Let Me Explain You: A Novel

by Annie Liontas

Overview

An unforgettable novel about a Greek American family and its enigmatic patriarch from a significant new voice in contemporary literature. “Hilarious yet rich...This debut by Annie Liontas will touch you” (The New York Times).

Stavros Stavros Mavrakis, Greek immigrant and proud owner of the Gala Diner, believes he has just ten days to live. As he prepares for his final hours, he sends a scathing email to his ex-wife and three grown daughters, outlining his wishes for how they each might better live their lives. With varying degrees of laughter and scorn, his family and friends dismiss his behavior as nothing more than a plea for attention, but when Stavros disappears, those closest to him are forced to confront the possibility of his death.

A vibrant tour de force that races to a surprising conclusion, Let Me Explain You is told from multiple perspectives: Stavros Stavros, brimming with pride and cursing in broken English; his eldest daughter Stavroula, a talented chef in love with her boss’s daughter; her sister, the wounded but resilient Litza; and many other voices who compose a veritable Greek chorus.

Funny yet deeply moving, this “pitch perfect” (San Francisco Chronicle) novel delivers a thoughtful meditation on the power of storytelling. In Let Me Explain You, Annie Liontas explores our origins and family myths, the relationship between fathers and daughters, the complex bond of sisterhood, hunger and what feeds us, but “the novel’s true heart is one filled with love and forgiveness” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476789095
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	06/21/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	471,289
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Annie Liontas is the genderqueer author of the novel Let Me Explain You and the coeditor of A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Gay Magazine, NPR, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Believer, Guernica, McSweeney’s, and other publications. A graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program, she is a professor of writing at George Washington University. Annie has served as a mentor for Pen City’s incarcerated writers and helped secure a Mellon Foundation grant on Disability Justice to bring storytelling to communities in the criminal justice system. She lives in Philadelphia.

Read an Excerpt

Let Me Explain You

CHAPTER 1

From: [e-mail]

To: [e-mail]; [e-mail];

[e-mail]; [e-mail]

Subject: Our Father, Who is Dying in Ten Days

Dear, Family. Daughters & Ex-Wife:

Let me explain you something: I am sick in a way that no doctor would have much understanding. I am sick in a way of the soul that, yes, God will take me. No, I am not a suicide. I am Deeper than that, I am talking More than that.

DEAR STAVROULA, MY OLDEST. Please grow out your hair. It is very very short. This is one little thing that can change everything, you will see what I am saying when you take this small but substantial advice. Sometimes if we are who we are supposed to be on the outside, we are who we are supposed to be on the inside. The hair is the thing to trust and leave alone, and it will take care of you.

Let me explain you something: your father has seen some of the world for it to be enough. There is a way to be for the normal society, and you are not it. The hair says things about you that, yes, they are true, but the hair is not a fortune-teller. The hair is not the thing that has to point the way, like a streetlight.

I am not somebody religious, but this I know: Death is coming. In ten days, I promise you, your father the man will cease, he will be dust, he will be food in the worms. What do we owe our father? This is the question you can say to yourself at this time. Who can deny a dead man—a dead father—the thing that he demands?

No, I am not sick like my brother in Crete, who die with emphysema (this is Greek en which means in and physan means breath).

DEAR LITZA, MY SECOND, please go to church. You could say, no dad, you go to church then we will talk about if I go to church, but what I am talking about here are lessons that I should have taken for myself if my father had the wisdom to give me awareness, which I am holding out for you.

Litza, let me explain you something. Litza, you have problems.

Litza, nobody marries for a big wedding and then divorce one week later. When your mother and I divorce, it took years off our life. Litza, nobody destroys property the way when you come here into my diner and smash the dessert case with my own stool. The same is true for your sister, which you take that same stool and break her car window with it, even though you deny this always. Are you on drugs, Litza? Are you the same low-life as your biological mother, Dina?

Litza, you need God in your life.

Litza I see how much helping you are needing, and I know that God has to exist, because he is the only one who can do for you. I cannot do for you. I can only do for you what I am done for you.

And here, I will tell you this secret, that I have questions for God—Are you real? Are you here for me, Stavros Stavros Steve Mavrakis? Am I Your Forgotten Son? What is the meaning of this life that is too sorry for what it could be? Even though I have succeeded more, much more, than any foreigner would do in my country and I have now two diners and plans for selling one of them so that I have a little something for the future, yours not mine since my future is not something I can belong to any longer, and not your Mother since she is a thief, I’m sorry if it is a truth.

I, Stavros Stavros, have ask God to erase the mistakes of my life; and God has answer, in a matter of speaking, That it is best to Start Over, which requires foremost that We End All that is Stavros Stavros. No, not with suicide. With Mercy.

Yes, Litza, you must go to Church. To pray. For your father, yes, and for yourself.

DEAR RUBY, MY LITTLE ONE that I have adoration. It is a good rule to follow that if the mustache is weak, so will be the man. Look at your father’s mustache, which it is a fist! Forget the boys, Ruby, find yourself a man who encourages you get your own education, because you don’t want to be one of those woman who takes and takes and does not appreciate all of the way her husband slaves, like your Mother. Don’t go marrying some losers. Which you know I am talking about Dave. Why choose a man with the facial hair of an onion? When you can choose instead one of my assistant cooks, who make a decent living and has dreams of owning their own diner the way their mentor has, which is your father.

Otherwise, you are doing OK.

DEAREST MY EX-WIFE, Carol, the Mother, who divorce me one year ago. Which I am still, as a generous person, paying for things like to repair the plumbing. I am talking to the woman who is still my Wife in death, even if she did not know how to mourn me in life: please be the Ex-wife a Wife should be, in sickness and health. Even though you poison Stavroula and Litza against me from the moment I bring them into this fat country, and Ruby from the moment you bring her into the world. That is why I am asking: you should wear only black for the next year. To show a sign of honor for the man who walk much of this life with you by his side.

If you have any confusions, Daughters and Wife, you can email a response. I will answer them all. Such as, what is missing for a man at the end of his life when the path is clear and wisdom is the greatest? . . . the respect and love for the pateras!

Signed within Ten Days of Life Left, and a Dying Promise, Your Father: Stavros Stavros Steve Mavrakis

Reading Group Guide

This reading group guide for Let Me Explain You includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.



Introduction

Haunted by a dream and a goat, Greek immigrant and diner owner Stavros Stavros Mavrakis composes an email to his three daughters and ex-wife predicting his death in ten days’ time. But the advice he freely hands out proves little more than laughable to his children, who are busy building their own adult lives: Stavroula, a talented restaurateur, pines for her boss’s daughter; Litza, wounded but strong, is trying to find her own way through the world; Ruby has eloped. Meanwhile, Stavros’s increasingly frantic attempts to arrange his affairs bring up difficult questions for his daughters not only about their relationships with their father, but about the bonds they share with each other. As an idle threat transforms over ten days into a very real crisis, the Mavrakis family must learn how to grow and how to forgive.



Topics and Questions for Discussion

1. The title of the novel takes its name from Stavros’s opening admonishment of his family, a phrase in broken English that typifies this patriarch’s tone. For Stavroula it is haunting, this “Let me explain you something that had been explaining to her, all night, what she needed to do” (page 34). Consider how Stavroula and Litza turn the refrain around and adopt it to empower themselves.

2. In his opening email, Stavros implores Litza to let God help her find the right path, but also admits to personal doubts. He writes, “I have questions for God—Are you real? Are you here for me, Stavros Stavros Steve Mavrakis? Am I Your Forgotten Son?” (page 8). How does this doubt relate to the Last Supper that Stavros prepares on page 99? Where else do you see religious imagery playing a role in Let Me Explain You?

3. Liontas structured her novel in ten daylong chapters counting down what Stavros believes to be his final week and a half on earth. Considering that the chapter titles refer to the well-known “stages of grief,” how do you interpret this structure?

4. Carol describes how neatly folding and stacking Ruby’s jeans lead her to sense “a similar layering happening in her daughter’s life” (page 64). What unique experiences does Carol have parenting Ruby that she did not have as a stepmother to Stavroula and Litza?

5. As a child, Litza adored her estranged mother despite the fact that she can only recall her “in blurs that more resembled bruises than face” (page 116). But after establishing a relationship, Litza admits that “living with Dina during her teenage years was worse than life with her parents” (page 310). Why do you think this is?

6. When Stavros asserts that the things that matter are “work, succeeding, a house, a business, children to carry the Mavrakis name,” Dina responds skeptically (page 206). How does Dina’s childhood affair with Angelos inform this conversation with her husband? What do you make of her persistent fantasy, borne of youthful disappointment, of “finally getting that baby elephant, stringing it with lights, strutting it through town, and delivering it to Papous’s doorstep, where he would come back from being dead just to give her a thousand kisses” (page 258)?

7. Before he disappears, a lullaby lifts a weight from Stavros’s shoulders “up to the stars to take its place in their glinting faces” (page 125). Litza also has a comparable experience when she visits the cathedral on page 162, and on page 219 Dina drives her plane “farther, farther, farther, into the thermosphere. Just shy of crossing the Kármán line, the thin airless boundary between atmosphere and space.” How do you interpret the theme of weightlessness throughout Let Me Explain You?

8. A goat appears in Stavros’s portentous dream, and a real goat lingers at his diner. This animal appears as a significant symbol throughout in the novel. What do you think of the way Stavros addresses the prematurely born Stavroula as “little goat” (page 253)?

9. When Stavros eats galaktoboureko in the United States for the first time, he remembers the way his mother used to prepare the pastry and “without realizing it [he] was makinggalaktoboureko into something foreign: from now on when he thought of galaktoboureko, as a father or an old man, he would not just remember galaktoboureko in Greece. He would have to remember galaktoboureko in America” (page 240). How does this idea of the immigrant experience compare to Marina’s sense of “reinvention” in America?

10. Consider Stavros’s metaphorical use of eggs on page 157 (“In the history of the world, it is eggs that have change everything”). Dina details the “Year of the Broken Yolks.” How do their worldviews converge, and how are they distinct?

11. When Stavroula achieves a level of intimacy with July, she realizes that “this was kindness. A friend, giving her shelter” (page 320). Given the way she weighs Mother’s love against July’s love on pages 70 and 71, how do you interpret this later scene? What might Stavroula and July’s future together look like?

12. On pages 300 through 302, Liontas summons a story of three daughters—“the first, as dear as gold. The second, as dear as wood. The third, as dear as salt”—that ends with the third daughter buried beneath her father’s “throne of salt.” The epilogue on pages 339 and 340 includes an unsent letter in which Stavros imagines holding three daughters as if they were fish—“one is beautiful, one has gills so small it is a miracle that she survives, and one is so fierce she is like a dark star exploding”—and ultimately dying as a whale for them to feed on. In what other ways does Liontas employ folklore in the novel?



Enhance Your Book Club

1. On page 309 Litza rejects the ideas proposed in To Live Until We Say Good-bye by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose five stages of grief Liontas uses as chapter titles throughout Let Me Explain You. Take a look at a copy of To Live Until We Say Good-bye and On Death and Dying. How useful do you feel self-help books are in difficult times? Discuss your opinion with your book group in light of your own life experience.

2. Young Stavros’s courtship of Dina is informed by his sense of the American Dream: “What better place to be a man? To work, to earn, to imagine a life richer than his parents’, to prove his brothers wrong, to make something his own, to make children who would honor him and gratefully inherit his fortune. What better place to reinvent himself—to reinvent the world?” (page 197). What experience, directly or indirectly, have you had with the expectations immigrants bring to the United States about personal success? Can you imagine a foreign place where you might be able to better realize your dreams? Discuss.

3. The snapshot of Stavroula and Litza in Stavros’s office betrays a lot about their relationship as children (page 86). Share a photograph with your book group that you feel shows something about your relationship with a friend or family member and explain the context behind the picture.

Editorial Reviews

"A lively portrait ... this simultaneously sad and funny story of a first-generation immigrant and hisrocky family relationships will resonate with a broad range of readers."

Booklist - Deborah Donovan

[Stavros] is an irascible, grandstanding, rhetorical-question-asking, self-pitying fellow, ‘more shovel than man’ as Liontas puts it, in one of many excellent turns of phrase…. It’s his two eldest daughters who emerge as the book’s broiling core… Liontas’s voice is rambunctious… The experience of Let Me Explain You is less of reading a book than of renting a room in someone’s brain… a festive place to visit.

The New York Times Book Review - Molly Young

"Liontas’ energetic saga infuses a poignant family drama with raucous humor and outsize characters... Let Me Explain You has both heart and hilarity, the perfect combination."

Huffington Post - Claire Fallon

"The strange saga of a Greek immigrant family deals with sexuality, superstition, and lots of yummy food... thoroughly engaging."

Out Magazine - James McDonald

Annie Liontas has fashioned from the raw facts of immigrant experience and family life a hilarious, fascinating, poetic work of fiction. You'll find yourself rereading it aloud for the guffaws it yanks from you. A dazzling debut destined to become a classic.”

Mary Karr

A wickedly funny and compassionate novel about a very contemporary Greek-American family. Annie Liontas gives us their story with precise and wonderful particularity; she shows us how the arguments, the omens, the foods, and the memories intimately bind them to one another. A sparkling debut from an exciting new writer.

Dana Spiotta

We don’t hear much from the Greek-American school of literature, which makes LET ME EXPLAIN YOU, a hilarious yet rich novel about Stavros Stavros Mavrakis, an immigrant from Crete, his perception of his own mortality, and the women in his life, even more of a treat than grandma’s galaktoboureko, the custard pastry for which his flagship diner, the Gala, is named. This debut by Annie Liontas will touch you even if your own roots are not steeped in Greek coffee.

The New York Times - Helen T. Verongos

Liontas awards all her characters a deeply inhabited interiority... pitch perfect... explores what it means to be foreign — to a place, to those around us and to ourselves — and what we take in, what we long for and how we interpret it... Liontas beautifully explores the ways we devour one life to create another... This is what I want from fiction, a story that is, and makes me feel, very much alive.

San Francisco Chronicle - Natalie Bakopoulos

"Evocative... while Steve’s elephantine personality could virtually constitute its own Greek chorus, Liontas writes the women who surround him with equal amounts of verve, and more than enough heart, to soften his rough edges."

Bustle

"Humorous and heartfelt... treats its characters with so much empathy and tenderness that it's hard not to think of the Mavrakis family as any other than the reader's own."

Shelf Awareness - Josh Potter

Stavros Stavros Steve Mavrakis is among the most brilliantly foolish, compellingly maddening, and memorable characters I have come across in any modern novel. Or Greek diner. Let Me Explain You displays the author’s intense sensitivity to both language and humor, used to tremendous emotional effect.Annie Liontas is a star.

Rivka Galchen

"Darkly comic... Liontas shows compassion for her characters even as she plumbs their dysfunction. Seeded with family anecdotes, the novel’s true heart is one filled with love and forgiveness."

Minneapolis Star-Tribune - Carol Memmott

"Let Me Explain You is about the American dream: the good, the bad, the ugly and the hilariously relatable... Liontas tells her story masterfully. We’re invited into the family’s inside jokes, and we laugh, hurt and cry with the characters as they peel away the family drama and generational divides and, somewhat unexpectedly, find love at the center of their story."

BookPage - Carrie Rollwagen

"A funny and moving rumination on the beauty and complexity of familial bonds... a page-turner that concludes in an unexpected way."

Muses & Visionaries Magazine

A big, rollicking, tender novel and family saga with a truly original comic voice at its center.

George Saunders

06/22/2015
Liontas's often raucous debut about a dysfunctional Greek-American family opens with Stavros Stavros Mavrakis's email to his three daughters and second ex-wife. After the Goat of Death appears to him, he believes he has 10 days to live. The proud, successful Stavros seethes with anger, and in broken English gives edicts to his family and insults them, shifting any blame away from himself, thereby assuring that his email is received in the worst possible way. Backstory about his early life on Crete and his first years in America with his first wife pinpoints the origin of his rage and the troubles he visits upon his two eldest daughters. Lacking parental support, Stavroula becomes a successful chef, but in her private life an unfed need leaves her hungry. Litza, the middle daughter, unwittingly offered herself as a pawn in her parents' disastrous divorce, and became a hot, angry mess. The youngest daughter, Ruby, from Stavros's second marriage, is the golden child. Liontas adds tremendously to the novel's ambiance through Stavros's idiomatic language, expertly reveals the layers of her characters' lives, and perfectly captures their emotional temperatures in an unputdownable read. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick and Williams. (July)

Publishers Weekly

06/15/2015
This debut opens with Greek immigrant and diner owner Stavros Stavros Mavrakis emailing his three grown daughters and one of his ex-wives. Believing himself to be dying, he details what changes he would like his family to make in the near future. The Mavrakis women dismiss his words until they realize Stavros has disappeared. Offering perspectives on their missing patriarch are Stavroula, the eldest daughter and talented chef; turbulent, tumultuous Litza; and adoring Ruby, to whom Stavros offers advice about love. Ex-wives Carol and Dina also offer their views on their former husband. It becomes clear through these perspectives that Stavros, in building his businesses, became a neglectful, overburdened father and husband. VERDICT Tradition and transformation, bitterness and forgiveness are the ingredients that make up this Greek American family. Serving readers many Greek delicacies, both culinary and vernacular, Liontas's multigenerational tale of miscommunications and mistakes is a delectable, provocative achievement.—Andrea Tarr, Corona P.L., CA

Library Journal

Stavros Mavrakis has a nightmare about a goat. The next day a goat appears in his New Jersey diner. Stavros is convinced it’s an omen and that he’s going to die in 10 days. Narrator Robertson Dean makes the growling, coarse, often crude Stavros as appealing as possible. Dean faithfully delivers Stavros’s infuriating behaviors, patriarchal tyranny, and biting comments and shines when expressing Stavros’s wry outsider’s observations. He deftly creates Stavros’s second-generation Greek-American daughters, late wife, and black mistress with the slightest shifts in voice and attitude. The story is engaging with its inevitable immigrant-curmudgeon/next-gen conflict and thoughtful reflections about ethnicity and family. But it’s Dean’s sensitive performance that keeps the novel from slipping into caricature. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2015 - AudioFile

Stavros Mavrakis has a nightmare about a goat. The next day a goat appears in his New Jersey diner. Stavros is convinced it’s an omen and that he’s going to die in 10 days. Narrator Robertson Dean makes the growling, coarse, often crude Stavros as appealing as possible. Dean faithfully delivers Stavros’s infuriating behaviors, patriarchal tyranny, and biting comments and shines when expressing Stavros’s wry outsider’s observations. He deftly creates Stavros’s second-generation Greek-American daughters, late wife, and black mistress with the slightest shifts in voice and attitude. The story is engaging with its inevitable immigrant-curmudgeon/next-gen conflict and thoughtful reflections about ethnicity and family. But it’s Dean’s sensitive performance that keeps the novel from slipping into caricature. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2015 - AudioFile

2015-04-16
A Greek immigrant in his sunset years takes out a lifetime's worth of frustrations on his three daughters in this seriocomic debut. By most measures, Stavros has had a good life in America, successfully launching two New Jersey restaurants and raising three daughters. But the novel opens with an email venting his frustrations with those around him: daughter Stavroula for not adhering to "normal society" (read: she has a girlfriend); daughter Litza for picking up the addictions that consumed his first wife; second wife Carol for, he claims, pitting the two daughters against him. But Stavros is a frustration himself: the "let me explain you" that opens his email tirade signals both his poor grammar and his patriarchal attitude. The early sections of the novel mainly circle on his family's and friends' reactions to Stavros' claim that he will die in 10 days and then on a disappearance that suggests he might do himself in. Liontas carries this story with some carefully tuned humor, recognizing Stavros' absurdity without allowing him to degrade into a wacky-immigrant cliché. That's bolstered by the history of Stavros' upbringing in Crete and his hardscrabble early days in the United States, where Stavroula and Litza are effectively neglected by their overworked father and checked-out mother. Even so, the novel feels at once overstuffed and undercooked, brimming with characters Liontas doesn't always seem sure what to do with; Stavros' girlfriend, second wife, and third daughter are unfinished characters, and Litza's habit of contemplating people via the ailment codes she uses at her job at an insurance company feels more like a writerly gimmick than characterization. Liontas handles Stavros' final fate gracefully, if a touch abstractly, recognizing the pull that even the most exasperating loved ones have on us in a family. A tale of an immigrant family rendered with unusual care, though it strains too hard for depth at times.

Kirkus Reviews