We Are Too Many: A Memoir [Kind of]

by Hannah Pittard

Overview

“Hannah Pittard’s memoir is so exquisitely crafted — I loved it.”
—Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful

“I loved this book, which I read in two breathless sittings. An intimate, bold, exquisite exploration of marriage, friendship, rivalry, betrayal.”
—Megan Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of The Turnout and Beware the Woman

We Are Too Many is an unexpectedly funny, unflinchingly honest, and genre-bending memoir about a marriage-ending affair between award-winning author Hannah Pittard's husband and her captivating best friend.

In this wryly humorous and innovative look at a marriage gone wrong, Hannah Pittard recalls a decade’s worth of unforgettable conversations, beginning with the one in which she discovers her husband has been having sex with her charismatic best friend, Trish. These time-jumping exchanges are fast-paced, intimate, and often jaw-dropping in their willingness to reveal the vulnerabilities inherent in any friendship or marriage. Blending fact and fiction, sometimes re-creating exchanges with extreme accuracy and sometimes diving headlong into pure speculation, Pittard takes stock not only of her own past and future but also of the larger, more universal experiences they connect with—from the depths of female rage to the heartbreaking ways we inevitably outgrow certain people.

Clever and bold and radically honest to an unthinkable degree, We Are Too Many examines the ugly, unfiltered parts of the female experience, as well as the many (happier) possibilities in starting any life over after a major personal catastrophe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250869050
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/02/2023
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	920 KB

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.

Editorial Reviews

Named a Best Book of 2023 (So Far) by Cosmopolitan

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by LitHub

“Stunning... Pittard’s attempt to make sense of the senseless draws the reader toward the same questions. In the end, we are not only drawn into an intimacy with the author, but we may come to know ourselves better as well.”

—John Warner, Chicago Tribune

“Pittard defies genre in her latest... It feels wrong to call such a devastating story juicy, but it is.”

—Bustle

“An honest and heartbreaking book.”

—Cosmopolitan

“Bold and inventive...Pittard's frankness stings, and the stripped-down format makes this all the more potent. It’s a powerhouse.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A fascinating study of how the mind works when someone is dealing with heartbreak and grief.”

—Library Journal

“Thrilling...Cumulatively, the parts of We Are Too Many tell the story of heartbreak in perhaps the most scorching, gutting, and tantalizing way imaginable.”

—Shelf Awareness

“Hannah Pittard’s We Are Too Many is a truly lacerating exploration of the betrayals that make a marriage. The book is a dagger-like dialogue between husband and wife, wife and best friend, but ultimately the conversation is between Hannah’s selves – some of them self-destructive, some despairing, some hopeful - who must rebuild. We Are Too Many will leave you stunned and tender.”

—Stephanie Danler, New York Times bestselling author of Sweetbitter

“In We Are Too Many, Hannah Pittard collects heartbreaking, revealing, and complex shards of conversation and snapshot memories in an effort to piece together a swiftly-moving, stripped-raw story of a marriage and friendship gone awry. A boldly-rendered and honestly-told memoir that’s as innovative as it is engrossing.”

—Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch

“With its heartbreaking and hilariously fast-paced dialogue and its unique self-awareness, Pittard’s new book is an extraordinary journey into the private life of one of our best writers.”

—Ada Limón, poet laureate of the United States

“Pittard is hilarious, inciting, heartbreaking, and enlightening, often all on the same page. We Are Too Many is a brilliant, soul-stirring, and utterly original investigation of marriage, friendship, and life.”

—Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of On the Rooftop

“I read We Are Too Many all in a rush, so wrapped up in the drama and brilliant reflection Pittard makes of that drama that the world around me dropped away. Written with a fresh, empowered use of all the registers creative nonfiction offers, this memoir is a passionate recounting of the complex joys and terrors of marriage and friendship.”

—CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays

“I opened this book at the beauty parlor and two chapters in started hand-selling it to strangers. Hannah Pittard’s memoir is her best book yet. It is raw, daring, honest, and fair. I want to give it to high school graduates and say, ‘Watch out for this. And this. And this.’ This book is an AP course in red flags. Reading it—the real-life twists and turns written by a woman scorned and reborn at the top of her game—I rooted for her: ‘Go, Hannah, go!’”

—Helen Ellis, author of Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light

“Reading We Are Too Many is like encountering a new, previously unknown animal. Part memoir, part reconstructed conversations, part speculative conversations, part historical conjecture, these fractured elements intertwine and coalesce into a stunning portrait of a crumbling marriage and the ultimate betrayal by a best friend.”

—Rob Spillman, author of All Tomorrow’s Parties

“We Are Too Many is an astonishingly intimate curation of conversations recalled in the wake of bruising infidelity. It is also a devastating account of the demons that trip up so many of us, especially writers—our bodies and our appetites, our windfalls and our debts, our fear of abandonment and our lust for experience. Most beautifully, however, this is a book about forgiveness—not so much forgiving those fools who trespass against us, but rather looking clearly at our past selves and forgiving our own selves for our flaws, our delusions, and our incessant, keening, wonderfully human need for love.”

—Dean Bakopoulos, author of Summerlong

“A truly unique investigation of what happens when two people who love each other get married and then lose sight of themselves.”

—Adam Ross, author of Mr. Peanut

From the Publisher

2023-01-28
Conversations, remembered and imagined, surrounding a divorce.

Pittard, author of several novels, begins this deconstruction of her marriage—her less successful writer husband, Patrick (names are changed), left her for her so-called best friend, Trish—with an introduction justifying its existence. In 2017, the author published a long essay in the Sewanee Review about the situation, but readers wanted more—“the nasty bits.” Clearly, it’s about more than just that: "What began as a response to curious readers has since morphed into an investigation into the intersection of memory, self, honesty, and personal accounting—an investigation that sharply questions the legitimacy, ownership, and accuracy of personal and shared memories." The first half of the book, which is interesting to read in a salacious, other-people's-private-business way, presents a series of scenes, written in script format with stage directions, between her, Patrick, Trish, and a few other characters. Scenes include: "July 2016—Hannah Discovers Her Husband Is Having an Affair"; "June 2012—Four Years Earlier, Patrick Proposes”; "Fall 2005—Hannah & Trish Discuss Live Bands and Eating Disorders”; "February 2014—Nine Years Later, Hannah & Patrick Discuss Having Children." The fractured chronology sometimes makes it tricky to follow, but overall this part is snappy and controlled, an addition to the growing canon of women writers figuring out fun formal ways to liven up a sad story of betrayal. The second section is less charming, envisioning a dialogue in second person with an imagined version of her husband. Here, bitterness and TMI prevail. About his career, she says, "It’s like you took one look at me—simple, boring, uptight me—and thought, Jesus, if she can do it, then surely so can I….But nothing got taken; nothing got published." In response, the imagined husband says: "This is gross. I feel dirty even tolerating this conversation."

Connoisseurs of divorce memoirs will enjoy the inventive style choices and unusually nasty details.

Kirkus Reviews