I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, by Claire Vaye Watkins: Awesome Autofiction

So I don't mind admitting my superficiality: I read Claire Vaye Watkins' new novel, I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, based almost solely on its incredibly awesome title. Hey, there are a lot worse reasons to pick up a novel.

Here's how it started: 

Me, after about 10 pages: Ah, man is this gonna be just another one of these self-indulgent, self-important pieces of autofiction?

Here's how it's going: 

Me, halfway through, and riveted: Okay, yeah, it is, but it's also really good!

If you do some googling, you'll learn that the real-person writer Claire Vaye Watkins' father was one of Charles Manson's right-hand men. Which is crazy! This novel gives a long story about her/the narrator's parents, how they met, etc., right at the beginning. So right off the bad the autofiction/memoir line is a little blurred. In these autofiction novels that seem to be so trendy these days, you always wonder where the line between reality and fiction is, which I realize is not productive to your reading experience. But I can't help it. It sort of feels like you're being tricked a little, but not in a nefarious way. (Of course, to most writers, readers trying to figure out what's real and not is beside the point — and in fact, is probably supremely irritating to them.) 

Anyway, that line is further blurred because the rest of the novel is about a character named Claire Vaye Watkins (also a writer). The character Claire and her husband have just had a baby. And she has had enough — she feels trapped, confined, and felled by postpartum depression. 

When she travels to her hometown of Reno for an author event, she hangs out with some of her old friends, does mushrooms, and slowly realizes she can't go back to her former life. So now what? That's what the rest of the novel is — her just trying (or not really trying, just drifting) to figure out her life. 

All the while, she contemplates a series of letters her mother, who has since died of an opioid overdose, wrote to a cousin when her mother was a teenager in Las Vegas in the 1970s. These letters are give us breaks in the narrator's story. And part of the point is: The apple maybe hasn't fallen far from the tree.

Yes, so once you get past trying to figure out what's fiction and not, you'll find a really sharply written story about returning to your roots. When you start slowly deviating from who you think you are, how do you get back to who you want yourself to be? 

I enjoyed this — a lot more than I thought I might after the first few pages. It's an acutely observed, quickly paced, clever, often funny, often VERY raunchy, and really entertaining read.