Don't You Know I Love You by Laura Bogart
The last place Angelina Moltisanti ever wants to go is home. She barely escaped life under the roof, and the thumb, of her violent but charismatic father, Jack. Yet home is exactly where she ends up after an SUV plows into her car just weeks after she graduates from college, fracturing her wrist and her hopes to start a career as an artist.
Angelina finds herself smothered in a plaster cast, in Jack's obsessive urge to get her a giant accident settlement, in her mother Marie's desperation to have a second chance, and in her own stifled creativity - until she meets Janet, another young artist who inspires her to push herself into making the dynamic, unsettling work that tells the story of her scars, inside and out. But excavating this damage, as relations with her father become increasingly tense, will push Angelina into making a hard choice: will she embrace her father's all-consuming and empowering rage, or find another kind of strength?
Publication Date: March 17th, 2020
Paperback: 264 pages
ISBN: 978-1-950539-13-0
Also available as an eBook
The last place Angelina Moltisanti ever wants to go is home. She barely escaped life under the roof, and the thumb, of her violent but charismatic father, Jack. Yet home is exactly where she ends up after an SUV plows into her car just weeks after she graduates from college, fracturing her wrist and her hopes to start a career as an artist.
Angelina finds herself smothered in a plaster cast, in Jack's obsessive urge to get her a giant accident settlement, in her mother Marie's desperation to have a second chance, and in her own stifled creativity - until she meets Janet, another young artist who inspires her to push herself into making the dynamic, unsettling work that tells the story of her scars, inside and out. But excavating this damage, as relations with her father become increasingly tense, will push Angelina into making a hard choice: will she embrace her father's all-consuming and empowering rage, or find another kind of strength?
Publication Date: March 17th, 2020
Paperback: 264 pages
ISBN: 978-1-950539-13-0
Also available as an eBook
The last place Angelina Moltisanti ever wants to go is home. She barely escaped life under the roof, and the thumb, of her violent but charismatic father, Jack. Yet home is exactly where she ends up after an SUV plows into her car just weeks after she graduates from college, fracturing her wrist and her hopes to start a career as an artist.
Angelina finds herself smothered in a plaster cast, in Jack's obsessive urge to get her a giant accident settlement, in her mother Marie's desperation to have a second chance, and in her own stifled creativity - until she meets Janet, another young artist who inspires her to push herself into making the dynamic, unsettling work that tells the story of her scars, inside and out. But excavating this damage, as relations with her father become increasingly tense, will push Angelina into making a hard choice: will she embrace her father's all-consuming and empowering rage, or find another kind of strength?
Publication Date: March 17th, 2020
Paperback: 264 pages
ISBN: 978-1-950539-13-0
Also available as an eBook
PRAISE FOR DON’T YOU KNOW I LOVE YOU
"Bogart manages to thread the ghost of past violence into every scene...Every character is deeply flawed but written with compassion... Bogart's prose is exceedingly thoughtful, and the cycle of abuse is deftly explored, though it may touch too close to home for some readers.A well-crafted tale of domestic abuse and recovery." -Kirkus Reviews
"An admirable first novel, full of fire and electric with emotion, about the realities of domestic abuse. ... The beating heart of the novel is its depiction of the inner world of an abuse survivor." -Washington City Paper
"This book is so good, so difficult in all the right ways, so deeply compelling, so beautifully written, and so full of clever insight and emotional clarity about what you get from your parents and what you make for yourself. I can’t recommend it enough.” -Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You
“Don’t You Know I Love You takes daring leaps of faith and perspective that pick up where classics like The Bluest Eye and Bastard Out of Carolina left off. Compassionate, uncompromising, surprisingly beautiful, Bogart takes us deep into the complex systems surrounding familial abuse and its far-reaching reverberations with a terrifyingly steady gaze and a courageously open heart. One of the most humane novels I have ever read.” —Gina Frangello, author of Every Kind of Wanting and A Life in Men
"What happens when we interrupt the narrative we were trained—into our very bones—to adhere to? Entrancing and transformative, Don’t You Know I Love You is more than a love story we haven't heard before. It’s a book that, like its narrator, defies all the stories we expect it to become. Laura Bogart writes with precision and heart." -Ariel Gore, author of Atlas of the Human Heart
"Intriguing and unsettling, this is a novel that plumbs the depth of violence—and love. When do we allow our scars to become our strengths? Laura Bogart has written a brilliant novel."
— Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Child Finder and the Butterfly Girl
"Laura Bogart’s Don’t You Know I Love You is as stern and loving as it is scrupulously and even painfully fair. Bogart wields this story—about disorientation and young adulthood and abuse and art—like a scythe, sometimes cutting everyone in it down to their damaged roots and sometimes sparing them, putting them back into context with a touch both gentle and precise. Anger and nostalgia power this novel; they meld and separate and stack and resolve, and the result is dexterous, delicate and too compelling to put down." -Lili Loofbourow, staff writer at Slate
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura Bogart is a featured writer at The Week and a contributing editor to DAME magazine. She was a featured writer at Salon, where her essays about body image, dating, politics, and violence went viral - her pieces were regularly recognized as Editor's Choice. She has written about pop culture, often through the perspective of gender, for The Atlantic, The Guardian, SPIN, The Rumpus, Vulture, Roger Ebert, The AV Club, and Refinery 29 (among other publications). She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received the Grace Paley Fellowship from the Juniper Institute at UMass Amherst. Laura has been interviewed about body size and pop culture for NPR outlets.
