If You Love It, Let It Kill You

A Novel

by Hannah Pittard

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Pub Date Jul 15 2025 | Archive Date Aug 15 2025

Henry Holt & Company | Henry Holt and Co.

General Fiction (Adult)

Description

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

Divorced and childless by choice, Hana P. has built a cozy life in Lexington, Kentucky, teaching at the university, living with her boyfriend (a fellow academic) and helping raise his pre-teen daughter. Her sister’s sprawling family lives just across the street, and their long-divorced, deeply complicated parents have also recently moved to town.

One day, Hana 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, a visit to the dean’s office, a shadowy figure from the past, a Greek chorus of indignant students whose primary complaints concern Hana’s autofictional narrative, and a game called Dead Body.

Steeped in the subtleties and strangeness of contemporary life, If You Love It, Let It Kill You is a deeply nuanced and disturbingly funny examination of memory, ownership, and artistic expression for readers of Miranda July’s All Fours and Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend.

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

Divorced and...

Advance Praise

“The real Ann Beattie has always enjoyed and admired Hannah’s ability to convince the reader that ordinary things aren’t ordinary, but neither are they necessarily extraordinary—just different, complicated, and worth noticing and thinking about. This book, which either is or isn’t a novel, because the real Ann Beattie knows better than to believe in categories, is a wonderful meta turn, and invokes daily life very much the way her, and my, much-appreciated Donald Barthelme would view it: as an of-the-moment ‘Critique de la Vie Quotidienne,’ seen through close examination that suggests expansive metaphoric possibilities. Good reading. Really.”

—Ann Beattie

“Hannah Pittard’s new novel is utterly compelling. I felt like I was standing beside Hannah while she peered in a mirror, looking for truth (in fiction, where it of course resides), pointing out flaws, but allowing the cracks of beauty to be revealed too. Pittard’s work lets nothing off the hook, and I read the book in one sitting, desperate to know if she—and therefore I—would be all right by the end. I love Hannah Pittard’s dark and squirrelly mind. I’m a huge fan.”

—Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful

“Hannah Pittard has always been so adept at delving into the interior, unafraid of what might reside there, able to create stories where the specificity of relationships and family and identity touch you in these unexpected ways. If You Love It, Let It Kill You asserts that it is ‘neither a comedy nor a tragedy but something much worse: real life’ but Pittard and these characters know better. Real life, the strangest place to reside, is where Pittard does the most incredible work.”

—Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here

“Hannah Pittard’s If You Love It, Let It Kill You is a masterclass in autofiction: incisive, hilarious, heartbreaking, and mercilessly candid. This novel, its narrator makes clear, is ‘neither a comedy nor a tragedy but something much worse: real life.’ If You Love It, Let It Kill You is Pittard’s most impressive and innovative book yet.”

—Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“I was going to say, one of the many reasons I love Hannah Pittard as a writer is that she looks at the world with an unflinching clarity. ‘Unflinching’ is a word writers love to use about other writers. I think it’s another word for brave. But then I thought maybe the word unflinching is too easy, and actually now that I think about it, unflinching isn’t even true at all. Hannah is a flincher. She flinches at the world and remembers that flinching, how exactly it felt to be surprised when her life turned topsy turvy. And it’s in that honest reaction to life where she manages to be the one seemingly impossible thing: funny. She is not just interested in facts, but the absurdity of facts and, in her gaze, even dark moments can become hilarious.”

—Ada Limón, Poet Laureate of the United States