Why Don't You Love Me?

MAX'S PICK

Why Don’t You Love Me by Paul Rainey (Drawn & Quarterly, March 2025) starts off like Blondie or Family Circus, young parents Claire and Mark ending their fights with cutesy one liners. But something darker and unreal starts puncturing their lives and they cope via meanness, alcoholism, and hate. Can they find their way back to love in the face of the world’s end? A heartbreaking and uplifting examination of a couple's straining under worldwide catastrophe. In hardcover in 2023, it felt like the perfect book to look back on living through COVID. Now brand-new in paperback, how can it be that it's the perfect book for a world that seems even worse off? -MA

A family gets lost in the shuffle of reimagining their lives in this dark, domestic sci-fi comedy

Claire and Mark are stuck in the doldrums of an unhappy marriage. She chain-smokes and refuses to leave the house or even change out of her bathrobe. He sleeps on the couch and can’t distinguish one day from the next. With all love lost for family life, pizza and Chinese food take turns on a nightly take-out dinner menu.

Husband and wife are plagued by the idea that this is all a dream. Why can’t Mark ever remember their son’s name? Isn’t he a barber? Doesn’t he play in a band? Why is Claire obsessively stalking her ex-boyfriend online? When exactly did she stop caring about what the kids wear to school? And just why can’t she be bothered to tell the other mums at pick-up apart? Didn’t Claire and Mark have different lives? As reports of an imminent nuclear war make subtle waves on the radio, the truth begins to dawn on them…

Paul B. Rainey’s critically-acclaimed sleeper hit returns in supple paperback with an all-new cover. Why Don’t You Love Me? is a hilariously terrifying meditation on mourning lost opportunities, rolling with the punches, and confronting reality as it turns on you—one day at a time. Rainey's tightly plotted relationship drama shifts into a science-fiction mindblower and keeps you surprised until the final heartbreaking panel.

Paperback | 216 pages | 9.05" x 6.50"