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?
Genre: Literary Fiction
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?
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Mariah Stovall's heady debut plays an addictive game of connect-the-dots between two estranged friends through a galaxy of shared pop-culture references and personal history. I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is a spiraling meditation on the porousness of music and memory, the blurred lines between obsession and friendship, and the hearts we must break in order to grow - including our own." - Emma Brodie
"Lyrical, musical, and brilliantly offbeat, this debut traces the aches and pains of young adulthood with such clarity I couldn't help but be transported back to my own adolescence. Our narrator, Khaki Oliver, is angry and lonely, brimming with nostalgia, and laugh-out-loud funny. She yearns, longs, hurts, and turns alive on the page; I feel lucky to have spent the duration of this book with her." - Diana Clarke
"You don't need a prior relationship to the sounds and saints of punk, emo, and hardcore to get swept into the currents of Stovall's pulsing storytelling. Her debut artfully dilates the cruel intimacy of one teenage friendship into a dark but tender treatise on hunger, compulsion, and identity. If you've ever loved - a person, a hobby, a song - so intensely it hurt; this mosh pit of a novel will offer you both sanctuary and feedback." - Stephen Kearse
"A ferocious debut that vibrates with music, insight and the electric torment of youth. I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is a story of shared - and shed - trauma that lays bare the power of friendship to make, or break, a life." - Cecilia Rabess
"Mariah Stovall's I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both turns up the volume on contemporary literary fiction in the best, most mesmerizing way. This book is a blazing riff, completely on fire from the first propulsive chord. Khaki Oliver leads us on a captivating ride; she is, simply put, one of the most compelling narrators we have seen in quite some time." - Jordy Rosenberg
"With a gift for mapping the inner lives of her characters with precision and intensity, Stovall captures the chaos and confusion of not-quite adulthood. Like the punk rock anthems we refuse to outgrow, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is the soundtrack to the damage we do to ourselves. It's a raw nerve, a meticulously coded manifesto, the coming of agency novel we've been waiting for." - Jim Ruland
"I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is a funny, biting, and big-hearted coming of age story. Enter these pages for Mariah Stovall's witty renderings of the contradictions of millennial youth and for her lovingly excavated cultural artifacts; stay for her poignant reflections on what it means to grow into an adult, to be a friend, and to belong to our moment in history." - Sanjena Sathian
"Mariah Stovall's prose sounds like driving in a car with your best friend, volume up high on your favorite song. I Love You So Much . . . resurrected feelings I had almost forgotten about what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world." - Vauhini Vara
"Somehow, the best literature - the literature I live for - has always been punk, and Mariah Stovall's novel is a beautiful case in point. I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both really shook me." - John Wray
"Lyrical, musical, and brilliantly offbeat, this debut traces the aches and pains of young adulthood with such clarity I couldn't help but be transported back to my own adolescence. Our narrator, Khaki Oliver, is angry and lonely, brimming with nostalgia, and laugh-out-loud funny. She yearns, longs, hurts, and turns alive on the page; I feel lucky to have spent the duration of this book with her." - Diana Clarke
"You don't need a prior relationship to the sounds and saints of punk, emo, and hardcore to get swept into the currents of Stovall's pulsing storytelling. Her debut artfully dilates the cruel intimacy of one teenage friendship into a dark but tender treatise on hunger, compulsion, and identity. If you've ever loved - a person, a hobby, a song - so intensely it hurt; this mosh pit of a novel will offer you both sanctuary and feedback." - Stephen Kearse
"A ferocious debut that vibrates with music, insight and the electric torment of youth. I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is a story of shared - and shed - trauma that lays bare the power of friendship to make, or break, a life." - Cecilia Rabess
"Mariah Stovall's I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both turns up the volume on contemporary literary fiction in the best, most mesmerizing way. This book is a blazing riff, completely on fire from the first propulsive chord. Khaki Oliver leads us on a captivating ride; she is, simply put, one of the most compelling narrators we have seen in quite some time." - Jordy Rosenberg
"With a gift for mapping the inner lives of her characters with precision and intensity, Stovall captures the chaos and confusion of not-quite adulthood. Like the punk rock anthems we refuse to outgrow, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is the soundtrack to the damage we do to ourselves. It's a raw nerve, a meticulously coded manifesto, the coming of agency novel we've been waiting for." - Jim Ruland
"I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is a funny, biting, and big-hearted coming of age story. Enter these pages for Mariah Stovall's witty renderings of the contradictions of millennial youth and for her lovingly excavated cultural artifacts; stay for her poignant reflections on what it means to grow into an adult, to be a friend, and to belong to our moment in history." - Sanjena Sathian
"Mariah Stovall's prose sounds like driving in a car with your best friend, volume up high on your favorite song. I Love You So Much . . . resurrected feelings I had almost forgotten about what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world." - Vauhini Vara
"Somehow, the best literature - the literature I live for - has always been punk, and Mariah Stovall's novel is a beautiful case in point. I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both really shook me." - John Wray
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