Claire Vaye Watkins goes on an autofictional odyssey out West in her latest
I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness follows a woman, also named Claire, who abandons her family during a bout of postpartum depression in favor of a road trip through significant places in her past.
In her 2015 viral essay "," Claire Vaye Watkins confessed her inability to write "anything of consequence" since the birth of her daughter. "I don't wander in the desert much anymore," the author of American West collection wrote. "I spend my days with a baby and that, patriarchy says, is not the stuff of art." That Watkins wrote , her debut, as a self-described pander to white male readership amplifies her fears that she has lost her artist's gaze entirely: Her attempt at a novel stalled out
