How to assess the third book by Claire Vaye Watkins, the marvellously titled I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness? Billed as a novel in small print on the cover, the book comprises a journey narrative by a woman called Claire Vaye Watkins; real-life inserts from the memoirs of the author’s father, Paul, who was part of the Manson Family; fictionalised letters written by the narrator’s mother; and a section from the perspective of an angry toddler, all capped off by some poetry and multiple-choice quizzes on postnatal depression. Darkness, it appears, comes in many forms.
Vaye Watkins is to be commended for this ambitious, shapeshifting book whose primary narrative – a woman on the lam from her life as mother, wife and academic in Ann Arbor, Michigan – proceeds at a fittingly breakneck speed. The story, which is to say the very loose framework that holds things together, sees the narrator Claire take a trip to Reno, Nevada to speak about her writing to a group of students. This makes for a funny set piece. Woefully unprepared, and coming down off mushrooms, she gets the audience to lie on the ground and shut their eyes for a creative writing “exercise” she just about manages to pull off.
What follows is a zany trip down memory lane, as Claire decides not to return to her husband, Theo, and toddler Ruth, choosing instead to revisit, among other things, family, friends, dead exes, her childhood in the Mojave Desert, and the tragic trajectory of her parents’ lives, all the while searching for the self she believes was obliterated by motherhood.
The style is effusive and propulsive, the tone irreverent. Both the pace and content give the book a timely feel. There are visceral details of sex, masturbation, giving birth and open marriages, passages tinged with the surreal. One indelible example is an in-depth description of vagina dentata, or vaginal teeth. This is part folktale, part real-life medical condition known as dermoid cysts, which can occur after pregnancy: “They come from DNA the baby leaves in you.”
Vaye Watkins was raised in the Mojave Desert, in California and Nevada. Her writing has appeared in Granta, the Paris Review and the New York Times. Previous books include the short story collection Battleborn, which won the Dylan Thomas Award, and her debut novel, Gold Fame Circus. This new book has echoes of Kate Reed Perry’s True Story and Nina Renata Aron’s co-dependency memoir Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls. However, comparisons to Jenny Offill, who provides the front cover blurb, are overblown. I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness has similar subject matter and wit, but not Offill’s precision and restraint.
Vaye Watkins writes with urgency, and sometimes to excess. The various parts of the book can feel diffuse, too sparse in their own right, not complementary to the whole. This is particularly true of the interspersed letters by the narrator’s mother, which slow the pace considerably and leave us wanting to get back to the action. Elsewhere, the sections on the Manson clan read like exposition of familiar ground. This style is used more effectively in the sections that detail the relationship between the narrator’s parents, as the reader has a sense of who these characters are and what they mean to the overall narrative arc.
Time is whirly throughout the book, and a cleaner, more linear approach might have brought cohesion to the disparate parts. That said, the hotch-potch form mirrors the disintegration of the narrator’s sense of self, and her valiant attempts to put things back together.
I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness is sustained by its sharp humour and transgressive approach to motherhood and marriage, which makes for interesting reading. The narrator is refreshingly honest but steers clear of self-recrimination.
On postnatal depression: “I did not want to hurt the baby or myself. I stressed this. We were the only people I didn’t want to hurt.” On Claire’s unconventional childhood: “We were in the fort all weekend, unless we were breaking into houses with Mom.” On Las Vegas: “The place will be whatever you need it to be.” On the accolades for her writing, where she is lauded for perspective: “Did it make it worse to be publicly celebrated for a capacity that the homestead knew to be stunted in me?”
Even when dealing with difficult topics – her mother's addiction to painkillers, Claire's father's cancer – she is matter of fact, unsentimental, always seeking to
represent the truth.
If the book’s heart of darkness lies in the hidden-away, unresolved parts of the narrator, her journey (or you could call it escape) is an attempt to confront them. The tension comes from watching her press the big red button, from standing back as a life explodes.
