Review: If You Love It, Let It Kill You by Hannah Pittard

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

Blurb from Goodreads:

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 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.

My Review:

This was very weird and very good.  Definitely recommend if you like Miranda July.  It was so cerebral but also unexpected!  I read it in one day and enjoyed it immensely.  So well written and so interesting!

If You Love, Let It Kill You comes out next week on July 15, 2025, and you can purchase HERE!  

One day, they will understand the subtleties of the world, the absurdity and sadness and isolation of what it means not just to be alive but to be alive and a middle-aged woman on the brink of invisibility.