Claire V. Watkins

speaker

479 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 12 Sep

Claire V. Watkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · Novelist Claire Vaye Watkins on the beauty & brutality of the desert · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

That was the first piece of writing that I did that became that book, I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness.

When my daughter was born, I took this questionnaire and I found the language just very confusing and baffling and funny, accidentally funny, unintentionally funny, I thought.

So yeah, then I thought, well, this should be an essay test.

And then I started writing these little essays in response to the questionnaire.

My doctors definitely described me as having postpartum depression, and I followed their advice accordingly, but I don't really think that's exactly what was happening.

I think I was having a kind of an existential crisis.

I think it was like a spiritual confrontation with myself, having had this child and doing something really heroic.

A lot of the other stuff that I was doing in my life sort of suddenly seemed really meaningless.

And the things that had given me a sense of purpose like striving in my career, they just suddenly seemed absurd.

I was a really ambitious young person, and I was striving a lot to do everything in the right way and in the right order.

Like, I was a straight-A student.

I did really well in school.

It helped me get out of my...

kind of crazy family scene and I was kind of in a survival mode I think looking back on it you know using like my education and eventually in my profession like as a university professor to get safe and even using intimate relationships as a way of of getting safe and then all of that was kind of culminated in having this child and I think I was telling myself a type of um

I don't know, almost like a messianic story where like once I arrive at this place and I'm middle class and I have a husband and a child, all will be good.

And it wasn't.

I was still myself and I still had, I had like deeper stuff that I needed to confront that couldn't

The solution wasn't outside in external validation or money or prizes or prestigious jobs.

It had to come within.

So when she was born, that was really the beginning of me starting to dig in deep with myself.

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