by Claire Vaye Watkins

by Claire Vaye Watkins

Format: ebook

Primary Doorways: Character, Setting

Genre: Autobiographical fiction

Claire Vaye Watkin’s book I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness is like if the concept “The Biggest Shit in the Center of the Universe” wrote a book about itself. Following a fictionalized version of Claire, the book alternates between Claire’s first person perspective as she flees her domestic life to pursue art/sex and letters her mother sent to a cousin the 70s and 60s. The letters move backwards through time mirroring Claire’s journey further and further back into her past in order to rediscover herself.

If the opening line of this review sounds like a dig, it’s not. Who hasn’t felt like the biggest shit in the center of the universe at times? And what would our literary cannon be without such (male) shits?

Favorite quote:

“Why not tell them, these luminous childless women of Reno, why not tell them everything? That I was coming of age at an alarming rate. That I’d gained so much weight that my dean had stopped asking me my major. That I did not appreciate the distinction between symposium and colloquium. That my chair had called me kiddo, both of a little drunk at a daytime reception. That I had liked it, that having-a-dad feeling. That for weeks into every term I forgot which classroom was mine…Motherhood had cracked me in half. My self as a mother and my sef as not were two different people, distinct. The women they’d admired, who’d written the books they liked or at had heard of, if only today, was on the other side of a canyon…A curtain fell across me each evening, after the baby was asleep, when I was supposed to be resting, supposed to be happy.”