There are some books that you read once and know they'll stick with you forever. Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is 100% one of those books. I thought I knew what I was getting into when I picked it up -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation is one of my favorite books, after all. I'm a sad lil twentysomething disaster; I devour sad girl fiction like some people devour beach reads.

But Please Stop Trying to Leave Me absolutely tore me to shreds. Told in alternating stream of consciousness therapy sessions and the main character, Norma's manuscript, this book is a meta, lyrical, artistic look into one woman's mental breakdown and her slow path to recovery. I am normally not triggered, but Saab's book is one of the rawest things I have read in years. Often when reading, I had to put the book down and step outside just to ground myself, and that, to me, is where the power lies. I have very rarely seen mental health depicted so accurately and achingly in fiction, and the way Saab tackles Norma's mental state, in all its complexity, is haunting.

Though Norma enters therapy to figure out why the universe wants her to break up with her girlfriend--and how she can possibly finish her semi-autobiographical manuscript if she does so--it becomes readily apparent the manuscript is not the issue at all. Instead, it's so much broader. It's about how to come to terms with a nonsensical world, how to heal from a trauma so buried that it cannot be touched, and so much more. And because of this, it's not a book I'd readily recommend to everyone. It's not a book I think I'll be able to read again. But it's a book I am so thankful to have been able to read.

Thank you to NetGalley; Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor; and Alana Saab for gifting me this e-ARC in exchange for my honest review. Alana Saab's writing is remarkable. I cannot wait to see what she comes out with next.

This is so good. It shows how complex it is to navigate mental illness and chronic illness is on your own for so long and to finally have professional help and not know what to do with it. I think the author did an amazing job talking about the different challenges of mental illness and how they intertwine with attachment and relationships. It was well-written and heartbreaking and very moving.

Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is unconventionally structured, following main character Norma as she writes her way through therapy and attempts to process her past and layers of trauma. Part love story, part psychological exploration, the story shifts continuously from Norma’s short stories to her inner dialogue during therapy sessions.

The stream of consciousness style works well here - although sometimes difficult to follow, it mirrors the experience of the narrator struggling with derealization and anxiety. Saab’s debut is gritty and painfully authentic, but glimmers with hope throughout.

Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC!

Heartbreaking, heavy, and haunting. These are the three words that immediately came to mind after finishing PLEASE STOP TRYING TO LEAVE ME by Alana Saab. This is one of the most unique novels that I’ve read in a while—mostly because of the structure. The reader is in Norma’s world. We spend a lot of time in the main character’s head as she tells her story through therapy sessions and short stories. It’s a 400 page novel, but certainly didn’t feel like it. I inhaled it in just a few days—it reads quite quickly. Norma is erratic, unhinged, and quite the unusual character. One may even label her as an unreliable narrator, and I definitely wouldn’t argue that. Norma’s new therapist has diagnosed her with depression/derealization disorder, and the reader is by her side as she navigates this diagnosis. We witness the weeks of therapy, medication use, and her struggle to finish her manuscript. As she shares bits and pieces of her manuscript, we learn more about her difficult childhood and traumatic past. At first, I wasn’t quite sure about Norma, but she slowly grew on me. You can’t help but feel for this woman and root for her. PSTTLM takes a deep dive into mental illness in this modern world, which I found completely unsettling, moving, and eye-opening. It’s a very impressive and smart debut, indeed. Give it a shot if you’re in the mood for something deep and profound.

This is a trip. I haven't read anything like it before, or anything that so accurately depicts depersonalization and derealization. As someone who has experienced it and did lots of intensive therapy to resolve that as my automatic stress/trauma response - this is what it's like.

With an unreliable narrator that you will alternately relate to and also think might be a terrible, privileged jerk, you're sucked into the stream of consciousness delivery, the sarcastic take on a lot of people around her, a fear of loving and what it means to be loved, and the inevitability of oblivion.

A strange, at times horrifying, and delightful trip.

I requested this book for the cover and I was not disappointed.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher, Vintage, for letting me read an eARC of this book! The release date is Tuesday, June 25th.

This book had a lot going for it to be honest. I thought that having an unlikeable main character struggling with her mental health was right up my alley but unfortunately it’s not. The writing is captivating so that’s what made this a hard decision to make on how to rate it and if I should DNF or not. Sadly the writing wasn’t enough for me to save this book as I DNF’d this one at 35%. I really loved the idea behind the plot of the story and I thought that I’d love the unlikeable FMC, but it didn’t work for me. The FMC was just too unlikeable for me to the point where I wasn’t rooting for her and it was frustrating to read. The FMC is seeing a therapist throughout the over and reading their sessions together made me cringe so hard and also got me so frustrated. The MC was so wrapped up in her own delusion that she couldn’t see what was the cause of her issues, and she wasn’t self-aware enough for me to enjoy the read.

Overall I think this book missed the mark for me, but I do still recommend it to others as I think this was just a me thing.

Maybe this book wasn’t for me.
While beautiful…it felt too flowery for me.

I felt like I was grasping at an abstract.

This is a tough one to rate because it had some really good parts but it also had some really bad parts. I really enjoyed the genre bending and the structure. An almost diary of sorts with a very unreliable narrator.

The actual writing was very good but the tone often got incredibly annoying, condescending and pretentious. I could forgive it up to a point because it is depicting a mental illness, quite accurately too. However there are so many parts that are truly eyeroll worthy, especially in the first half of the book (I almost DNF-ed it multiple times). Some of the observations about the modern world are very obvious and come from a very privileged point of view and a lot of the meta/fourth wall breaking elements are cringe. I’m also not entirely sure if I like the last short story/the epilogue(?) when it’s from the pov of her girlfriend. I love the concept but I’m not entirely happy with the execution. It falls a little flat imo.

This is in essence a book about trauma and derealization and the very rocky and hard process of healing and it does this very well and, to my experience, very accurately (even with all the dramatics) (the dramatics are a very honest part of the experience actually). So I did appreciate this a lot. When the trauma is that bad, getting help is a very frustrating process and to build up trust with your therapist takes a very long tedious time and I think this was showcased incredibly well.

There are a few scenes in this book that viscerally burned into my memory and will probably not leave anytime soon, specifically the speculum scene and that moment of remembering a long buried trauma.

Keeping all this in mind, the narrator herself was still just a very annoying person, mental illness and trauma or not. I didn’t really like her for most of the book, except for a few rare glimpses.

Which leads us to why I’m so ambivalent about the very last part of the book. The narrator from the pov of her girlfriend sounds like a genuinely awful toxic even abusive person. And yes, the effects of your body adjusting to SSRI meds can be very volatile but the way her girlfriend was dealing with it was very reminiscent of the way victims in abusive relationships act. But in the book it’s portrayed as romantic and healthy and that gives me a bit of an ick.

Overall, I’m glad I got to read this one, despite all its flaws. Not a bad debut.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

(Heads up for CSA content warning)

4.25 stars

Norma is a writer struggling with her manuscript after a mental breakdown, so she goes to therapy to try to Get Better while dealing with signs from the universe that she should break up with her girlfriend.

I absolutely love mental health books, and this one is a really interesting take on depression, depersonalization/derealization, and anxiety. I loved that this is told in a combination of therapy sessions and short stories written by the main character. Did not like that there are no quotation marks, but I got used to it. I think it could have been maybe 50 pages shorter because it was starting to get repetitive. I enjoyed the way it ended, and I think this is a good addition to queer mental health fiction.

Thank you to NetGalley and publisher for the opportunity to read and review.

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.