Some books try to tidy up pain. This one refuses. Ilias Agapiou’s Mom, Dad… I’m Drowning isn’t about neat resolutions or cathartic glow-ups. It’s about staying alive long enough to remember who you were before everyone else decided who you should be. It’s blunt, intimate, and it will sit in your chest for days.
Told through shards of memory, the novel follows Orpheus — a queer child raised in a home where silence, shame, and “suffocating love” are the family currency. The narrative does not spoon-feed redemption. Instead, it shows what happens when difference is treated as betrayal: isolation, self-erasure, and the slow, corrosive work of feeling invisible in the one place you should be seen.
Agapiou doesn’t prettify pain. He writes it the way it feels: jagged, recurring, stubbornly real. The prose is spare where it needs to be and devotional in its small mercies when a hand — Odysseus — reaches out and offers a love that refuses to judge. That relationship is the novel’s fragile lifeline, but life is not kind, and the book lets you feel the waves come anyway. The result is not a tidy moral lesson but a lived experience: how people survive, how they drown, and how the ones left behind barely register the sinking.
This is a book for anyone who’s ever felt invisible in their own home, anyone who prefers emotional honesty over tidy endings, anyone who wants queer stories that aren’t sanitized for comfort. If you’ve ever wondered whether love is supposed to hurt as much as it does, this novel will meet you where you are.
It isn’t a “find yourself” arc — it’s a survival manual in miniature: an anatomy of silence, the cost of hiding, the electric relief of being seen, and the merciless truth that sometimes the people who should save you are the ones who drown you first.
This book refuses to be easy. It’s for readers who can sit with discomfort and come out clearer on the other side. If you want a book that guts you, makes you think about what we say and what we refuse to hear, and stays with you afterward — Mom, Dad… I’m Drowning should be on your shelf.
Pick it up. Read it slowly. Let it speak.
