I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness is Claire Vaye Watkins’s latest novel, [released October 5th, 2021] and is written in the form of a memoir interlaced with her family saga—one can imagine a tattered journal, interwoven with detritus from past and present, pages scrawled in a corner of the Vegas airport or under the branches of a Joshua tree, its cover cracked from the heat of the desert—stories of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll and vagina dentata—what more could you want?
Bio
Born in Bishop, California in 1984, Watkins grew up in the Mojave Desert on the fringe of Death Valley—first in Tecopa, California and then Pahrump, Nevada, living in a desert landscape of sand and gravel, yucca and mesquite, edged by the gray chiseled Nopah Range—the extremes of life and death of nature in striking distance of the fantasyland of Vegas. But Watkins’s unique upbringing was not only the desert—her father was Paul Watkins, a member of the Charles Manson Family. By illuminating Manson’s “Helter Skelter” motive, he ultimately brought Manson to justice after the horrific Tate and LaBianca murders in Los Angeles. Watkins describes her mother, Martha, as “a great bullshitter” and “incredible dynamo” who found a way to survive in a grueling world. Her parents met at the Crowbar bar on the edge of Death Valley, married, and had two daughters, Claire and Lise Watkins.
Watkins received her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Nevada, Reno and her Master of Fine Arts from Ohio State University. She has taught at Princeton and Bucknell universities, and was an assistant professor at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Currently, Claire Vaye Watkins teaches creative writing at the University of California, Irvine.
Literary Debut
Watkins made her literary debut in 2012 with a collection of short stories, Battleborn, earning literary accolades on multiple fronts. The New York Times called the collection, “brutally unsentimental,” and The New Yorker wrote that Watkins is writing in an entirely new genre: “Nevada Gothic.” Battleborn won The Story Prize, The Dylan Thomas Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, The Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and The Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. She has been published in a slew of respected publications: Granta, Tin House, Freeman’s, The Paris Review, Story Quarterly, New American Stories, Best of the West, The New Republic, The New York Times, and Pushcart Prize XLIII, to name a few. Watkins was included in the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35,” Granta’s “Best Young American Novelists,” and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Her first novel, Gold Fame Citrus, published in 2015 by Riverhead, is a work of stunning speculative fiction, and hit the literary scene with a flurry of critical praise, named the Best Book of the Year by a host of publications: The Washington Post, NPR, Vanity Fair, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Refinery 29, Men's Journal, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Book Riot, Los Angeles Magazine, Powells, BookPage, and Kirkus Reviews.
The near future story is set on a West Coast suffering extreme drought with shifting sand dunes driving out all but the dregs of society, who, like rats, rifle through the scraps of the rich and famous who have fled the Golden State. As the main characters flee eastward from California, they discover a tribe in the desert—a commune of the insane, the desperate, and the unlucky—led by an enigmatic master.
Watkins’s dystopian parable weaves metaphor and angst as desperate and tenuous humans cling to life within oceans of sand. With vestiges of Orwell and LeGuin, she scatters her disturbing “Alice in Wonderland” existence with peculiar and broken characters, irrevocably wounded by life.
I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness
If Gold Fame Citrus can be described as intensely surreal, then Watkins’s latest novel, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, is a foil in a way—the brutal realism of life. Primarily told in the first person, the story has a disjunctive feel: Claire’s anguished memoir, jumbled with stories from her father’s past, and, in reverse chronological order, her mother’s old letters to her cousin Denise, inserted at random places, as if tucked within the pages of a book.
The novel begins after the birth of the main character’s first child, and Claire sinks into a quicksand of post-partum depression, and attempts to persuade herself that this will pass.
“I would be okay—would survive my child’s first winter, a sludgy era of despair, bewilderment, and rage passed in the palm of the mitten.”
As Claire tries to come to terms with her life, she recalls the stark grief of losing Jesse, a lover from her past, in a wreck:
“There is a shattered windshield, a cop car, an ambulance, a fire engine tilted on the soft shoulder of the highway, lights blazing. The sun is rising and the mountains are indigo above you. Someone has tucked you up so none of you is showing so we don’t have to see the parts of you we don’t want to.
You were here, then you were gone.”
Watkins peppers a wry and, at times, bitter humor within her narrative, and yet the novel’s essential humanity is poignantly revealed in Claire’s attempt to understand the dysfunctional love of her family:
“We have loved and loved and been loved despite the fissures and loses, violence, cruelty, smallness, timing, deficits in money and time and attention, despite the betrayals and indifferences, the distance and weather, despite developing different definitions of certain words. Death, expensive, cold.”
There is a deep, stark honesty in I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness—where one finds comfort in the shadows—hiding from the vulnerability and powerlessness of love. Though life can be beautiful, it’s also a journey through a valley of heartache, sorrow, and loss—and at its deepest abyss—a place where fear trumps love. As the old expression goes, perception is everything, but in our flawed myopic vision, is what we think we see real, or is the world simply a chaotic and surreal mirage? I guess it depends on how good the drugs are…
Please check out my fantastic interview with Claire Vaye Watkins on The Millions.
Additional links to I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/668168/i-love-you-but-ive-chosen-darkness-by-claire-vaye-watkins/
https://bookshop.org/books/i-love-you-but-i-ve-chosen-darkness/9780593330210
Karen (K.E.) Lanning www.kelanning.com , author of the cli-fi series, The Melt Trilogy: A Spider Sat Beside Her, The Sting of the Bee, and Listen to the Birds, and currently writing two commercial/literary novels: Where the Sky Meets the Earth and The Light of the Sun.
