If You Love It, Let It Kill You - by Hannah Pittard (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Divorced and childless by choice, Hana P.--the metafictional version--has built a cozy life in Lexington, Kentucky, teaching at the flagship university, living with a fellow academic, and helping raise his pre-teen daughter. ... One day, Hana learns that an unflattering version of herself will appear prominently ... in her ex-husband's debut novel. For a week, her life continues largely unaffected by the news, ... 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 been enjoying is gone. In its place: nothing. A remarkably ridiculous mid-life crisis ensues, featuring a talking cat, a visit to the dean's office, a shadowy figure from the past, a Greek-like chorus of indignant students whose primary complaints concern Hana's auto-fictional narrative, and a game called Dead Body"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Recommended Summer Reading according to The New York Times, Elle, Zibby Owens, Town and Country, and the Minnesota Star Tribune
A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year
A Goodreads Most Popular Book of July
One of Vulture's Best Divorce Books

"A dishy work of autofiction that everyone will be talking about."
--The New York Times

"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

"I loved this book. It's exquisitely sharp, very funny, moving, and strange in the best possible way."
--Emily St. John Mandel, New York Times bestselling author of Station Eleven

"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, author of The State We're In

"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

"Pittard's fiction is fascinating and easy to fall into head first; the story of Hana... would be engrossing whether or not a version of it actually happened."
--Town and Country

"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, U.S. Poet Laureate

"A moving and very, very funny story."
--Elle

"If You Love It, Let It Kill You demonstrates that it doesn't matter what Pittard is writing about--she is mighty skilled at drilling to the heart of uncomfortable emotions.... honesty is what makes this raw and self-referential story such an engrossing read."
--Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Pittard is a zesty, unflinchingly honest writer."
--Minnesota Star Tribune

"A wild romp of a novel. . . . Pittard's prose hums with wit and verve, paragraphs and pages ricocheting from one sharp or devastating or shocking observation to the next."
--Kirkus

"Hannah Pittard's zany work of autofiction questions the rules of creative writing--as well as the logic of life and love. Pluck any line and it's sure to be memorable."
--Shelf Awareness

"Cheeky, hilarious and heartbreaking."
--B&N Reads

"The novel brims with quick wit... The writers here might be insufferable, but in Pittard's skillful hands, they can also be entertaining."
--Publishers Weekly

"The author's ear for dialogue and her sense of absurdity carry the novel.... Pittard asks readers to consider the characters they are and who they love."
--Booklist

About the Author

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.