Claire Vaye Watkins

In I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, new mother, Claire, leaves her husband and infant for a speaking engagement in Reno, she does not intend to be away for long. However, the quick trip mutates into an extended escapade away from the confines of marriage and motherhood and a seemingly bottomless descent into the past. Deep in the desert, alone, and confronting the legacy of her tragic first love, her cult-member father and her struggling mother, Claire searches for a way forward.

Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of the novel Gold Fame Citrus and the short story collection Battleborn, winner of the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other prizes and was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness is a finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Time Book Award. Watkins is a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and lives in Twenty-nine Palms, California.

“Intense, intelligent, and bristly. . . angry and alive. . . a virtuoso performance.” —The New York Times Book Review. “Unequivocally triumphant. . . 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.” — NPR. “A beautifully arranged tackle box of everything Watkins does best — cut-through-the-bone narrative of family apocalypses; custom blending of the historical, the unimaginable and the impossible; enchanting, terrifying encounters with the American West.” –Los Angeles Times.