Review by Jennifer Keith
I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both
Mariah Stovall
2024, Soft Skull Press, New York, NY.
326 pgs. $17.95 ISBN: 978-1-59376-793-8
I’ll never forget what my friend Don said about addicts. People think they’re weak or damaged, but paraphrasing Don, the truth is there’s a kind of person that craves transcendence. Normal life won’t do. It’s not enough to live; you have to survive some sort of lightning strike that makes your life into a story. The pejorative shorthand for this is “thrill seeking.” Bungee jumpers, Kennedys. And a whole lot of teens.
Khaki, the protagonist of Mariah Stovall’s I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both, is a typical girl in many ways. Her parents are divorced. She loves her dog. She likely earns a neuro-psychiatric diagnosis of some kind. She wears band t-shirts and eyeliner. There is nothing particularly unusual about a kid on the cusp of adulthood getting whirled around by sex, eating issues and rock ‘n’ roll.
Like pretty much every sensitive teenager, Khaki compares her tortuous insides with others’ placid outsides: “I needed help existing while everyone else operated with so much ease,” she says. Take a number, Kiddo.
In an argument with a boyfriend who’s tiring of Khaki’s chaos, she explodes: “I promise you I cannot chill out. I don’t have an off switch. But please, tell me what it’s like. I can only imagine how hella fucking fun it is to not constantly nitpick everything you’ve ever done and overanalyze everything that there’s the slightest possibility of your ever doing…. Can you fix my brain?”
In middle school Khaki becomes obsessed with a girl named Fiona who’s struggling with a serious eating disorder. They grow up, becoming bad influences on one another. Even with the allure of emo rock shows and a series of young men named Matty, Khaki’s mind reserves the largest expanse of its real estate for Fiona. Fiona doesn’t share in Khaki’s explorations into romance or music; she’s just trying to stay alive.
Khaki and Fiona get separated by circumstance, school, medical crises and rehab. When, as an adult, she gets a chance to reconnect with her childhood friend, Khaki ties herself into knots, weaving tortured suppositions not about who Fiona is, but what the friendship with Fiona means.
Khaki has a lot on her mind, and an infuriating inability to verbalize it. The dialog between the young characters forms death spirals. Hamstrung with awkwardness and self-absorption, she can’t convey anything discernable. A college friend says, “Khaki, can you please stop speaking in code for like five minutes? I’m begging you to let me have a normal conversation with you.”
Normal conversations are impossible, so Khaki flings herself into the world of the body. Sex runs aground when there’s any real talking, but Bad Religion and other emo rock music bash her body and mind around with no demands. Simply liking the same band erases hours of small talk between Khaki and the guys she has sex with.
But she can’t stop ruminating about Fiona. “The inner monolog was by then indistinguishable from my own voice, far louder than anything that came from an amplifier. Perhaps I could no longer choose what to listen to.”
What exactly is it about Fiona? This remains something of a mystery, not because of any talent Stovall lacks, but because of Khaki’s relentless solipsism. Khaki and Fiona aren’t physical lovers. Fiona doesn’t share Khaki’s love of emo punk.
As a kid, Khaki says, “I wished to be different and feel normal at once. She made it come true. Fiona was not sadness incarnate. She tickled me pink, rained cheer down on me, twisted me giddy, made me want to skip through the streets.” Why and how is not described. Near the novel’s end, Khaki admits “She was beautiful to me because I loved her, not the other way around.”
A very, very interior book, I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is a well written diary of a twitchy kid who’s much less interested in other things and people and much more interested in her feelings about them.
You want something unusual to happen in the plot arc and it doesn’t. But the roaring juggernaut of Khaki’s inner voice careens like a pinball. Unlike her protagonist, Stovall is pretty handy with a phrase and Khaki’s inner voice says mundane things in sparkling ways. A lover’s cheekbones “…belonged in a gallery, behind bulletproof glass.” Of her own neediness, Khaki says, “I feared we would separate like an egg. In an invisible hand, I, the white, would fall through the fingers. She, the precious yolk, would stay cradled in someone’s satin palm.”
With writing chops like these, it’s reasonable to wish the story went into meatier territory. Stovall’s talent is like a cherry 1963 Fender Jaguar, but in I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both she’s just slamming out 3-chord covers with it. There’s nothing particularly new about self-absorbed hipster angst. But sweet cracker sandwiches, that sound, that sound.
Jennifer Keith plays bass for the post punk band Batworth Stone. Her poems have appeared in Sewanee Theological Review, The Nebraska Review, The Free State Review, Fledgling Rag, Unsplendida, Best American Poetry 2015, JMWW, and elsewhere. Keith received the 2014 John Elsberg poetry prize, and was a finalist in the 2021 Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. Her first full-length book of poems, Terminarch, won Able Muse Book Award and was published in 2026. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.