If You Love It, Let It Kill You

An NPR best book of the year 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.

Hannah Pittard is the author of the novels Listen to Me and The Fates Will Find Their Way. She is a winner of the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a MacDowell fellow, and the Guy M. Davenport Professor in English at the University of Kentucky. She lives with her boyfriend and stepdaughter in Lexington. Much of her family lives nearby.