Joining family and Manson in the desert
Claire Vaye Watkins shuffles the real and imagined cards of her world in novel ‘I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness’
It’s hot and windy in San Bernardino County’s High Desert when Claire Vaye Watkins answers the phone. The award-winning author of “Battleborn” and “Gold Fame Citrus” bought a home in a community between Joshua Tree and the Twentynine Palms Marine base last year during the pandemic.
“Moving is always really hard — and moving in a pandemic, it’s hard not to know whether the desolation is temporary, medium term or long term,” she says. “But it’s also been kind of magical just to have permission to stay home and get to know my new home really well.”
Desert Heights also proved to be the place where she would finish her latest novel, “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness,” released Tuesday (Riverhead Books, $27). So far, Watkins, a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, has finished all of her books in the Mojave Desert. “I don’t really know how to finish them unless I’m basically in the places where they are,” says Watkins. “It’s kind of how I know if I’m getting it right.” “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness,” which is what Watkins describes as “a novel in the form of a memoir,” follows a fictional version of the author on a journey of self-discovery across parts of California and Nevada. Watkins began writing the book six years ago after having a baby and filling out a postpartum depression questionnaire, a moment that would evolve into the first chapter.
“There was a wish-fulfillment element because this narrator, Claire — who is kind of like a cleverly disguised alter ego — she gets to be very bad,” says Watkins. “She’s very naughty. She shucks off a lot of her responsibilities, so it was an imaginative outlet for me to play out while I was really in dedicated, active caretaking for a baby and teaching and writing books and supporting other books.”
In the novel, there’s a section in which the fictional Claire, who’s been up all night and is soaked, must appear at a high school assembly, something she is completely unprepared to do. Watkins, who is on the faculty at UC Irvine, says that is pure fiction. “I wish! I have never dared to be as heroically unprepared as Claire is in that scene. I don’t think I could pull it off. She thinks on her feet better than me, taking everyone on a guided meditation/nap while listening to the Beach Boys. It’s more of a silly yet deeply felt wish-fulfillment scene,” says Watkins in a followup email. “The only part based on my actual experience is the line about having the impulse every time she approaches a podium to curl up in a ball behind it. I don’t love public speaking, but teaching is fairly painless for me at this point.”
The book further developed its unique voice when Watkins received a box of her mother’s letters, which she rewrote and reimagined. Those experiments would go into “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness” as well. Then she reread “My Life With Charles Manson,” the memoir of her late father, Paul Watkins, who had been associated with the “Manson Family” and went on to testify against its leader.
Claire Watkins, who wrote about her father’s involvement with Manson in an essay for the Guardian, explained the challenge of getting into the mindset of her parents, which she does in a powerful section of the book about her father’s involvement with Manson. “It was a long, complicated process, and often very difficult. To write them as characters I had to make them whole in my mind in the way we rarely do with our parents. It made me painfully aware of everything I don’t know about them, which was very humbling and
in tension with the writer-as-God approach,” she says in a follow-up email.
Born and raised in the Mojave Desert, Watkins has an intimate perspective of the landscape. “I was raised in the tradition of the American West as a landscape of exceptionalism and redemption,” she says. “My parents ran a small, little museum on the edge of Death Valley and their job was to welcome visitors and to keep them alive and to explain to them the place.”
She took the messages and traditions of naturalists like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir to heart, even before going to college and learning about the associated literary traditions. “I still have a really deep, important spiritual relationship with the land, but I have to work very, very hard on it, because it also has to accommodate tremendous grief, sadness, coping, loving stolen land, loving land that has a very bloody history, that is suppressed often in the American West,” she says.
As well, issues like climate change can’t be ignored when you live in the desert. Watkins mentions a recent power outage at her home. Her swamp cooler stopped working. “You just go into survival mode really fast,” she says. “It gets too hot to be safe very quickly.”
She notices the heat waves that are out of place. “I’m very used to the Mojave Desert being extremely hot at the end of August and the beginning of September,” she says. “I’m not used to it at the end of May.” She listens to longtime locals talk about an increase in the wind and stays informed about policies that would affect the land. “I’m keeping my ear to the ground and listening and getting involved with local people who have been watching this stuff for a long time,” she says.
In various ways, this is all subtly reflected in “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness,” as the character Claire reflects on her past in the West while returning to it.
“I think I wanted to let the reader watch one person feel it, watch this Claire character go romping through the American West looking for fulfillment, and she gets mixed results,” says Watkins. “It’s not all heartbreak. She still finds shelter and growth and peace and joy and love in a ruined landscape.”