To call I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness a novel about maternal ambivalence would be to get only halfway there. Watkins’s intentions here are more elusive: she wants us to consider our unexamined reactions, to question why it is still a political act for a woman to seek pleasure ... Watkins’s prose is catlike—sleek, elegantly designed, and unconcerned with convention ... So much love emanates from I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness. It is an insider’s story, often told in code, using the hidden language of the body.

Watkins’s foray into the canon of mom-lit reads, appropriately, like a piece of writing that did not enter the world easily ... She attempted a short story 'in the form of a postpartum-depression questionnaire,' but set it aside, convinced that her character’s concerns were 'quaint' ... That questionnaire, or one like it, appears in an early chapter of I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness. You can see why Watkins returned to the conceit. The form’s sterile, inadequate prompts...ramp into multiple-choice answers—but Watkins’s narrator free-associates her replies, making room for particularity ... Claire steps into the breach, and her answers feel not so much skimmed from her stream of consciousness as scraped, like debris, from a crater ... Claire is honest and lacerating about the pull of prestige, especially for a woman whose coming of age entailed truant punks knocking each other’s teeth out with baseball bats ... This yearning for life, or for a particular kind of life, serves as the book’s subject and governing mood. It also powers the plot ... where Battleborn juxtaposed a blanched terrain with lush but empty mythologies, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness takes seriously the redemptive possibilities of narrative. Claire is an author. If anything can save her, it’s her song ... Still, the book distinguishes itself from the valorized male getaway. For one, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness is a bonanza of consequences, many of which do not befall the protagonist but, rather, originate within her ... if the book claims a place in the archive of ambivalent motherhood, alongside works by Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, and Jenny Offill, it also breaks the mold. Claire risks more than other sad-mom protagonists, pulling off a jailbreak that they only dream about ... Watkins, though, neither stews nor panders. She just follows her light.

I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness is an audaciously candid story about the crush of conflicted feelings that a baby inspires ... This late in the history of feminism that theme may sound too familiar, but Watkins’s book sparks the same electric jolt that The Awakening must have sent juicing through Kate Chopin’s readers in 1899. Here is a novel to hate and to love, to make you feel simultaneously disgusted and unloosed ... With such naked honesty, Watkins provides a perfect articulation of her mutinous thoughts, the unresolvable tension between what she feels and what she knows is expected of her ... The unusual method of I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness — its illicit mingling of fact and fiction — serves as a surprisingly effective representation of what it’s like, for some women, to be handed a newborn ... It’s no coincidence that much of this story takes place in the American desert, a territory that burns away ornament and affectation. Here, on the terrain where she began, Claire sloughs off the skin of a life that doesn’t fit her and begins to discover one that might. It’s a painful transformation, but utterly captivating to witness.

Vaye Watkins is to be commended for this ambitious, shapeshifting book whose primary narrative – a woman on the lam from her life as mother, wife and academic in Ann Arbor, Michigan – proceeds at a fittingly breakneck speed ... The style is effusive and propulsive, the tone irreverent. Both the pace and content give the book a timely feel. There are visceral details of sex, masturbation, giving birth and open marriages, passages tinged with the surreal ... comparisons to Jenny Offill, who provides the front cover blurb, are overblown. I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness has similar subject matter and wit, but not Offill’s precision and restraint ... Vaye Watkins writes with urgency, and sometimes to excess. The various parts of the book can feel diffuse, too sparse in their own right, not complementary to the whole ... Time is whirly throughout the book, and a cleaner, more linear approach might have brought cohesion to the disparate parts. That said, the hotch-potch form mirrors the disintegration of the narrator’s sense of self, and her valiant attempts to put things back together ... sustained by its sharp humour and transgressive approach to motherhood and marriage, which makes for interesting reading. The narrator is refreshingly honest but steers clear of self-recrimination ... If the book’s heart of darkness lies in the hidden-away, unresolved parts of the narrator, her journey (or you could call it escape) is an attempt to confront them. The tension comes from watching her press the big red button, from standing back as a life explodes.

I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness achieves many...things, and it does so viscerally and candidly. The tales of sex and drugs come thick and fast ... Such candour will not appeal to all readers, but it is central to this playful, serious novel concerned with female freedom. Watkins rightly refuses to see these 'details' as surplus to a woman’s life and its telling. Her novel is not helped, however, by occasionally mystifying allusions to characters such as 'my biologist' (whose identity is only explained nearly 200 pages in), while the reams of unmediated correspondence between Claire’s mother and her cousin go on for too long. Strongest, in this novel of fluid form, are those passages that transcend conventional anecdote.

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.

Ultimately, what this novel is about is freedom and choice, causes and consequences, and it is written in sharp language that is both deeply funny and painful. Completely absent any navel-gazing or self-pity, it is a book that probes questions of family, feminism, ecology, and home, and refuses to settle on easy answers ... equally thrilling and harrowing ... Watkins writes about motherhood with precision and insight—each word feels carefully chosen and essential to the narrative ... Within these pages, Watkins blurs the line between reality and imagination in prose that is darkly funny, heartfelt, and at times tragic. She writes with precision and control, even as the story seems to travel where it wants to go. Just as her protagonist refuses to conform to the socially acceptable script for young mothers, so too Watkins writes on her own terms.

There’s an intentional millennial-ness—or, more specifically, something particular to the Oregon Trail generation, a microgeneration of the millennials—to Claire Vaye Watkins’s new novel ... Though Watkins doesn’t explore the binary of who most deserves happiness—mother or baby (or even the baby’s dad back home)—she does liberate her alter ego from the inherently limited social constructs of motherhood and womanhood. In doing so, Watkins asks readers to sit with discomfort until something gives ... Although Claire describes the ways she has been abandoned by her parents, Claire’s (temporarily) abandoned infant daughter, Ruth, is almost entirely absent from the novel. But it’s Claire’s imagining of the way her infant daughter thinks of her that highlights Claire’s own feelings about herself as a mother.

Watkins riffs lovingly on [autofiction] ... [And] shows that autofiction, as much as any other mode of writing, can be escapist ... No matter how much the fictional Claire may seem like the real Watkins, readers can’t just decide the two are the same ... Watkins seems to use Claire’s flight westward to dramatize fiction’s improvisatory potential: Her novel becomes structurally looser and shaggier with every chapter ... Watkins’s freewheeling excavation of her family’s story may be frustrating to readers seeking more allegiance to reality: So many of us feel irreversibly beholden to loved ones, history, or convention. But I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness...is not slickly false. [It's a] messy, bighearted book that prioritize emotional searching.

Stunning ... The character is that rarest of things — a woman whose questionable decisions remain unpunished. That's part of what makes this novel so refreshing: At no point does it descend into a morality tale ... Readers who know Watkins from her first two books are bound to be surprised by this novel. It's messy, out of pocket and unapologetically transgressive ... It pays off. I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness is a wild, hilarious novel, told with a contagious, unchained ferocity. It's a wonderful book by an author who's quickly proven herself indispensable to American literature.

The brazenly frank depiction of Claire’s bad behavior offers constant reminders of just how sharp and funny Ms. Watkins’s writing can be ... Her unapologetically self-involved wanderings from therapy to drugs to extramarital flings have some of the depraved zaniness of a Hunter S. Thompson road trip. For a time the narrative seems animated by the same death drive that has possessed its heroine, and if the depths it reaches are disturbing they are also strangely exhilarating ... But this doesn’t last, and soon enough Ms. Watkins pulls out of free fall and back toward respectability, obedient to the formula of confession and absolution that describes nearly every work of autobiographical fiction ... The evidence of her rehabilitation is that she is able to write again, yielding the book we have just read. And so at last readers perform their true function in relation to this novel: as witnesses to the author’s therapeutic breakthrough.

This surreal odyssey, propelled by maternal rage, may at times be alienating even to female readers, but it is unequivocally triumphant to witness Watkins writing for herself ... The journey occasionally drags in the portions that come across as too obvious in their excavations ... The letters from Claire's mother Martha to her cousin, chronicling her teenage loves and newspaper aspirations, start out infused with the titillation of who-likes-who but eventually become so repetitive that it's unclear if that's a commentary on limited teenage perspective or a consequence of too-faithful transcription ... What has more of an impact are Watkins' subtle, deliberate stylistic choices ... Her dark glee, cautious explorations, and triumphant control of her new appendages are a thrilling embrace of what makes her monstrous ... Watkins shows readers — and perhaps proves to herself — 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.

The immediacy of the first-person voice, notable even in the title, suggests we may be reading a memoir. So does the narrator’s name, which, as it happens, is Claire Vaye Watkins ... But this is indeed a novel, and it’s an intense, intelligent and bristly one ...I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness can be difficult to track; characters appear without backgrounds, prose unfolds as poetry, material is quoted at length from the author’s father’s 1979 memoir, My Life With Charles Manson, as well as from the narrator’s mother’s letters to a cousin ... This novel’s sweaty urgency, its ambitious disruption of form and content, makes it tough to criticize ... A slice of her mother’s back story is told through sets of letters so dull only a daughter could love them ... But most prose wouldn’t stand up against the narrator’s breakneck pace, frightening honesty and biting, self-deprecating humor ... As Watkins writes, in a virtuoso performance of a chapter titled 'How I Like It,' 'I am not choosing darkness, but darkness is choosing me.' Maybe, but by nourishing her complicated desires, she holds on. Perceptive and shameless.

While reading this funny, deeply searching, and innovative novel, what surfaces is the pursuit of freedom as well as the act of recovering a fractured self ... Watkins’s structurally textured novel revels in a certain chaos that mimics the inner life of its protagonist, a woman who cannot look away from the panoply of raging interests and influences that surfaced in the wake of childbirth and motherhood ... Watkins plays with the mystery surrounding childbirth and postpartum bodies in order to reveal the ways women become foreign to ourselves, more animal than domestic goddess ... Readers may find it hard to forgive, much less empathize with, such a contradictory protagonist. But this disarming novel isn’t asking the reader to concentrate on redemption. Instead Watkins makes connections between taboo, shocking, and shameful states of being to create a more honest relationship to humanity and freedom ... This blistering, form-shaping novel may not connect with some, but guess what? It was never meant for everyone in the first place. That’s pretty liberating too.

Watkins wrote, 'Let us, each of us, write things that are uncategorizable, rather than something that panders to and condones and codifies those categories' ... Watkins’ second novel, I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, lives up to that challenge. Its form is uncategorizable, somewhere between a work of autofiction and memoir that reads like a fully realized work of fiction. It’s also a radical feminist text in conversation with classics of the genre ... I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness is a beautiful, provocative, often jarring meditation on the limits and possibilities of female freedom ... At times the weight of the nonfictional threatens to topple the fictional throughline of the book. I often found myself in the book’s first half wondering how this all was going to hold together, and it’s a testament to Watkins’ immense talents as a writer that all these disparate threads become coherent in the book’s stunning conclusion ... I was consistently fascinated by I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness ... In the end, I am glad I read it and even gladder that Watkins wrote it. When I came to the book’s final page I found myself questioning the givens of my own life, willing, at least for a moment, to imagine a different way of being.

With her fierce, poetic new novel, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, Watkins has accomplished her artistic task: she panders to no one ... Watkins is one of our greatest writers of place. Her descriptions of the West are stunning and unsentimental .

Watkins’ angry, grieving, wild-at-heart narrator shares Watkins’ name, home ground, parentage, and literary calling, creating a wily fusion of autobiography and imagination ... She’s reckless, infuriating, ribald, incisive, and hilarious. In the spirit of Edward Abbey, Hunter Thompson, and Joy Williams, Watkins has forged a desert tale of howling pain and a chaotic quest for healing mythic in its summoning of female power in a realm of double-wides, loaded dice, broken glass, and hot springs.

Reckless and defiantly intelligent, Watkins detonates the ties that bind ... An almost hallucinatory craft propels Watkins' fiction ... Watkins’ reckoning with her mother is breathtaking ... Dark humor marbles these pages, and whether a reader finds it bracing or bratty may be a matter of temperament, or generation ... Along this jagged way, Watkins spins a remarkable set piece as she gives a literary reading at a Reno high school. Mostly, she sifts the remnants of her desert family of origin, making it impossible to look away. Less successful are long excerpts of Martha’s teenage letters to a cousin, a wanly parallel coming-of-age. Still, when Watkins thanks both dead parents in her acknowledgements, the sincerity is a measure of rare storytelling capable of lifting them all from the wreckage ... Incandescent writing illuminates one woman’s life in flames.

Vivid if overstuffed ... While Claire’s memories provide the narrative thrust, nearly a third is spent on her family’s history, including letters from Martha to her cousin from 1968 through the ’70s...and the material doesn’t quite illuminate Claire’s story or develop the plot. What makes this work is Claire’s raw sense of pain on the page, and the evenhanded honesty with which Watkins portrays her actions. Thought Watkins overreaches, her talent is abundant.