I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both

October 23, 2023
Literary agent Stovall debuts with the penetrating story of an erstwhile friendship. Khaki Oliver, who is Black, and Fiona Davies, who is white, last spoke to each other a decade ago. In the present day, Khaki receives an invitation to Fiona’s baby shower for her adopted Black daughter. As Khaki waffles on whether to attend, she plans a mixtape of punk songs from her adolescence. While playing the records, she remembers her and Fiona’s frenzied days as high school outcasts in New Jersey and their split after Khaki left for college in Los Angeles. Stovall devotes many pages to the nuances of punk’s many subgenres as Khaki navigates the punk scene in L.A., where she develops an eating disorder and feels a growing resentment over Fiona never visiting her there. As the narration winds back to the present, Stovall elucidates the reasons behind the friends’ break and reveals what they still have in common. The meandering narrative starts off slow, but it’s lifted by Stovall’s irony-spiked odes to an impassioned, punk-tinged youth (one band’s vocalist “flip-flop between shouting diatribes against the military industrial complex and belting broken-hearted love songs with a twang”). Patient readers will find plenty of rewards.

November 1, 2023
Stovall's debut novel navigates two time lines and two coasts. In present-day New York, Khaki receives a letter from her long-ago best friend, Fiona. The first correspondence in 10 years forces her to excavate memories long buried. When the two first met as teenagers, Fiona suffered from a crippling eating disorder. Khaki left the East Coast for college in California, unsure how to navigate the world without Fiona but certain that the distance was the only way her friend would heal. Along with Khaki's other difficulties--feelings of isolation as one of the only Black people in her rural college town, an unsustainable romance, trauma from past relationships--she, too, fell into a destructive pattern with food. In the present, an opportunity for Khaki and Fiona to reunite approaches. The rhythmic and lyrical quality of Stovall's writing parallels the underlying playlist of punk music that Khaki crafts as she remembers their volatile relationship. This poignant tale explores illness, the role of music in one's life, and the blurred lines between friendship, sisterhood, codependency, and love.

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Starred review from December 1, 2023
Moving between New York City and Los Angeles, Stovall's debut novel follows a Black millennial woman as she reckons with her past. Living alone and working behind a museum's welcome desk, Khaki Oliver receives a card from Fiona Davies, her white best friend from high school in a New York suburb. Reading Fiona's baby shower invitation floods her with unwelcome memories, so instead of responding, she begins to craft a mixtape--obsessively replaying songs and reminiscing about the punk shows she attended as a teen embroiled in a distinctly unhealthy, codependent relationship with Fiona: "I try to remember what Fiona is. A full-body rush. A cursed experiment in collaboration. Someone to share things--a piece of gum; life--with." Their friendship was all-consuming, an intoxicating blend of devotion, secrets, and lies, at once sustaining and destroying them both. When Khaki immersed herself in punk fandom--typically white, older, male--she experienced a dislocation between her sense of self and the ways she was perceived and treated by those around her. Things came to a head between the young women, and Khaki crossed the country to attend college in L.A., embarking on life without Fiona. Khaki's mental health dominates the novel, with depression, anxiety, and disordered eating looming large over nearly every page. In one chapter, Stovall represents those disorders formally with huge blocks of numbers evoking calories consumed and burnt, weight lost and gained, without specific accounting--literally taking up space on the page the same way disordered thinking takes up mental space. In the aftermath of Fiona's letter, Khaki's ability to function wavers, and she reflects that "because of her, I've trained myself not to develop attachments to human beings. This seems to have improved my health. The stability is hard won and precarious. I'm better without her." A powerful testimony to the enduring violence of harmful relationships and the profoundly difficult task of recovery.

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