I LOVE YOU SO MUCH IT'S KILLING US BOTH

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.