Writers, especially of autofiction, experience relationships differently. When someone’s primary lens of looking through the world is seeking stories and dilemmas and personalities to dissect on paper, I really don’t know how secure their interpersonal relationships must feel.
I’m also not trying to exclude anyone with the term “writers.” Everyone has a little bit of this weird gene in them, I’m sure. Maybe it’s the part of you that reaches to rant about your cheating ex on your Instagram Close Friends story or post a TikTok singing a song that vaguely connects to how you’re feeling about your ex-best friend. Maybe you write in your diary extensively or just really loved telling your mom about high school drama.
But autofictional novel writers like Hannah Pittard must have this instinct in spades.
“If You Love It, Let It Kill You” follows a self-inserted version of its author, Hannah Pittard, in the aftermath of her ex-husband releasing a book which contains yet another pseudo-version of her — something that is only slightly altered from real events. The character, cleverly concealed as “Hana,” spirals a bit, grappling with the fact that, not only is she in the novel, but she is also murdered in his story. This situation must be awful for her. Right?
Pittard pulls you in a few different directions with this book: There’s a talking cat that only she can hear, dubious interpersonal ethics and the struggle of finding yourself living a life you’re positive you never wanted. After Hana’s ex-husband moved their lives to Kentucky and cheated on her with her best friend, Hana found quite a different life from the one she had started with. Still a university professor, she also has been in a long-term relationship with a man and a pseudo stepmother toward his young daughter, a concept she rejects, along with the idea of getting remarried, throughout the novel.
The book’s title seems to imply that she finds peace with her arrangement: Even if it’s killing you that your life is not how you wanted it to be, you love it — so suffer. But, by the end of the novel, I’m still not quite sure. The baggage that lurks under the surface of Hana’s experience doesn’t attempt to conceal itself. Pittard doesn’t seem embarrassed or ashamed about her part in any of this, about the intricate emotions that come with writing about people she knows or the infidelity she reveals that Hana took part in before her ex-husband came clean about his affair. The final chapter of the novel leaves her self-inserted character gratified and triumphant with the realization that those in your life are kind of there to be written about. Her use of these barely altered real-life events, meta rumination and complete absence of desire to separate herself, the author, from the origins of the novel is a little unnerving.
There’s a beabadoobee song, “This is How it Went,” timidly thrown onto the end of her album This is How Tomorrow Moves. The song was written after a friend of hers posted a picture with Bea’s ex-boyfriend to the song Bea had written about their breakup.
“Let me write a song like all the songs I love to listen to / Writing ’cause I’m healing, never writing songs to hurt you / Using what I’m best at and I hope you do the same.”
Something similar occurs in “If You Love it, Let It Kill You” where one of the characters throws an icy remark about fiction writers always mining their lives for their work. Songwriters perhaps get equal, if not more flack for this. The pure volume of people not only speculating about who Taylor Swift’s songs are about, but also criticizing her for writing about real people, should speak for itself. But it’s hard to pinpoint when things are taken too far. Beabadoobee’s song, timid and shy as her delivery is, helps to build some empathy for her. She acknowledges that the person she is singing about can express their emotions about the event, and that her intention in writing the song was not revenge. There’s a sense that she has thought about her actions and how they would make those involved feel. It’s a sympathy that allows her to reach from the contemplative, fictional mode of the song to forgiveness in real life. I don’t know if Pittard and “If You Love It, Let It Kill You” can argue the same.
The book is abrasive in its references to her life, directly telling the audience that she’ll refer to her current boyfriend as Bruce, because it’s the name her ex used in his book. (It’s also the name that Pittard’s real-life ex uses in his story about her, a story called “Halloween” published in 2019). She grapples with the romantic encounter she had before her divorce, a man who calls her “Hot Stuff,” which is also the name of a novel Pittard wrote but never published. There’s a trail of easter eggs that become shockingly obvious after even just a skim of the Vulture article chronicling Pittard and the other authors involved. It’s shocking, it’s invasive and at times it can feel cruel.
Despite the plot of Pittard’s latest novel being heavily intertwined with real life, and self-aware in its presentation, it’s not really self-aware about the moral dilemma that has slipped between every line. You can’t help but wonder how Pittard’s ex feels about this book, how the people in her life are okay with her writing about them in such a vitriolic tone. Pittard is entirely uninterested in how much someone else’s perspective matters, or how fickle the truth is. In fact, the news of her ex-husband’s novel fades into the background, serving more as a set dressing for the main character’s slow unraveling of her old life and developing discontent with her new one. Pittard’s novel becomes more of an ode to art itself, the unwavering worship for what is being produced, a respect that seems to trump all other considerations — as long as the art is good. She reveals this respect in the same Vulture interview:
“I would love for young people everywhere to get to experience art and conversation in this way … I’d rather be a character in somebody else’s book than not acknowledged at all.”
It’s this respect that Pittard lionizes at the end of “If You Love It, Let It Kill You.” Her main character emerges from the confusing aftermath of her ex-husband’s book announcement, deciding that it’s worth it to suffer the blows after all, as long as there’s an interesting story to tell.
Daily Arts Writer Cora Rolfes can be reached at corolfes@umich.edu.
