An Exploration of Loss & Desire in "I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness," by Alicia Marshall

An exploration of loss & Desire in I

LOVE YOU BUT I’VE CHOSEN DARKNESS Alicia Marshall

I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, by Claire Vaye Watkins, Riverhead Books, 2021.

Claire Vaye Watkins’ second novel, I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, is a piecemeal tapestry of poetry, fiction, biography, and letters—an expansive exploration of loss and desire, a darkly funny work of autofiction, and a near-frenetic attempt to broach an impossible question and then to answer it.

The impossible question at issue is why a new mother— in this case the novel’s protagonist, also named Claire Vaye Watkins—would leave her stable marriage and infant daughter and embark on an unplanned trip across the Nevada wilderness to visit dilapidated landmarks of her childhood.

From the beginning, it is clear that Claire—the narrator—is struggling to explain what is happening, to excavate satisfying answers. And so, the novel opens with a clarification, a disclaimer of sorts: “I’ve tried to tell this story a bunch of times. This will be my last try [. . .] The story starts sometime in my daughter’s first year [. . .] Or maybe it starts before then. Like I said, I’ve tried to tell it a bunch of times.”

In the pages that follow, the author grabs hold of every literary device available, combining forms, weaving together history, biography, poetry, and stream-of-consciousness narrative—imbuing each segment with a deeply haunting and irrelevantly funny voice.

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First there is the “hermit crab” satirized response to the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS), which attempts to show the impossibility of accurately responding to esoteric questions with multiple-choice options—and perhaps even the impossibility of knowing oneself with any level of certainty.

Then there is the provocative retelling of the narrator’s early postpartum state—with particular emphasis on her vaginal (toothy) dermoid cyst (a play on the mythic “vagina dentata”), and how this (positively!) impacts Claire’s experience of masturbation.

If this isn’t shocking enough, the reader is then quickly introduced to a colorful retelling of Claire Vaye Watkins’ (realworld) family history—particularly her father’s (Paul Watkins) participation in Charles Manson’s cult, The Family. Combining commentary with excerpts from Paul’s own autobiography, My Life with Charles Manson, Claire Vaye Watkins weaves together a portrait of her father that is dynamic, complicated, simmering with longing, occasionally idyllic, and simultaneously deeply conflicted.

After this, the pieces keep coming in quick succession: Claire travels to a book reading in her hometown of Reno, Nevada. She spends the weekend connecting with old friends.

At the end of the weekend, instead of returning to her husband and infant daughter, she stays—touring landmarks from her childhood, revisiting past traumas, unpacking the history of the area, smoking lots of pot, having lots of sex, and recording her experiences in writing.

Intertwined with these present-tense events are flashes from Claire’s past. The reader learns about Claire’s childhood in the Nevada wilderness, the untimely death of her father, her mother’s subsequent remarriage, the birth of Claire’s baby sister, the family’s move to a new house, her mother’s opioid addiction,

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the slow disintegration of her family unit, Claire’s flight from her hometown, her mother’s death, her college years, and the death of her first serious boyfriend, Jesse Ray. The structure and pace of these disclosures is often frenzied.

There are jumps in time. There are jumps in location. Characters are referenced without introduction. Various forms and writing styles are introduced in quick, unapologetic succession. Excerpts from Paul Watkins’ book are inserted without preamble or explanation. Dozens of letters written by Claire’s mother to her cousin are dropped unceremoniously into the otherwise streamof-consciousness current of the book.

In approaching this novel, it would be easy to get distracted by the lack of traditional narrative structure, or by the bleak hilarity of certain details (there are teeth in her vagina!), or by the endless quest to excavate fact from fiction—to separate the real-world Claire Vaye Watkins from her fictional counterpart.

But all of this misses the point—or as Claire herself calls it, “the big gnar.”

The big gnar has many strands. It is Claire’s father and his early death, Claire’s mother and her addiction. It is her relationship with her sister, her position in the family as the “chubby twin,” the untimely death of her first serious boyfriend, her inability to enjoy monogamy, her endless sense of dislocation.

But it is also a philosophy, an attempt to answer an impossible question by telling the entire story of a person—an implicit statement regarding identity, and how it travels backwards in time to encompass whole generations and pieces of land. The world of I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness is comically dark and (at points) painfully circuitous—but it is also haunted, filled with Claire’s dead parents and her dead parents’ parents—back and back—and the land on which they lived and the choices they

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made and the people they loved and the way in which they died.

To Claire, all of this is the “gnar.” And all of this is the only way the protagonist knows how to tell the story.

Perhaps it is fitting, in light of this, that the novel ends on as sweeping and disparate of a note as it began: “You were here, then you were gone. You died the way this river dies, not so far from where it was born. Turned into sky. Jesse, Jesse, Jesse Ray, my dead ex-boyfriend, my son, my stepson, my sister, Mom, Martha Claire. I have a daughter now. She knows your name.”