Book Review: “Please Stop Trying to Leave Me” by Alana Saab
An Imaginary Conversation with My Therapist
Therapist: What’s your mood like?
Zachary Houle: Sad.
Therapist: What are you so sad about?
ZH: I’m always a little sad when I close the cover of a book for the final time. Particularly if it was a good book.
Therapist: What’s the book that has made you feel down?
ZH: It’s the debut novel by a New York City author named Alana Sabb. It’s called Please Stop Trying to Leave Me. It’s a bit of an unusual book — a little experimental and edgy.
Therapist: (silence).
ZH: (silence).
Therapist: (silence).
ZH: There’s that pregnant pause thing you do to make me feel uncomfortable and want to speak just to fill the void of emptiness. That’s an old trick they taught us in journalism school. In any event, the book is good. I don’t know if I didn’t fully understand it, but I enjoyed it.
Therapist: What didn’t you understand?
ZH: Well, the entire book is a series of conversations a young woman (whose age is 27, but I’m not sure if that means anything) has with her psychiatrist after suffering from some kind of nervous breakdown that isn’t revealed in the book. The woman, who is a lesbian (though I’m not sure why that matters and why I even bring that up), shows the therapist some short fiction she’s been working on in the hopes of turning it into a publishable manuscript. The thing is all these short stories seem to be about her. At least, if not literally, then these stories borrow elements from the young woman’s life. Or do they?
Therapist: Sounds like a work of literary fiction.
ZH: It is. And for all its boundary-pushing and iconoclastic nature, it’s a pretty good book. That doesn’t mean that it’s a perfect book, though.
Therapist: Why not?
ZH: Well, before I get critical, I should probably say a few good things just to be charitable. The author (the real author, Alana Saab) has a sardonic wit that I appreciated. She really “gets” the voice of a psychiatric patient and her seemingly bored, and yet “know it all” therapist. I liked how you know that the therapist is talking in a text — the book reads mostly like a screenplay because most of it is dialogue — because She Talks In Sentences Where The Words All Begin With Capital Letters. As though she’s important, a big shot.
Therapist: Mmmm-hmmm.
ZH: No offense, doc. But, anyhow, the other thing that’s good about the book is that it flies by. The book is more than 400 pages long, but you could easily read it in an afternoon. If the more philosophical elements of the novel don’t bog you down in pondering, that is.
Therapist: I see.
ZH: But the thing that I found to be the weakest link was the short stories themselves. Some of them weren’t bad. But it was difficult for me to initially see what point they had until the author of the story itself drew attention to them as fiction. (Or is it?) In that sense, and, you know, maybe this is a good thing about the book is that the novel is one big jigsaw puzzle. You must sit with it for a while and keep reading so that you slowly begin to peel back the onion and figure things out.
Therapist: It seems to me that you’ve figured out this book.
ZH: Not exactly. The young woman in the story goes on at length about “oblivion” — it’s a throughline of the novel — and I wasn’t sure what she was talking about unless it had something to do with the diagnoses the therapist was throwing at her.
Therapist: (silence).
ZH: (silence).
Therapist: (silence).
ZH: See, you’re doing it again. You don’t know what to say, so you quiet down and let me fill in the gaps. Anyhow, I don’t know what else there is to say really about this book. Again, I enjoyed it and was happy to read it — especially as this was gifted to me by a new publicist that I’m working with, and I want to prove myself to be kind and fair to her so that she’ll feed me more books in the future. So, yes, I do care about what other people think. Is that narcissism, by the way?
Therapist: I would say that it’s a sign that you care about others.
ZH: I hope so. It’s something I’ve been working on, but you know that. In any event, I think … well, I think I would recommend the novel to anyone interested in psychology. It’s a pretty good read overall. It was a different read for me. Certainly, something that I wasn’t expecting. It’s challenging work, but not overly so, and there’s a part of me that might be interested in reading this book again at some point. Perhaps when it’s out in a physical book and not an uncorrected PDF that I was given, as is usually the case with certain books I take from publicists.
Therapist: Interesting. That’s all very interesting.
ZH: (silence).
Therapist: (silence).
ZH: (silence).
Therapist: Now you’re doing it.
ZH: I know, but I honestly don’t have much more to say about this book. Should we turn to happier emotions that I’ve been experiencing lately?
Therapist: Unfortunately, our time is up for the week.
ZH: Drat! That’s what I get for prattling on about a book that I just read. You’d think I’d be able to turn this passion for books that I have into a full-time job or something. Maybe when I’ve saved up enough money, I should put a downpayment on a bookstore or something ….
Therapist: Yes, well, we can take up that thread next week if you’re able to.
ZH: OK, will do. See you next time!
Alana Saab’s Please Stop Trying to Leave Me will be published by Vintage Books on June 25, 2024.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
