Don't You Know I Love You

""Bogart manages to thread the ghost of past violence into every scene. ... Bogart's prose is exceedingly thoughtful, and the cycle of abuse is deftly explored ... 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 ""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 ""How do we survive a body breaking and then taking us back home to the origin site of violence? Laura Bogart's Don't You Know I Love You chronicles how a young woman artist must reimagine her life after an accident that derails her dreams. Inside the constellation we call ""family"" Angelina, Marie and Jack orbit around each other's stories. Under the weight of paternal violence Angelina conjures a lifestory she can live with. This is the story of a body not broken but reaching for beauty, a life not destroyed, but restoried."" —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Book of Joan ""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 ""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 ""Each sentence in Laura Bogart’s gorgeous novel is achingly beautiful and necessary. Bogart, with the voice of a poet, has crafted a painful novel full of love. I couldn’t put this book down. Each character- each line of exceptional dialogue-is etched so imperfectly human that even when you know you should not care about one- you do. The gift of humanity in Don't You Know I Love You will leave you astounded and in awe. An astonishing debut!"" —Jen Pastilloff, author of On Being Human ""Don't You Know I Love You thrums with the fierce, undaunted heartbeat of its protagonist. Angelina is a survivor, through and through—a woman who has set herself in grit and steel, yet whose layers peel away like delicate petals at the possibility of being enough to love. A compassionate, empathetic, and thoughtful look inside an abusive household—at the love that has been strangled, the concessions made, and the fear and anger of voiceless affection. Bogart writes with a stark, brutal beauty; a tone that is enhanced by the bleak backdrop of industrial Baltimore. This is the story of a woman discovering how to claim her own power on her own terms."" —Jen Ponton