Mental illness are hardly new ground for literary fiction but Alana Saab’s unique voice, empathy and humour made Please Stop Trying to Leave me a moving and affirming journey. Scarred by trauma in her childhood, the lead character Norma explores her memories with her psychiatrist as she deal with what she calls her “breakdown”. Along the way, she navigates her relationship with her girlfriend and the nature of love and existence. The book is a profoundly philosophical one, but our admittedly unreliable narrator never resorts to pedantry. I may have missed something, but neither love nor existence are fully defined although we get some strong direction on the latter. There’s enough foreshadowing that most of the novel moves in the expected direction A shift in narrative perspective in the end, though, is jarring. A new narrator (possibly as unreliable as the first) defends the shift, but I personally found it a bit of a test of my ability to focus. That’s on me, though. Overall, the work moves quickly and compellingly through old ground in new ways, and I’m looking forward to reading more from this debut author.
