Please Stop Trying to Leave Me

A Ms. Most Anticipated Book of 2024: “Debut, contemporary, queer AF.”

“Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is a riveting, deeply funny, and acutely observed ride through the breaking down and rebuilding of self and connection. It’s a full sprint toward (and away from and back again) real love and meaning. Sharp and existential and devastating and queer.”
—Jules Ohman, author of Body Grammar

“Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is the most delightfully unhinged and chaotic novel I’ve read in years and I am here for every page, and more.”
—Chloe Caldwell, author of Women: A Novella

“Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is an electric, delirious novel about how art-making, romantic partnership, and trauma make fractals of the self. Alana Saab is an intoxicating stylist, pulling off a heady and meta debut that feels like clawing your way out of the belly of some monster, rib by rib, only to find that the monster is you. Deadpan and tender, Please Stop Trying to Leave Me is a must-read for anyone who has ever white-knuckled their way through the wilderness of their own mind (it me).”
—Ruth Madievsky, author of All-Night Pharmacy

“Audacious, innovative and utterly absorbing, this beautifully written debut novel feels like a new form of realism. Structured as a series of therapy sessions, it does what Samuel Beckett asked of the contemporary novel –“to find a form to accommodate the shape of the mess.” From overwhelming feelings of oblivion to climate crises and economic anxiety, here in a voice at once tender and funny, unsettled and deeply observant, is the texture of our age brought vividly into focus.”
—Laurie Sheck, author of The Willow Grove, a Pulitzer Prize finalist

“After a mental health crisis, a young woman seeks treatment in an attempt to reinhabit the outside world, and herself, again. . . . Acerbic, tenderhearted, and clever. . . . A well-crafted spiral of a story with hope at its center.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A lesbian woman grapples with her literary ambitions and deteriorating mental health in Saab’s engrossing debut. . . . [An] affecting and singular exploration of a woman’s attempts to live and write with mental illness.”
—Publishers Weekly