RaveThe Guardian (UK)This is the territory Watkins explores, and she does so powerfully, resisting the need either to sentimentalise or apologise ... It is a mark of Watkins’s confidence that she displays her source material so brazenly, and I loved her for it. The question of female imagination seems at times to be tediously inescapable, the autofiction tag so readily applied, that to find an author meeting the issue head on is invigorating. It also pre-empts interrogation, forcing the reader to concentrate on what’s in front of them. And what emerges is a study of intergenerational pain ... Although the novel is focused on women, it is poverty, rather than patriarchy, that is presented as the central evil, and Watkins writes with clarity about the fact that acquiring money doesn’t automatically alleviate the legacy of a difficult childhood ... There were parts I found less convincing. When Claire speaks to her college friends, the writing loses some of its power. Perhaps the intention was to show a failure of connection; if so, it didn’t quite work for me. Teenage letters from the narrator’s mother to a cousin add little to the thrust of the book and are presented in reverse chronological order, a slight misstep in a novel that is otherwise impeccably readable, despite its episodic structure. On the other hand, Watkins is excellent on the dulling quality of depression, the way it can make one both lucid and careless ... I had this book pegged, at first, as angry, but struggled as I read to characterise the quality of this anger – until I realised that what I had mistaken for fury was something else. I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness is a novel not of rage but of incandescent sadness, radiating grief for the lost, the damaged, the left behind. It is remarkably clear-sighted. While presenting the causes for Claire’s crisis, Watkins never mistakes context for excuse. What she offers instead is compassion, and the suggestion that, for those lucky enough to have the option, it is possible that the only way out is through.
