I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness

May 1, 2021

Trying to shrug off postpartum depression, a writer named Claire travels to a speaking engagement in Reno and stays longer than anticipated, reconnecting with old friends and confronting the death of her first love, her father's cult-member notoriety, and her mother's steady dwindling down to focus on her addiction. What Claire is really doing: struggling with how she feels about marriage and motherhood and, in the sun-swept Mojave Desert, trying to figure out where she belongs in the world. Following the multi-award-winning Battleborn (e.g., Story Prize, NYPL Young Lions Award) and the multi-best-booked Gold Fame Citrus.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 2, 2021
In this vivid if overstuffed outing from Watkins (Gold Fame Citrus), a writer named Claire Vaye Watkins returns to her hometown of Reno for a reading. The trip is meant as a brief respite for Claire from her husband and daughter, but it becomes a monthslong stay as she grapples with memories of those who are gone. Her late father, Paul, a member of the Manson Family, was described by her mother, the late Martha, as the cult’s “number one procurer of young girls.” Martha, meanwhile, died when Claire was in her 20s, either by an accidental opiate overdose or by suicide. She also remembers an ex-boyfriend who died in a car crash. And as Watkins catalogs her “maternal ambivalence” and “wifely rage,” she breaks the rules of her open marriage by falling in love with an extramarital partner. While Claire’s memories provide the narrative thrust, nearly a third is spent on her family’s history, including letters from Martha to her cousin from 1968 through the ’70s (“I think I’m mentally ill. Love is a fucking hassle”), and the material doesn’t quite illuminate Claire’s story or develop the plot. What makes this work is Claire’s raw sense of pain on the page, and the evenhanded honesty with which Watkins portrays her actions. Thought Watkins overreaches, her talent is abundant. Agent: Nicole Aragi. Aragi, Inc.

November 1, 2021

Watkins (Gold Fame Citrus) uses her own life and family background as a basis for this dark, gritty, unsparing odyssey of a young woman in search of herself and the root of her unhappiness. After Claire goes to her native Nevada for a speaking engagement, she avoids returning home to her husband and infant daughter. Instead she spends months revisiting former homes and haunts, taking lovers, getting high, and having various surreal adventures and disasters. Early in the novel, readers learn of her father's experiences as part of the Manson Family and her mother's decline and eventual death from opioid addiction. Letters sent from her mother as a teenager to a cousin are interspersed throughout Claire's narrative. VERDICT Watkins is fearless in her depictions, particularly of the character based on herself; she makes no attempt to help the reader sympathize with her actions, which initially feel selfish and immature. But as the layers of the past and present are peeled away, one can understand how she's been traumatized and begin to admire her grit and determination to be true to herself. In the end, the narrative calls to mind Rabbit, Run as well as works from the Beat Generation but reflected through a feminist, millennial lens.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 15, 2021
Reckless and defiantly intelligent, Watkins detonates the ties that bind. An almost hallucinatory craft propels Watkins' fiction, starting with her ear for titles. Midbook, the reader learns that the narrator's (doomed) teenage beau tattooed I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness across his collarbones, "with a period, as in end of discussion." The narrator, named Claire Vaye Watkins, starts off in a garden of "mostly rock and dirt," addressing four naked dolls. Awash in postpartum depression, she has bolted the Midwest for Nevada, leaving an infant daughter and a husband in her wake. She might be directing the title to her daughter, but it works equally well as a signoff from her own handsome, notorious father, Paul Watkins, "Charles Manson's number one procurer of young girls." Or from her mother, Martha, "an artist, a naturalist, a writer" who died alone, addicted to OxyContin. Watkins' reckoning with her mother is breathtaking. "I went from being raised by a pack of coyotes," she writes, "to a fellowship at Princeton where I sat next to John McPhee at a dinner and we talked about rocks and he wasn't at all afraid of me." Dark humor marbles these pages, and whether a reader finds it bracing or bratty may be a matter of temperament, or generation. Watkins breaks the rule of her open marriage by falling in love and, thinking of her husband, tells herself, "Do not say I just have to get this out of my system because I do not want it out." Along this jagged way, Watkins spins a remarkable set piece as she gives a literary reading at a Reno high school. Mostly, she sifts the remnants of her desert family of origin, making it impossible to look away. Less successful are long excerpts of Martha's teenage letters to a cousin, a wanly parallel coming-of-age. Still, when Watkins thanks both dead parents in her acknowledgements, the sincerity is a measure of rare storytelling capable of lifting them all from the wreckage. Incandescent writing illuminates one woman's life in flames.

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Starred review from September 1, 2021
In her second novel after the speculative Gold Fame Citrus (2015), Watkins' angry, grieving, wild-at-heart narrator shares Watkins' name, home ground, parentage, and literary calling, creating a wily fusion of autobiography and imagination. Fictional Claire is in the grip of postpartum depression and writhing in the chains of matrimony, first-time motherhood, a tenured university position, and high expectations. She is homesick for the Nevada desert and haunted by her father, Paul, who got tangled up with Charles Manson's murderous Family and died young; and her free-spirited, con-artist, opiate-addicted, deceased mother, Martha. Martha's coming-of-age as a budding journalist is tracked in letters she wrote to a cousin--brainy, boy-obsessed, shrewd, and funny missives Claire reads backward from 1974 to 1969. Leaving her husband and baby daughter to travel to Reno for an author event, Claire goes rogue with old friends, a lover, and an enclave of desert artist-squatters, getting high, living rough, and raging against sexism, artistic compromise, and academic and domestic rigidity. She's reckless, infuriating, ribald, incisive, and hilarious. In the spirit of Edward Abbey, Hunter Thompson, and Joy Williams, Watkins has forged a desert tale of howling pain and a chaotic quest for healing mythic in its summoning of female power in a realm of double-wides, loaded dice, broken glass, and hot springs.

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