Mariah Stovall’s novel I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is a stunning debut, a vivid exploration of friendship set against an unforgettable soundtrack.
“The rhythmic and lyrical quality of Stovall’s writing parallels the underlying playlist of punk music . . . This poignant tale explores illness, the role of music in one’s life, and the blurred lines between friendship, sisterhood, codependency, and love.”
My first novel, I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both, is an annotated punk, emo, and hardcore mixtape. In it, the narrator matches 41 songs to 41 memories as she relives breaking up with her best friend a decade ago and considers finally getting back together. Since the book already has a soundtrack, I took this opportunity to soundtrack the years it took me to write the book and get it published.
1. The Four Seasons: Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, RV 315 “L’estate” (summer): III. Presto by Antonio Vivaldi, performed by Adrian Chandler, La Serenissima
In the film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Héloïse is a late eighteenth century woman delaying the inevitable: marriage. While she stalls, she has a brief and intense affair with Marianne, an artist hired to paint her portrait. Héloïse tells Marianne that she loves music but has heard very little of it. Marianne tells Héloïse that plenty of live music awaits her in the married life she’ll live in Milan. In the meantime, Marianne does her best to play this section of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons from memory on a neglected harpsichord. She calls the music “not merry, but lively.” In the final scene, years after they part ways, Marianne spies Héloïse across a concert hall. Héloïse’s face and poised body shake in restrained waves. You have to look closely, as Marianne does, to see her cycle through awe and horror and greed and confusion and grace and recognition. She heaves and seems ready to choke on the ecstasy of remembrance. That’s what writing this book felt like.
2. Master of Art by Laura Stevenson
This song is a plea: Please wait for me until I am a master of art. I don’t have an MFA, or even undergraduate-level fiction coursework under my belt, but the sentiment stands. I finished the first drafts of I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both before I tried writing a short story. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was twenty-two years old. I wrote with a singular focus, intensity, and determination I’ll probably never have again. Time flew. I was having fun. I made a list of writers who published their first novels by twenty-five. I was going to be one of them. I was slightly more determined and naive than I was arrogant and entitled. This song is a promise: It’s just a little longer.
3. Mirrored Heart by FKA Twigs
Agents wanted to read my manuscript (which I submitted pseudonymously for the first year or so). They read it or, more realistically, part of it. They didn’t want to represent it. I became a scholar of the stray sentences of concrete feedback I received. There was too much music, too many lyrics. It needed a more exciting plot. It was YA, not the adult fiction I’d described in my pitch. It was adult fiction, not the YA I’d described in my pitch. It was too commercial. It was too literary. The structure didn’t work. It should focus more on race. It should be happier. I tried to understand what to change and to preserve. I revised. They didn’t connect with it. I revised. It just wasn’t quite right. I revised.
I don’t hear insecurity in the way this song asks, taut and tortured, Did you want me all? Did you truly see me? Were you ever sure? I don’t hear resignation in the way it answers, No, not for life, not this time, no, no, no, not with me. I admire its pleading envy because of the tenacity it breeds. I watched other books get published. I helped other books get published and tried to learn from the light their successes shone on my failures. For four years, I was told no (or ignored, told nothing) over two hundred and fifty times. And then, four times, I was told yes.
4. Colossus by Birds In Row
An agent! My choice of four agents! My book would sell quickly and easily for six figures! It did not. It sucked! The book, perhaps. The situation, surely. I was a furious mess. This song is a strange kind of security blanket. When on fire, you don’t throw “Colossus” on to suffocate the flames, you use it to fan them. It’s not merry. It’s lively! It’s stunning to listen to human beings detonate with this kind of efficiency, to make a mess this measured and clean. What is the song about? I have no idea! Just listen to these French guys lose their shit for ninety-five seconds. By the end, your fury will have somehow receded.
5. On and Off by blair
I just found out that the audio clip at the beginning of this song is from Jerry Springer. I always assumed it was from a navel-gazey, character-driven drama by an up-and-coming playwright. The sound of this woman airing out her grievances to her unfaithful on-and-off boyfriend is the kind of raw you feel immoral for watching, the kind of pain that doesn’t feel like it’s any of your business. For almost two years, my agent dutifully sent my book to publishers. The first failure and the fiftieth failure felt equally public and personal. My twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth birthdays passed. My novel was better than ever—I never stopped revising it based on the latest rejections—and not quite right. Some sadness is ever-evolving and never complicated. You try, you fail, you feel betrayed. After this song’s initial melodrama, there’s a fuzzy, yearning instrumental that repeats itself. It’s humble. It’s hysterical. I just wanna die. I just sit and cry. It’s that simple.
6. Maybe You, No One Else Worth It by Brave Bird
Why was I doing this? For the feeling music used to give me: the awe and horror and greed and confusion and grace and recognition. For the people who wrote the music that I wrote I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both about. For the band who wrote the song that I stole the title from. For their other fans. Were we worth it? Here’s a breakup song that takes its time and probably needs more of it because I think it’s only pretending to have moved on.I accepted that my book was not going to sell. It was okay. I had written most of another one.
7. I Can Hear Music by The Ronettes
When you gravitate toward overwrought and bombastic music, even the wall of sound can sound muted. When my book finally sold, this mid-tempo, traditionally-structured pop song wasn’t the music I expected to hear. The crush of relief I felt was strangely soft. I didn’t cry beneath the weight of it. My life was changing, and not. What was happening to me had and would happen to millions of other people. But it is rare for the first novel you write to be the first novel you publish. I am reasonably talented and incredibly lucky.
8. Why It Scares Me by La Dispute
Once my novel was acquired, I rewrote almost every sentence. My editor told me I couldn’t keep making such drastic changes. I was terrified of not being perfect and beyond tired of the story I’d spend the last eight years with. I gladly ceded my manuscript to the printer and waited. My energy returned. I became peculiarly, casually dramatic. I wanted to jump forward in time, months or years past the publication, have it done and over with. I also wanted to pull the plug before the book could be published. It was too late to stop the printing press but I had time to demand all the copies be held at the warehouse, which I could presumably visit and immolate. I wanted everyone and no one to read my book. Now it’s published. It’s not mine anymore. It belongs to anyone who reads it. This song is a shouting song about shouting at the world, unprovoked. That’s all writing is. Publication is all anxieties of legacy and love. Here’s my advice: wear yourself out with worry so that you can finally rest.
9. Mammoth by Rookie Card
Our lives are dreams we’ve chosen, or so “Mammoth” says. Alan Watts’ words play over a twinkling instrumental. I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both was an excuse to put my words in conversation with some of my favorite songs. That’s a dream I had. It happened. It got chosen.