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I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both

A Novel

ebook
2 of 3 copies available
2 of 3 copies available
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?
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

    • Booklist

      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.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Kirkus

      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.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • English

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