20 must-read fiction books like Pretend I'm Dead by Jen Beagin

If you liked the fiction plot in Pretend I'm Dead by Jen Beagin , here is a list of 20 books like this:

Similar categories in Halle Butler's Jillian book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• adult fiction
• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary
• womens
• novels
• audiobook

Similar categories in Miranda July's The First Bad Man book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

Similar categories in Anna Dorn's Perfume & Pain book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary
• adult
• audiobook

"I sit down wanting to write the great lesbian love story, but wacko bitches just keep coming out."

-Anna Dorn, Perfume & Pain

Similar categories in Mona Awad's Rouge book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary
• adult
• audiobook

"If I had beauty, I decided then, I would never throw it away. I would never give it up."

-Mona Awad, Rouge

"I mean, we all have our dark days. Very dark days, sometimes. When our demons come out to play. No one lives entirely in the light, right?"

-Mona Awad, Rouge

"That I can’t protect you from my terrible places that I still go, can’t help but go because no one protected me, no one saved me, no one ever held out their hand and walked me away. But I’m trying to…"

-Mona Awad, Rouge

Similar categories in Maud Ventura's My Husband book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary
• adult
• audiobook

"When it comes to love, I’ve learned nothing: I love too intensely and I’m consumed by my own love (analysis, jealousy, doubt)—so much that when I’m in love, I always end up slightly extinguished and …"

-Maud Ventura, My Husband

Similar categories in Eliza Clark's Penance book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary
• adult
• audiobook

"Do you know what happened to her already? Did you catch it in the papers? Are you local? Did you know her? Did you see it on the internet? Did some website the trawls local news for the worst details…"

-Eliza Clark, Penance

Similar categories in Miranda July's All Fours book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• literary fiction
• humor
• fiction
• contemporary
• novels
• adult
• audiobook

"But maybe the road split between: a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising"

-Miranda July, All Fours

"Maybe we shouldn't do that," Jordi said. "Flatten ourselves like that. Erratic doesn't have to mean crazy or irresponsible. Shouldn't we be normalizing change?"

-Miranda July, All Fours

"I guess any calling, no mater what it is, is a kind of unresolved ache," I said, giving in to knowing more than him. "It's a problem that you can't fix, but there is some relief in knowing you will c…"

-Miranda July, All Fours

"For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces- each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to co…"

-Miranda July, All Fours

Similar categories in Alexandra Tanner's Worry book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• adult fiction
• literary fiction
• humor
• mental health
• fiction
• contemporary
• novels
• adult
• audiobook

Similar categories in Ruth Madievsky's All-Night Pharmacy book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• adult fiction
• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary
• adult
• audiobook

"You could fall asleep spooning her and wake up with a screwdriver pressed to your throat."

-Ruth Madievsky, All-Night Pharmacy

Similar categories in Emma Cline's The Guest book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• adult fiction
• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary
• novels
• adult
• audiobook

"Younger men had to make everything mean something, had to turn every choice and preference into a referendum on their personality."

-Emma Cline, The Guest

"He assumed her attention when he spoke. He had his insecurities, his anxieties. But underlying it all was the certainty that the world would be generous in its orientation toward him."

-Emma Cline, The Guest

"All the women in the show hated each other, hated each other so much, just so they could avoid hating their husbands. Only their little dogs, blinking from their laps, seemed real: they were the wome…"

-Emma Cline, The Guest

Similar categories in Caroline O'Donoghue's The Rachel Incident book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary
• adult
• audiobook

"I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously."

-Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

"He was a doctor and I was supposed to take what he said seriously; but he was a dentist and my dad so I didn’t."

-Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

"It's not that we weren't capable of warmth as a family. But we were regularly seduced by the concept of being wronged."

-Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

"I thought of my parents as heads on Easter Island, and it took moving two miles away to realise they had been people all along."

-Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident

Similar categories in Melissa Broder's Death Valley book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• adult fiction
• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary
• novels
• adult
• audiobook

"My body is the real problem here. If I could be bodiless - or at least, senseless - I’d be better off."

-Melissa Broder, Death Valley

"This is the problem with human relationships: you come to a person with one feeling and they’re having another."

-Melissa Broder, Death Valley

"I am going to die out here. I might. I could. Die. All this time I should have been practising for dying. What was I doing instead? Reading reviews for sweatpants."

-Melissa Broder, Death Valley

"Stop placing so much value on the known, I tell myself. Fake like this is the hero’s journey. It’s good to get lost. Good for the soul. But how lost is the good amount of lost? If I die here, is that…"

-Melissa Broder, Death Valley

Similar categories in Dizz Tate's Brutes book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary
• adult
• audiobook

"to be loved, was just to be watched"

-Dizz Tate, Brutes

"We feel chased. It doesn't matter if it's only by our own shadows."

-Dizz Tate, Brutes

"and now I think that to humiliate a woman is the only way some men know how to love one."

-Dizz Tate, Brutes

"To be loved was just to be watched, or in my case, to imagine you are loved is to imagine you are watched all the time."

-Dizz Tate, Brutes

Similar categories in Lottie Hazell's Piglet book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• adult fiction
• literary fiction
• mental health
• fiction
• contemporary
• novels
• adult
• audiobook

"She picked up salted butter, thick Greek yoghurt, and cream. The menu was not modest. Her basket was already heavy with Charlotte potatoes, fresh herbs, and a Duchy chicken. It was too hot for a roas…"

-Lottie Hazell, Piglet

"She picked up salted butter, thick Greek yoghurt, and cream. The menu was not modest. Her basket was already heavy with Charlotte potatoes, fresh herbs, and a Duchy chicken. It was too hot for a roas…"

-Lottie Hazell, Piglet

"She opened the capers, green and freckled as amphibians, and with a teaspoon eased them from their brine. The olives were next, and she pushed pits from the aubergine-dark fruits, dropping their fles…"

-Lottie Hazell, Piglet

"On the platter before her there was a bowl of beef bourguignon, the sauce dark with merlot; the corner of dauphinoise potatoes, gruyère-crusted top browned, bubbled with heat; there was a small plate…"

-Lottie Hazell, Piglet

Similar categories in Melissa Broder's The Pisces book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• adult fiction
• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary
• novels
• adult
• audiobook

"I would say I'm less afraid of dying than I am of life."

-Melissa Broder, The Pisces

"He took off my flip-flops and began kissing my feet, sucking my toes."

-Melissa Broder, The Pisces

"Feelings were a luxory of the young, or someone much stronger than me - someone more at ease with being human"

-Melissa Broder, The Pisces

"I'd been wrong about death ... There was no gentle escape. When I had taken those Ambien in Phoenix I thought there was a peaceful way to just kind of disappear. But death wasn't gentle. It was a rob…"

-Melissa Broder, The Pisces

Similar categories in Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• adult fiction
• literary fiction
• humor
• mental health
• fiction
• contemporary
• womens
• novels
• adult
• audiobook

"You respect me?" Sheila asked, surprised. "As a person?" "No, as a pigeon."

-Jen Beagin, Pretend I'm Dead

"She smiled. It was rare for her to find someone attractive physically and also to like what came out of their mouth."

-Jen Beagin, Pretend I'm Dead

"He was one of the fortunate ones. He'd emerged from childhood a whole person and his past wasn't some vast immovable mass with its own weather system."

-Jen Beagin, Pretend I'm Dead

Similar categories in Melissa Broder's Milk Fed book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• literary fiction
• mental health
• fiction
• contemporary
• adult
• audiobook

"This interplay between hope and reality was also a part of the mourning."

-Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

"There are emanations of god we can’t even see. What’s important is that you feel it."

-Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

"Life was a lot less bleak when you were staring straight down the barrel of a burrito."

-Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

"I wanted a love contingent on nothing finite. I wanted a love without end. Everyone was always saying you had to give it to yourself. Self-love, self-love."

-Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

Similar categories in Rebecca K. Reilly's Greta & Valdin book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• adult fiction
• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary
• adult
• audiobook

"I wonder what plant I would be, if I were a plant. Maybe something with big leaves that droop sulkily if not provided with the exact right amount of water and light."

-Rebecca K. Reilly, Greta & Valdin

Similar categories in Sarah Rose Etter's Ripe book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• adult fiction
• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary
• adult
• audiobook

"The open office floor plan is a form of strangulation."

-Sarah Rose Etter, Ripe

"Maybe there must always be two of us—our real selves and the ones we create to survive in the world as it is."

-Sarah Rose Etter, Ripe

"When you're young, every part of life seems big and monumental. Once older you can see it for what it is: smaller pieces of a larger game you have no choice but to play."

-Sarah Rose Etter, Ripe

"If the brain is elastic and memory is faulty, maybe all of these stories are wrong. Maybe it happened a different way altogether. Maybe I was happy and I just forget that now."

-Sarah Rose Etter, Ripe

Similar categories in Anna Dorn's Vagablonde book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• humor
• fiction
• contemporary
• adult
• audiobook

Similar categories in Halle Butler's Banal Nightmare book and Jen Beagin's Pretend I'm Dead

• adult fiction
• literary fiction
• fiction
• contemporary
• novels
• adult
• audiobook