The narrator is also a child of divorce in a family of restless souls — “akathisians, which is a fancy way of saying we can’t sit still” — with a history of suicide. Still, she is deeply aware of her advantages, deploying the hashtag #FPOP (From a Place of Privilege) and fretting about making class assumptions about a Black student (while crushing ostentatiously on one of two Black mailmen, both also bald).

She tells of being the “undesired sidekick” to an older sister and a brother who once tricked her into drinking his urine. Her father started piloting a single-engine plane with alarming indifference to preflight checks. Now he does ketamine, buys Polo cologne “by the gallon” and is given to sentimental rumination.

Her mother has three online boyfriends in different states, collects taxidermy specimens , hates brunch and might have once climbed a tree while chained to a chain saw. Everyone but the brother has moved nearby.

Hana chafes at domesticity, whose modern hallmarks Pittard gets exactly right: bite guards, the glowing twin screens in bed, endless laundry, her partner’s wasteful overstocking of — of all things — bananas. She rightly puzzles that this mealy fruit, unlike, say, celery, can be bought singly.

I haven’t yet mentioned the articulate, injured talking cat, the latest character in a string of novels to go Charlotte’s Dark Web lately, who utters commands like “Go then, stupid human. Go forth and see what you can do for me.” Nor the mysterious unnamed Irishman Hana P. met at a bar and slept with before she knew about her ex-husband’s cheating. (Perhaps he is shortly to come forward in real life with some Gaelic love poetry of his own?)

“If You Love It, Let It Kill You” is a rollicking, free-associative and almost claustrophobically insiderish novel most honest in its naked craving for validation and a place in an increasingly unstable canon.

Hana is “desperate” for Margaret Atwood to notice her; she gets in trouble with the university administration for teaching a story by Donald Barthelme; her peers cite Deborah Eisenberg, Elizabeth Hardwick, James Salter in casual conversation.

She grasps at form, sketching outlines for a tragedy, a comedy, a tragicomedy and an instant best seller that reviewers will fawn over, before concluding that this is “something much worse: real life.” Whosever that may be.

IF YOU LOVE IT, LET IT KILL YOU: By Hannah Pittard | Henry Holt | 304 pp. | $28.99