P&P Live!: Zaina Arafat – You Exist Too Much

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother's response only intensifies a sense of shame: "You exist too much," she tells her daughter.

Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, Zaina Arafat's You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings--for love, and a place to call home.