I Haven’t Stopped Thinking About This Book
I read this novel in early January 2022, finishing it over a long, chilly weekend, settled in to the chair closest to the fireplace with my two cats, Jack and Louie, curled up next to me, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
Honestly, I haven’t stopped thinking about Watkins’ first novel, “Gold, Fame, Citrus,” since I read that back in the fall of 2015. But that is for another time.
Let’s stay focused on “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness.”
This novel, or maybe I should call it an auto-fiction book, is unlike anything I’ve ever read.
What I Loved
There is so much about this book resonated with me.
We go on a hero’s journey with Claire as she runs away from her life as wife and mother to go poking into dark corners and lifting the edges up to look back at the life she lead before her daughter was born.
We navigate low-rent neighborhoods and back-of-the-van sex with Claire, who is grappling to hold on to a part of herself that seems to be vanishing.
Claire has lost something on the way from there to here. There being college, graduate school and a writing career, a husband, home and a baby. Here being a rundown desert town and high school friends who never made it very far, along with two dead parents who lived just shy of the up-and-up.
Themes
There’s a lot going on in this story. There are a number of themes or storylines you could focus on and I suspect that if I were to read this again, and I probably will, I would find something different of interest.
Claire is a trainwreck while also being the smartest person in the room.
First, we have an unlikable narrator. Claire is a trainwreck while also being the smartest person in the room. Following Claire on her journey is a bit like hate-watching something and a bit like rooting for the underdog.
I happen to especially like the unlikable narrator thing, but, truthfully, I found a lot to like in Claire.
Then we have Claire’s literal and figurative wandering in the desert. Make of this what you will, I don’t have a keen eye for religious themes, but I saw something of a nod to religions, cults, and the new-agey groups who make their life in the desert.
I always enjoy the warmth of the sun and the desert landscape when I visit on vacation. Vacation being the key factor. It takes something I don’t possess to make a life in a desert community. We see this wherewithal in the starry-eyed, or half-baked, depending on how you see it, cast of characters who’ve made their way to the edges of society.
What I most enjoyed was reading the letters Claire’s late mother Martha wrote to her cousin in San Francisco during Martha’s teen years. The letters, presented in reverse order, start in 1975, Martha’s first year in college, and go back in time to 1969, her early adolescence.
Reading these letters gutted me.
It’s painful to understand how the world slowly lost its shine, how Martha’s dreams and desires were shuffled to the side.
Martha got lost. She forgot herself. She got high too often, messed up her college classes, and met Claire’s father, who had his own shady story (there is a Charles Manson connection, yes, that Manson).
Martha’s life turned out so different from her early aspirations. Spoiler alert, Martha’s dead and before that things weren’t exactly easy. It’s no wonder Claire feels desperate.
“My mother never got to make everything she wanted to make, to build even a fraction of what she wanted to build.”
Claire
And this is where I think this story excels.
There is an undercurrent, a feeling that you will never escape your past. Yes, you can be a published author with a nice three bedroom house, but none of that takes away the fear that you will become your parents.
Coupled with this is the heartache over the people and places you’ve left behind. Claire has lost her mother, her father, and an ex-boyfriend, each one dying younger than they should. They lived hard lives. There’s painful awareness in knowing you survived when others have succumbed
More than anything this story is about Claire’s life transition from daughter to mother. She is now a mother to her own daughter. After reading Martha’s letters, which laid out her dreams, her daringness and her mistakes, I can only imagine Claire wondering if she too will lose her wildness.
We expect women to put their self aside, to pause dreams, tamp down desires and give up the option of making foolhardy choices when they become mothers. Maybe this is necessary, maybe it is not, I don’t know the answer to that.
But giving up a part of yourself does exact a toll on one’s soul.
Fair Warning, Not Everyone Loved This Book
Based on Goodreads reviews many others didn’t find this book nearly as good as I did. In fact quite a few people downright hated it, though it seems the one thing there is agreement on is that this book has a great title.
Folks took time to post reviews like:
“Thoroughly dislikable narrator, disjointed plot and no hope of redemption. Great title, though.“
“Hot mess! Left me confused. The only thing I liked was the title.”
“I chose this book because of the title, it’s a GREAT title! But I found the main character annoying and I couldn’t get past that.“
What’s Up With the Title
The title comes from a tattoo that Jesse, Claire’s dead ex-boyfriend, had on his neck.
This likely was inspired by a mid-2000’s Austin-based band of the same name, I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, but Jesse’s dead so we don’t know. This band is real. Or was real, they do not appear to actively be making music anymore.
Jesse, his tattoo, I don’t know if they are real outside of this book.
My Rating 5/5
The Seventeenth Line 