I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness - Claire Vaye Watkins

 I remember when I read Gold Fame Citrus back in 2016 I got that strange, tingly feeling that I get when I have a sense of experiencing something special. I thought the writing was incredible, the imagery and language expressive and evocative. I expected great things of the book but it didn’t seem to garner the accolades I thought it should. I began to doubt my instincts!!

So I was intrigued to read Watkins’ new novel. Although classified as a novel I suspect much of it is autobiographical since the author uses real names, certainly of her own family. But, like Jared McGinnis and The Coward, an autobiographical work expressed as a fiction can do what the hell it likes with the actual truth! But much of the Watkins’ family history is documented elsewhere and I often wondered whether the notoriety of having a father associated with Charles Manson has been a blessing or a curse but what better way to exorcise any effects by expressing them in a novel.

Something I love about this book was how contemporary it is in many ways, motherhood in our current age, but also how it seems to palpably echo a previous time in literature, I was reminded of Kerouac but with punctuation, the roman de clef, I thought of Tom Wolfe and The Electric Kool Aid Acid test, Kesey and his Pranksters, Manson and his family, and, I suppose inevitably, Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, something about the mood created in the novel, a kind of timelessness but a paradox in that the novel covers a very specific time in the protagonist’s life.

There’s humour in the book and there’s a raw honesty particularly regarding the equivocation of motherhood. A poignancy to revisit the past and try to understand its place in the present. A look at the preoccupations and self absorption of a teenage girl growing up in ’70’s America realised quite brilliantly with several epistolary sections and I was left wondering whether these letters penned by Watkins’ mother in the book are real or imagined? And in reading the mother’s letters the reader is subliminally required to consider the effect on the child and her sister? There’s a sense of them both needing some closure from a past, of living with unfinished business from the past that impacts on the present. It’s powerfully executed.

The title derives from a tattoo on a deceased boyfriend’s collarbone and it provokes considerations about what constitutes the author’s own ‘darkness’.  Or rather what she perhaps perceives as darkness. It’s an eloquent, literary soliloquy almost,  to mid life crises, motherhood, marriage and the pursuance of ones own creativity, however that is manifest. It’s frank, uncompromising writing, it may bother some but I applaud the candid sincerity of the protagonist and I delight in the masterful prose writing.

My thanks to Ana McLaughlin of riverrun books for a gifted copy.