#i love you but ive chosen darkness

A few years ago, author Claire Vaye Watkins went viral with an essay called “On Pandering,” in which she wrote about how her debut story collection Battleborn was written “for white men, toward them. If you hold the book to a certain light, you’ll see it as an exercise in self-hazing, a product of working-class madness, the female strain. So, natural then that Battleborn was well-received by the white male lit establishment: it was written for them.” She’d had a baby, and “that, patriarchy says, is not the stuff of art.”

But in her latest, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, critic Natalie Zutter says Watkins is writing adamantly and fiercely for herself. This surreal, autofictional odyssey about a character (also named Claire) who abandons her family after having a baby, opting instead for a road trip through sites important in her past, shows readers that “that one does not have to choose the lesser of two evils. A woman can want motherhood and the rest of her life, not or.”Check out the full review here!

– Petra