{"id":1696,"date":"2025-06-15T07:07:42","date_gmt":"2025-06-15T07:07:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/2025\/06\/15\/hannah-pittards-if-you-love-it-let-it-kill-you-comes-with-baggage\/"},"modified":"2025-06-15T07:07:49","modified_gmt":"2025-06-15T07:07:49","slug":"hannah-pittards-if-you-love-it-let-it-kill-you-comes-with-baggage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/2025\/06\/15\/hannah-pittards-if-you-love-it-let-it-kill-you-comes-with-baggage\/","title":{"rendered":"Hannah Pittard\u2019s \u201cIf You Love it Let it Kill You\u201d comes with baggage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Writers, especially of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.masterclass.com\/articles\/autofiction\">autofiction<\/a>, experience relationships differently. When someone\u2019s primary lens of looking through the world is seeking stories and dilemmas and personalities to dissect on paper, I really don\u2019t know how secure their interpersonal relationships must feel.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m also not trying to exclude anyone with the term \u201cwriters.\u201d Everyone has a little bit of this weird gene in them, I\u2019m sure. Maybe it\u2019s 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\u2019re feeling about your ex-best friend. Maybe you write in your diary extensively or just really loved telling your mom about high school drama.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But autofictional novel writers like Hannah Pittard must have this instinct in spades.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf You Love It, Let It Kill You\u201d 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 \u2014 something that is only slightly altered from real events. The character, cleverly concealed as \u201cHana,\u201d 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-1    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p>Pittard pulls you in a few different directions with this book: There\u2019s a talking cat that only she can hear, dubious interpersonal ethics and the struggle of finding yourself living a life you\u2019re positive you never wanted. After Hana\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The book\u2019s title seems to imply that she finds peace with her arrangement: Even if it\u2019s killing you that your life is not how you wanted it to be, you love it \u2014 so suffer. But, by the end of the novel, I\u2019m still not quite sure. The <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.is\/928St\">baggage<\/a> that lurks under the surface of Hana\u2019s experience doesn\u2019t attempt to conceal itself. Pittard doesn\u2019t 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 <em>Hana<\/em> 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 <em>there<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-dots\"\/>\n<p>There\u2019s a beabadoobee song, \u201cThis is How it Went,\u201d timidly thrown onto the end of her album <em>This is How Tomorrow Moves<\/em>. The song was written after a friend of hers <a href=\"https:\/\/www.distractify.com\/p\/beabadoobee-ex-boyfriend\">posted<\/a> a picture with Bea\u2019s ex-boyfriend to the song Bea had written about their breakup.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLet me write a song like all the songs I love to listen to \/ Writing \u2019cause I\u2019m healing, never writing songs to hurt you \/ Using what I\u2019m best at and I hope you do the same.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Something similar occurs in \u201cIf You Love it, Let It Kill You\u201d 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\u2019s songs are about, but also<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/newsbeat-29685510\"> criticizing <\/a>her for writing about real people, should speak for itself. But it\u2019s hard to pinpoint when things are taken too far. Beabadoobee\u2019s 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\u2019s a sense that she has thought about her actions and how they would make those involved feel. It\u2019s a sympathy that allows her to reach from the contemplative, fictional mode of the song to forgiveness in real life. I don\u2019t know if Pittard and \u201cIf You Love It, Let It Kill You\u201d can argue the same.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-2    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p>The book is abrasive in its references to her life, directly telling the audience that she\u2019ll refer to her current boyfriend as Bruce, because it\u2019s the name her ex used in his book. (It\u2019s also the name that Pittard\u2019s real-life ex uses in his story about her, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.juxtaprosemagazine.org\/halloween-by-w-andrew-ewell\/\">a story called \u201cHalloween\u201d<\/a> published in 2019). She grapples with the romantic encounter she had before her divorce, a man who calls her \u201cHot Stuff,\u201d which is also the name of a novel Pittard wrote but never published. There\u2019s a trail of easter eggs that become shockingly obvious after even just a skim of the <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.is\/928St\">Vulture article<\/a> chronicling Pittard and the other authors involved. It\u2019s shocking, it\u2019s invasive and at times it can feel cruel.<\/p>\n<p>Despite the plot of Pittard\u2019s latest novel being heavily intertwined with real life, and self-aware in its presentation, it\u2019s not really self-aware about the moral dilemma that has slipped between every line. You can\u2019t help but wonder how Pittard\u2019s 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\u2019s perspective matters, or how fickle the truth is. In fact, the news of her ex-husband\u2019s novel fades into the background, serving more as a set dressing for the main character\u2019s slow unraveling of her old life and developing discontent with her new one. Pittard\u2019s 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 \u2014 as long as the art is good. She reveals this respect in the same Vulture interview:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI would love for young people everywhere to get to experience art and conversation in this way \u2026 I\u2019d rather be a character in somebody else\u2019s book than not acknowledged at all.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s this respect that Pittard lionizes at the end of \u201cIf You Love It, Let It Kill You.\u201d<strong> <\/strong>Her main character emerges from the confusing aftermath of her ex-husband\u2019s book announcement, deciding that it\u2019s worth it to suffer the blows after all, as long as there\u2019s an interesting story to tell.<\/p>\n<p><em>Daily Arts Writer Cora Rolfes can be reached at <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michigandaily.com\/arts\/books\/if-you-love-it-let-it-kill-you-comes-with-baggage\/mailto:corolfes@umich.edu\"><em>corolfes@umich.edu<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<aside class=\"scaip scaip-3    \">\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<aside>\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p><h3 class=\"jp-relatedposts-headline\"><em>Related articles<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Writers, especially of autofiction, experience relationships differently. When someone\u2019s primary lens of looking through the world is seeking stories and dilemmas and personalities to dissect on paper, I really don\u2019t know how secure their interpersonal relationships must feel. I\u2019m also not trying to exclude anyone with the term \u201cwriters.\u201d Everyone has a little bit of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1697,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[1908,1905,1907,1002,1906],"class_list":{"0":"post-1696","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-baggage","9":"tag-hannah","10":"tag-kill","11":"tag-love","12":"tag-pittards"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1696"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1698,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1696\/revisions\/1698"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}