by Tiffany Tsao

Where to purchase: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Libro.fm

Thank you to HarperVia and HarperAudio for the gifted copies of this book in exchange for an honest review. This post contains affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

ARC Review

Publisher: HarperVia / HarperAudio

Publication Date: May 5, 2026

There is a moment, somewhere in the middle of But Won't I Miss Me, where I realized I had stopped reading it as speculative fiction. The premise is wild. A woman gets pregnant and gives birth to a second self, an identical, nearly indestructible version of her who then consumes her so the new self can raise the baby. That is the world. That is just how it works. And somewhere along the way I stopped registering it as strange and started registering it as familiar, which is a much more unsettling thing for a book to do to you.

What it's about

Vivi is pregnant, and she should be happy. Everyone around her treats rebirth, the process by which a woman births her replacement and is consumed by her, as a fact of life. It is nature's way of equipping mothers with the strength they need. No one questions it. Vivi cannot stop questioning it.

When her rebirth goes wrong and she emerges weakened instead of stronger, her husband leaves her. She moves to the country with her baby, takes a job with her old boss, and tries to figure out how to be a mother in a body and mind that are not what motherhood demands. What she eventually uncovers about her failed rebirth reframes everything that came before it.

Tiffany Tsao is an Australian-Indonesian novelist and translator, known for her novel The Majesties and her translations of Norman Erikson Pasaribu's poetry and fiction. The audiobook is narrated by Siho Ellsmore.

What stuck with me

The thing about this book that caught me off guard, and I do not say this often, is that I knew something was coming and I still did not see what was actually coming. That is rare. I read a lot of speculative and literary fiction that telegraphs its turns. This one does not.

But the part that stayed with me, the part I keep turning over, is the metaphor. A mother gives birth to a second self that consumes her so the new self can have the strength to take care of the child. The original woman is gone. What remains is the version motherhood requires. And in the world of the book, this is normal. It is expected. It is what a good mother does.

Read that sentence again and tell me it does not describe something true.

The horror of But Won't I Miss Me is not that this is a horror novel. It is not structured like one. There are no jump scares, no graphic dread. The horror is that the book treats this transformation as ordinary, the way the world treats it as ordinary, the way mothers are expected to be erased and replaced by a more useful version of themselves and call it love. Vivi's whole crisis is that she is the only one who finds this terrifying. Everyone else has accepted it. She is the broken one for noticing.

This is where Tsao's book sits beside Sayaka Murata for me. Vanishing World did the same thing with the disappearance of human connection. Murata's worlds are not strange to the people who live in them. They are just real. The strangeness is in our own reaction to them, the gap between what the characters accept and what the reader cannot. But Won't I Miss Me operates in that exact register. The surreal is just real. The real is just expected. And what gets exposed is not the fictional world, but ours.

On the audio

I read this one in both formats, the print copy and the audio narrated by Siho Ellsmore. I want to flag the audio specifically because Ellsmore carries this book. The narration is the kind that holds a difficult premise steady. She does not perform Vivi's fear, she just delivers it, which is exactly what the book needs. If you do audio, this is a strong audiobook to pick up.

What surprised me is that the format did not change how the speculative parts hit, and I think that is because the book is not trying to defamiliarize anything. The rebirth, the consumption, the second self, all of it is delivered as ordinary. So whether you are reading it on the page or hearing it in your headphones, it just is. That is the whole point.

My takeaway

But Won't I Miss Me is a book about what we lose of ourselves to become the version of ourselves that motherhood, or society, or partnership, demands. It is a book about a woman who refuses to accept the terms even when refusing makes her the broken one. It is also, structurally, a book that pulls off a turn I genuinely did not see coming, which is rare enough to mention.

If you read Sayaka Murata for the way her worlds make ours feel suddenly suspect, this is for you. If you have been gravitating toward feminist speculative fiction that does not announce itself as either feminist or speculative but is both, this is for you. Definitely worth the read.

If you like this

Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata
The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Where to purchase

Bookshop.org | Amazon | Libro.fm

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