should we? it made Norma the most frustrating and unreliable character, but also the most relatable. if that makes sense.

even though there were parts that were hard to get through, i loved reading this. i would definitely recommend this. there's a level of rawness and realness in this novel that i respect and appreciate. this would also probably be a great book for those studying Psychology and need an in-depth case study. for a debut, the author did well!

thank you to NetGalley & Vintage Books for allowing me the opportunity to read this book. i received this as an ARC & leave this review voluntarily.

"Please Stop Trying To Leave Me" is a unique reading experience that explores the psyche of Norma, a protagonist grappling with the disorienting effects of Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder. As she navigates the chaos of her internal world, haunted by the cryptic messages of divine intervention on social media platforms, Norma goes on a healing journey, anchored by her desire to complete her manuscript, "The Last Story." This story oscillates between Norma's mental illness and her raw stream of consciousness. While I enjoyed the book I think it's mostly suited to those with a background of understanding the nature of psychoanalysis. The book unravels with honesty, wit, and a touch of horror that explores the blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy, sanity and madness.

Through dialogue with Norma's therapist, readers gains insight into dissociation, while simultaneously hearing about the power of storytelling as a coping mechanism for authors and creatives in general. Norma's relationship with her therapist serves as a conduit for unraveling the inner workings of her psyche, and explores the role of memory and emotion in a bid to make sense of her fractured reality.

I loved reading the epilogue at the end that shares the collaborative aspect of Norma's writing process. It shows how she is eventually able to complete her manuscript with the help of her lover. The story demonstrates the way that relationships help us heal and face the darkest parts of ourselves when we are able to allow ourselves to be seen and held. Thank you to the author and publisher for the e-arc copy!

A story about a young woman dealing with her ever changing mental health. This story really resonated with me especially during these times when a lot of us are trying to work through trauma and figuring out who we really are. Throughout this book you learn that sometimes things don’t disappear once you “fix” them and that you may always have to live with certain thoughts or memories. However, these don’t have to take over our lives.

Thank you to the KDPG influencer program for the arc and to Net Galley.

Reminded me of what I enjoy about Emily Austin’s books. Dives deep into one woman’s inner life through mental illness, searching for love and belonging, and the messiness of one’s twenties.