When people birth a baby it’s not just the baby who is born, but the mother as well. Our society largely ignores this transformation wrought as new life is brought forth. Birth is viewed as a thing which must be done, as quickly and efficiently as possible, so one can hop off the delivery table, bounce back to bikinis and stilettos as if the baby never existed, returning as quickly as possible to feeding the capitalist machine, apologetically hiding away in a coat closet on break, compelled by an inconvenient biological function we would ignore if we could, to pump milk for the baby.
Rarely, if ever, are we to acknowledge who we were, who we are, who we will become, let alone exist in an undefined state of metamorphosis, because that diminishes who we are prescribed to be.
I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness is a work of autofiction in which a new mother in the haze of postpartum depression turns a work trip into something of a postpartum Rumspringa, leaving her responsible, intellectual life behind, returning to her desert roots to poke at unhealed wounds of childhood trauma. The stripping away of expectations and shortcomings allows her to reconcile past and present grief, examining all her selves, evolving into someone wholly new.
I really enjoyed this book in a way similar to Animal and Nightbitch, though Darkness is something of a slightly more palatable story trodding similar themes.
Wild, darkly funny, terribly relatable, an unapologetically transgressive #WeirdLittleBook
That Bookish Life 