As promised, today’s post will be a rave about Mariah Stovall’s debut novel, I Love You so much it’s Killing us Both, released February 13th, by Soft Skull Books. As the title comes from a song by Jawbreaker, each chapter in turn takes its name from the mixtape by Khaki Oliver, our protagonist. Khaki is a masterfully developed, multilayered character: a young Black punk rocker with an eating disorder. Though punk rock and eating disorders are most often associated with whiteness, Stovall’s work is totally unselfconscious about busting up these stereotypes. The bildungsroman centers Khaki’s complex, toxic, and all-consuming friendship with one Fiona Davies.
The novel begins in 2022—with Khaki out of college, modestly employed, and estranged from her friend. When Fiona breaks through the thin membrane of Khaki’s new adult life, it is with an invitation to a baby shower for a Black child that Fiona, who is white, has just adopted. From here, the narrative swings between Khaki’s adulthood, her collegiate years, and her existence in high school, including her early friendship with Fiona.
What I loved best was—is—Stovall’s use of language: lyrical, poetic, never too-purple, never over the top. Just spot on in her descriptions of the small moments that make the characters and their relationships intrinsically human.
The role race plays in the book is subtle but fascinating and highly relatable to me as a biracial woman. Khaki has two Black parents, but her light skin and long, loosely curling hair gives her an impression of racial ambiguity. Khaki’s mother had intended to name her “Ebony” but settled on “Khaki,” due to the child’s pallor—a throwback gene recalling the era of compulsory rape of Black women by their enslavers. The name forecasts the paradox that Khaki will grow up to be. Her appearance, like that of so many young biracial people, is on display whether she wants it that way or not. Always available for public consumption.
“Where are your people from?” queries a man at a party—a variation of the question frequently asked of mixed people, myself included: what are you? Stovall writes:
I too once wanted an answer to that question, and thus, at ten years old, wasted a month’s worth of Sundays hunting through family photos. I was hankering for a distant relative to blame for my anomalous appearance: my mother’s nose, her great-uncle’s smile, my father’s eyes and ears, all arranged on skin that literally paled in comparison to theirs. At family get-togethers, questions, comments, and concerns were expressed in good humor. It was a cut-and-dry case of recessive genetics, vis-à-vis a few generations of chattel slavery and its requisite rapes. I never found the photograph I was looking for; there wasn’t one.
Stovall immerses us in Khaki’s isolation. You feel it. Khaki stands out at family gatherings—though these are only mentioned in passing. There are no circumstances in the book where Khaki is significantly immersed in Black family or Black culture. This I could also relate to, having grown up with no Black extended family, always feeling outside the community. (That’s for another post.) Khaki’s Blackness is largely a thing in opposition to the settings she is in—Fiona’s home, her college. She also stands out at the at punk shows she attends, among the overwhelmingly male and white raving, moshing audiences. Fiona, who is white and blond, does not accompany her.
Even in Khaki’s diverse New Jersey town—which I suspect is based on my own, where Stovall spent much of her life—Khaki is hard to classify. There are two sides of town, divided largely by race and income. Khaki and her mother live right smack in the middle.
For the duration of the book, throughout all three time periods described—current adulthood, college, and high school—Khaki inhabits something of a racial, socioeconomic, musical, sexual no-man’s land. She is other in every way. Never what anyone expects her to be, which is at once freeing and alienating. The existential equivalent of the eating disorder paradox.
When Khaki starts high school, she’s new in town, silent, sullen and disinclined to make friends. Fiona, well-versed in the lingo of mental disorders, introduces herself by diagnosing Khaki’s selective mutism—which she ultimately cures. Khaki is ripe for a best friend. Fiona is white, blond, and rich with no affiliation to the punk scene. But like Khaki—whom Fiona calls Olive, a shortening of the latter’s last name—Fiona is smart and sensitive with the same kind of acutely observant nature. They are both perpetual outsiders.
Stovall describes Fiona and their friendship as “A full body rush. A cursed experiment in collaboration. Someone to share things—a piece of gum; life—with.”
While Fiona’s parents are together, they fight constantly, more often than not, about Fiona’s mental health. Khaki’s parents have an on-again off-again marriage, which frustrates and confuses her, manifesting in her need to be loved by boys/men and to assign the phrase in love to every male she is drawn to. (These boys’ names are usually, Matty, a choice which I took to represent Khaki’s search for grounding, a welcome mat, representing a home, a place to rest and take refuge.) Her love for Fiona is platonic but deeper than what she feels for the men with whom she alternately toys and is toyed.
The break with Fiona, sort of a mutual abandonment, occurs when Khaki leaves for college in California. Fiona remains in New Jersey, taking a “gap-year” where there is no travel or internship, but a focus on getting well. Apart from Fiona, Khaki takes on her eating disordered behaviors. Apart from Khaki, Fiona becomes “fine.” Stovall never spells out exactly how or why this bait and switch takes place, but we understand that the interdependence between these two young girls defies the norms of friendship laid out for them by peers, adults, therapists, music and literature.
Like Khaki, I have negotiated collegiate life—and cafeterias stupid with abundance—as a Black girl with an eating disorder. The soundtrack was a little different: 1980’s technopop and alternative rock in place of Khaki’s early 21st century punk. Stovall names countless real bands, songs, and shows by the way, all beyond my aging GenX recognition. Stovall’s narration is intricate, deft and form-challenging, occasionally switching to numeric values that govern her regimented eating disordered mind.
The struggle of an eating disorder is reconciling your emotional self and inner life with the uncomfortable truth of having a body, an inescapable shell with its own set of wants and needs. Throughout her adolescence, Khaki bore witness to Fiona’s anorexia, which the latter intellectualized and built on, in the way you play mind games with yourself and those around you to maintain—whatever it is you do in pursuit of whatever your goal is. (To become thin enough to exist as a head without a body? To feel safe?)
Most of all, this novel brought back some of my own early friendships. I think many women will be reminded of girlhood friendships like this: platonic but as intense as any romance. Fraught with flip-book responses to one another’s inevitable changes, where affronts were excruciating, and the fun of connection, shared passions and humor were thrilling. I think you have friends who impact your development as much as your parents do, where you grow up both in accordance with and opposition to one another.
In any case, I think Stovall brilliantly captures Khaki’s quest for solid ground, companionship, community, connection, all those great C-words. In their absence, we grasp onto anything we can: music, toxic friends, sex. This story has at its heart something so familiar to all of us, the clinging to things that define us even when we have outgrown them. This is a story of holding on too tightly, the obstacles to letting go, getting unstuck, and trying to find a way forward to a free and hopefully healthy future.
Signing off with this photograph of Stovall and me at a Book Event this summer.
Wishing you moments of joy and clarity.