Finished: Dec 5, 2022
pp: 288
Author: Claire Vaye Watkins
Other books: Battleborn, Gold Fame Citrus
Rating: Really good!
Some thoughts:
As a rule, I love something that’s overstuffed, shaggy, and rough around the edges. Whether it’s great art is almost secondary. I’ll always prefer the messy version that overloads its plate at the buffet to one that tries to do too little. That feels especially true on the heels of Zorrie, the book I read before this one. It’s perfectly fine. It doesn’t try to be anything that it’s not. ILYBICD tries to do a lot. Not all of it works, but where I stopped thinking about Zorrie almost as soon as I finished it, I’ve been thinking more and more about ILYBICD since finishing it.
At the most surface level, it’s a book about post-partum depression, but it’s also about art and America, and how we come to grips with the version of ourselves we end up becoming. It’s about how you confront the tension between your obligations to your family and the resentment that can accompany those obligations.
When I was partway through the book, I was waffling back and forth on it. It’s auto fiction, which can go a lot of ways. Done well, it feels like you’re getting down to the bone of what the authors is trying to say. Done poorly, it can feel like someone is telling you a story that you’re unsure has a point. This one has a point, and in the same way that Karl Ove Knausgaard books manage to be breezy despite their heavy subject matter, this one never drags or feels like it’s taking itself too seriously. Still, I wasn’t sure what the book was trying to say, or, probably more accurately, I was having a heard time hearing what it was trying to say. Part of my hesitation was related, I think, to the subject matter, and my own relationship to it (ie. parenthood). While Claire was out in the novel, having experiences, I kept hearing the little voice in the back of my head that starts to chatter if my toddler is in the other room and quieter than she should be. I wanted her to go back and see her kid! She could be getting into something she shouldn’t! I’m a dummy and it takes me longer to realize things that are patently obvious, so it took me a while to recognize that tension is exactly the point.
One of the things you can’t realize before having a kid is how much it raises the stakes of everything, and, on top of that, how much it’s able to worm its way into corners of your brain that you didn’t think it’d have anything to do with. This book grapples with that, and embraces how difficult it is and how it’s not a process that makes you feel great about yourself. That process is messy. So any book about it that doesn’t reckon with that messiness is at best presenting an overly sanitized version of the thing. At worst, it kind of misses the point entirely. CVW focuses on how your relationship to your kid reframes the relationship you have to your parents, and in her case, that’s something she has to understand/overcome before she can begin to have a healthy relationship with her own daughter.
Because it’s a little shaggy, there are other elements of the novel that don’t seem crucial to it, but that I loved nonetheless. In no particular order they are:
- The fact that her father was a part of the Manson family. It’s connected to the other ideas about family that the novel explores, and adds some important context around what people find attractive in families despite how problematic they can be
- The west. CVW writes beautifully about the American west. As a lifelong east coaster, it’s something that I’ve only experienced briefly, but I’ve been there enough to recognize how fundamentally different and strange it is.
- The idea of the Oregon Trail Microgeneration . On the one hand, I might just be latching onto this as a member of the imaginary generation. But on the other hand, I think there’s real thematic importance to the concept. CVW is interested in how we understand who we are in relation to the rest of society, and the resonance of a micro generation has a lot to do with wanting something that feels accurate and true to who you are while also being pretty absurd and pointless.