because reading is what?

fundamental

Mariah Stovall’s I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is a novel about punk rock and codependency, among many other things. It is first and foremost litfic, and I do want to make you aware of that as soon as possible so that you aren’t thrown for a loop when the ostensible narrative takes an immediate backseat to living inside the head of protagonist Khaki Oliver. But oh, what an experience it is to ride Khaki’s waves of consciousness.

Both is a psychological excavation project. As an exploration of The Punk Rock Human Condition, it doesn’t so much peel back the layers of Khaki’s mind as it lays each of them bare for the audience to organize themselves. The book takes a somewhat similar approach to chronology, as the first half of the book broadly takes place after the second half of the book, although there are a few exceptions scattered throughout. All that being said, this isn’t The Recognitions or anything—you should not be intimidated. Just because this is a rich text does not mean it is a difficult one.

The premise of I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is simple on the face of it. From the official description:

Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise meets Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity in a Black woman’s coming-of-age story, chronicling a life-changing friendship, the interplay between music fandom and identity, and the slipperiness of sanity

Set in the suburbs of Los Angeles and New York City, I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is an immersive journey into the life and mind of Khaki Oliver, who’s perennially trying to disappear into something: a codependent friendship, an ill-advised boyfriend, the punk scene, or simply, the ether. These days it’s a meaningless job and a comfortingly empty apartment. Then, after a decade of estrangement, she receives a letter from her former best friend. Fiona’s throwing a party for her newly adopted daughter and wants Khaki to join the celebration.

Khaki is equal parts terrified and tempted to reconnect. Their platonic love was confusing, all-consuming, and encouraged their worst impulses. While stalling her RSVP, Khaki starts crafting the perfect mixtape—revisiting memories of formative shows, failed romances, and the ups and downs of desire and denial—while weighing the risks and rewards of saying yes to Fiona again.

One song at a time, from 1980s hardcore to 2010s emo, the shared and separate contours of each woman’s mind come into focus. Will listening to the same old songs on repeat doom Khaki to a lonely life of arrested development? Or will hindsight help her regain her sense of self and pave a healthy path for the future, with or without Fiona?

The previously-mentioned mixtape structure is not actually that prominent in the text itself. The songs inspiring the memories that make up the core of the story are mostly ambient texture rather than rote prompts. The chapter and section headings are primarily composed of snippets of quotes instead of something so blunt as a song title. But in this way—of inextricably weaving the intricacies of the music into Khaki’s life and thoughts without ever delving into an actual treatise on sound or ethos—Stovall has constructed what is maybe the most authentic portrayal of “punk” I’ve read in literature.

Part of my appreciation, I’m sure, is that Khaki and I share a background in the mid-aughts-to -mid-tens emo & hardcore scene. There is a lengthy sequence devoted to her discovery and subsequent obsession with Punknews.org. There are bands mentioned in passing throughout this book that I never would have imagined being namedropped in fiction. (Cobra Skulls? ONSIND??) Stovall walks a thin line of winking at an audience in the know without alienating more casual readers or coming off as an insufferable know-it-all in regards to trivia. For example: There is a moment where Khaki uses misogynist lyrics for a class assignment. Your average reader will probably assume it’s any number of early-2000s pop-punk “I hate my girlfriend” jams; more astute readers can glean from small context clues that the song is most likely “Hope” by The Descendents. Nothing is lost for the first group of readers, but the small gain for the second group just serves to make the reading experience a little more authentic and intimate.

Sometimes you may not want to be as intimate with Khaki’s mind as you end up being. Khaki’s thought processes are captured at particularly vulnerable and chaotic moments in her life: adolescence; freshman year of college; late-twenties depression doldrums. She can be an asshole. She can be judgmental and condescending both internally and out-loud. Her decisions are by turns baffling and infuriating. She is a normal human and every moment I was annoyed by her are moments where really I was annoyed by my own teenage self.

There is a darker side to the intimacy you share with Khaki as well. Though this book is by no means transgressive or even overtly grim, Stovall does not shy away from frank depictions of struggles with eating disorders and self-harm. On a more granular level, Stovall also sketches out instances of microaggressions and messy sexual politics without being moralistic or didactic, choosing to let the characters speak for themselves. The results are not always comfortable, but they are much truer to real world experiences than the idealized characters and fanfic-y dialogue I always dread when reading Fiction Books About the Scene.

The dialogue is actually something of a point of contention for me. At times I felt like the dialogue was a bit too oblique to sound like it was coming from the mouths of real people, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like just the right middle ground between “realistic exchanges between people who know each other well enough to have shorthands for ideas and make intuitive logical leaps” and “these are memories and as such are fractured and somewhat unreal by nature.” Another important thing to remember about the dialogue is that, as this book is first and foremost a character study of Khaki, every other character is viewed through her specific prism. Outside of Fiona, very few characters are granted an internal life. This is not a flaw of the book by any means. It tells us a lot about Khaki to see how she perceives other people. But it does mean that every character’s spoken dialogue is Khaki’s interpretation of what they are saying, or what she remembers them saying.

The overall effect this grants us is that regardless of how many characters float in and out of the story—my personal favorite being Khaki’s unflappably silly roommate Cameron, for what it’s worth—it feels profoundly lonely. This loneliness causes us to hang onto the relationships that Khaki does have for dear life, and thus we get the emotionally draining saga of her friendship with Fiona.

I’ll rip the band-aid off for you now: Fiona sucks. She is selfish, shamelessly manipulative, and callously cruel. And yet you completely understand why Khaki connects to her immediately and feels so deeply tied to her long past the point where it’s clearly worse for them both to keep being friends. I feel like almost everyone has had a friendship like Khaki and Fiona’s, or at least a few friendships that, when conglomerated together, approximate something similar. (Alternatively, maybe you’re a well-adjusted Mumford & Sons fan or something.)

I have to give Stovall a lot of credit for writing something so merciless without ever sacrificing compassion. The section of the book that is most heavily devoted to the Fiona-Khaki dynamic is compelling, self-propelling and inevitably heartbreaking. It is the highest of compliments that the dramatic beats of their teenage fallout so enraptured me that I almost completely forgot to be going over the text with a fine-toothed comb for musical references.

Ultimately, it is easy for me to imagine this book reaching a much larger audience than the relatively niche subset of people who would nod along when one of Khaki’s dates selects Kid Dynamite to play after Lifetime. Yes, the constant deluge of allusions makes for reliable injections of comedy—Khaki’s assertion that a potential love interest’s ranking of Black Flag vocalists is merely “acceptable,” her internal debate about whether Green Day or Fall Out Boy have more cred, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it admonishment from a classic Lame Dude Archetype for quoting Brand New. But it is in service of a narrative and character that are relatable to a far greater swathe of the population than that.

One moment that really stuck out to me on my read-through was a section during which Khaki has relapsed in her eating disorder. Instead of simply telling us that Khaki was counting calories and obsessively weighing herself, Stovall interjected random numbers into the text until they slowly began to outweigh the words in the sentences and by the end of the chapter, the reader is lost in multiple pages of numbers with disoriented phrases cropping up just often enough to remind us of what we were reading. I found this clever and powerful and unique in a way that both succinctly put us in Khaki’s headspace and added a hint of overwhelm.

It is the combination of Stovall’s sharp observational eye, poetic instincts, and deep commitment to the character of Khaki that make I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both such a raw, impressive debut. The reward of the book is watching Khaki come to terms with the residual impact of a toxic, harmful friendship and examine the patterns of behavior she was left to deal with in the aftermath. It’s one of the most textured depictions of the non-linear road to mental health recovery that I’ve read.

The music is simultaneously a bonus and impossible to divorce from the whole. Everything in Khaki’s life revolves around her obsession with punk music, but the beauty of that specificity is that it then becomes universal. I can’t speak to that directly, since I pretty much picked up everything Stovall was putting down, but the book’s warm critical reception from the wider literary world does indicate that there’s truth in what I’m saying. Either way, the book would be poorer if it emphasized any one aspect of its identity more than the other. It is for that reason I feel confident in saying it might be one of the best Punk Rock Novels we’ve ever gotten. If nothing else, the conclusion of Khaki’s arc reaffirms the strength of one of my favorite Jawbreaker lines: Survival never goes out of style.

(Full disclosure: I was sent a promotional copy of this book for review. Deanna and I had it on our wishlist for weeks before I was contacted about this; we were going to read it either way.)

So What Else Are You Reading?

I’ve been on a really big “I forgot how much I love books” vibe lately, if I’m being honest. I briefly feared that I might be losing my ability to absorb and enjoy fiction in favor of non-fiction, but luckily this book as well as a recent reread of My Heart Is A Chainsaw have reminded me that fiction can engage me and I can still follow narratives and parse literary techniques. (Fun fact: ceasing to read novels is a warning sign of dementia for older people!)

That being said, I have quite the queue in both fiction and non-fiction camps. I’ll start with fiction:

Of course, I’m preparing to read the sequel to My Heart Is A Chainsaw, Don’t Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones. I truly did enjoy MHIAC both times I’ve read it, and Jade is one of my favorite horror protagonists ever, but Jones’s prose is, to put it lightly, an acquired taste. It often makes more sense spoken aloud than when simply read, and it has a unique ability to simply allude to what is happening more than actually convey plot and action. And if you want to talk about oblique dialogue… But the thing is, all of these things put together flow exceedingly well, and any of Jones’s work is a rewarding read, but it’s usually something you need to prepare for. I’m excited to prepare for the last book in this trilogy, which is supposedly also due out soon.

Deanna and I were going through our book collection not long ago and were shocked to discover that, although we had The Crying of Lot 49, we were for whatever reason missing a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. This is a book that I enjoyed greatly when I read it my senior year of high school, which is as of this year (gasp) a full decade ago, so I am excited to revisit it. We got a really beautiful edition of it from Intermission, which is a really cute bookshop in Brownwood, TX, which we passed through on our recent anniversary.

While I was there I also picked up one of my biggest Russian lit blind spots, The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, a blend of magical realism, Soviet-era satire, and theological philosophizing that I have historically neglected amidst my rereads of Notes from Underground. I’m pretty excited for that one, I can’t lie. I also grabbed a copy of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, which I’ve been eager to read since I saw that Junji Ito had adapted it into manga format. I have heard No Longer Human be compared to The Stranger, but considering Osamu Dazai’s life and that No Longer Human does not seem to be as directly philosophical, I’d imagine it to be a more visceral and personal work than The Stranger. (Not to insult The Stranger, obviously.)

Aside from these new pickups, I have a large running list of books I have been meaning to read and/or reread in my phone, which I’d be glad to share if anyone is curious. (It contains categories running the gamut from “transgressive French fiction” to “postmodern mysteries” to “hot girl books.”)

As for non-fiction books, I actually have recently started reading two. The first is The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster by John O’Connor. It is, so far, a lot of things. First and foremost, it is very funny. Secondly, it’s rather lucid and insightful, scooping up many disparate elements of modern American Sasquatch culture and shrewdly identifying the alienation and the Search For A Religion To Actually Believe In (this idea is closely related to what the community refers to as “woo”) that fuels much of it. I’m excited to see where else it takes me.

The second non-fiction book that I’ve started is Pure Invention by Matt Alt, which details how Japan’s pop culture has fundamentally reinvented the way that we engage with the world (or, in some cases, don’t engage with the world). What might at first seem like just another congratulatory America-centric perspective on our embrace of Nintendo and anime has already revealed itself to be an incisive and analytical pop-cultural history of modern Japan and its relationship with the world at large, with a healthily skeptical eye towards late-capitalism’s role in much of this development. I like this one so much so far that I also scooped up several of the related titles that I found most interesting in its “customers also liked” section, including Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals by Hiroki Azuma, and Saito Tamaki’s Beautiful Fighting Girl and Hikikomori, all three of which are slightly more academic and therefore might take me awhile to get through, but they do seem very interesting.

And finally, I am almost done with the trio of books my friend David Anthony was kind enough to let me borrow. The first two, Blood Fire Death: The Swedish Metal Story and Rotting Ways to Misery: The History of Finnish Death Metal, were really enjoyable and engaging reads. (Rotting Ways to Misery was a lot less impressive from an actual “writing” standpoint, but it was enthusiastic and informative enough to make up for that; Blood Fire Death was genuinely brilliant and insightful, in my opinion.) The final book, Swedish Death Metal by Daniel Ekeroth, is widely well-regarded in the metal world and I look forward to devouring it and following it up with The Devil’s Cradle: The Story of Finnish Black Metal by Tero Ikäheimonen for good measure.

What Are You Playing?

I am almost done with the base game of Outer Wilds and I am maybe a third of the way through 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. They’re gonna get write-ups.

What Are You Listening To?

Infant Island’s Obsidian Wreath is, pending a true game-changer, easily going to be the best screamo album of 2024. It is an arresting and truly emotionally challenging record that layers its influences from black metal, noise, ambient, and shoegaze into something as richly textured as it is overwhelming. It doesn’t even really matter that it can be hard to grok the band’s political conceit beneath the maelstrom; in fact, that inscrutability and desperation to be understood amidst an ever-churning swamp, nuances trapped in the gears of a million moving parts, captures the experience of existing in an age of ecological and political collapse better than any set of lyrics ever could. (Not to knock Infant Island’s lyrics, which are far superior to the average screamo band’s.) This is an album that begs to be understood, picked apart, analyzed, and to have all of that extracurricular material buckle under the sheer magnanimity of the band’s power. An essential listen.

Knoll’s As Spoken is exactly the album you’d hope they’d make after touring with fucking Thantifaxath. This is nightmare music. If Obsidian Wreath should be listened to more than once to appreciate it, As Spoken demands to be listened to more than once simply to parse it. Despite my pre-existing bias towards the dissonant metal that Knoll is pulling from here—acts like Portal, the aforementioned Thantifaxath, Nightmarer, Artificial Brain, Jute Gyte, and Deathspell Omega—Knoll approach it from a grind framework, and the result is music that actively sounds like it is decomposing as you listen to it. This is the most emotional and visceral grind album I’ve heard since Gridlink’s most recent record, but it’s also the most deliberately vexing and obscurant piece of heavy music I’ve heard yet this year. Its subtle use of discordant melody is something really special and I can safely say that Knoll’s evolution has me very excited about where they will go from here.

Q1 of 2024 is rapidly coming to a close. Expect a writeup as the rest of my favorite music so far has a change to digest. As the music settles in my mind and I gather my thoughts, I look forward to writing about Dissimulator, Sovereign, Spectral Wound, Aureole, Fatboi Sharif & Roper Williams, Angry Blackmen, and all the other music that’s made 2024 an incredible year for music so far. Stay safe so you can read it.

-xoxo, Ellie

To see more work like this, including the unabridged version of my recent series on The Cure and subscriber-exclusive goodies like media journals, recommendations, and my 2023 backlog project, please consider contributing to my Patreon, or hit up my Venmo at xyoudontneedmapsx if you’d prefer to show your support with a one-time donation! If you’re interested in a band bio or some freelance writing, email me at xyoudontneedmapsx@gmail.com to hash out the details. If you’d just like to read dumb jokes, follow me on Twitter. I am also, of course, on Instagram @youdontneedmaps. Thank you so much for reading.