For a moment in time, in the early and mid 2000s, emotional masculinity was all the rage. From MySpace darlings to mainstream radioplay, pop culture gravitated toward “emo”: alternative anthems with softer edges, vocals comfortable with vulnerability, and singalongs about valentines and similar sentiments. Such a rise in popularity prompted no lack of argument on AIM chat and online message boards over what constituted real emo—unresolvable debates over whether the latest purveyors were indie enough or punk enough or hardcore enough. Still, most artists proximate to the genre could trace some lineage back to the melodic, emotional force that was the band Jawbreaker, whose influence also anchors Mariah Stovall’s debut novel, I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both (Soft Skull Press, 2024).
How to describe Jawbreaker? “Impossible . . .” ran a review in the first issue of Punk Planet magazine: “The best I can do is this: pulsing, music with a spontaneous feel, mid-tempo, makes you wanna close your eyes, stare at the clouds, and daydream.” Many of Jawbreaker’s daydreams, it might seem, came true. They became mainstays in the Bay Area punk scene, recorded with the influential producer Steve Albini, toured with Nirvana, and were anticipated as the next Green Day. But the pressures of their growing acclaim accelerated the band’s breakup following their major-label debut, Dear You. Even before they reunited more than twenty years later, their impact never went away.
“Friendships, relationships—these things change,” Chris Bauermeister, Jawbreaker’s bassist, said several years after the band’s split, in a Punk Planet interview that also featured in a re-issue of We Owe You Nothing. “Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don’t. . . . I don’t know if it could have been saved. I don’t think so.”
I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both treats Jawbreaker’s troubles as a muse while returning to the music scenes of the mid-aughts. With its title drawn from Dear You’s second track, the novel explores the magnetic push and pull of a friendship as the protagonist and narrator Khaki Oliver grapples with what might have been—and what might yet be—saved, both in herself and with her estranged yet ever-present high-school soulmate, Fiona. Billed as an annotated mixtape, Stovall’s recommended playlist spans decades, from early DIY icons Bikini Kill and Rites of Spring through to the late ’90s power pop of Alkaline Trio and Mr. T Experience, and onward to the forcefulness of Loma Prieta and Pianos Become the Teeth. These touchpoints act less as an ekphrastic description of the soundtrack of Stovall’s youth and more as an amplifier for the tension her protagonist feels between past and present, foreground and background. For Khaki, the music she listens to shapes her identity, colors her attractions, and mirrors her emotions, and yet the records and concerts that mean so much to her remain mostly peripheral to her fissure with Fiona. In Khaki’s view, the music is “the only thing that wanted me instead of her.”
The novel opens in January 2022, with Khaki looking back on her youth, concluding, “It was wanting I wanted.” The lyrics of “Want,” the first track on Jawbreaker’s 1990 debut album Unfun mention a “mouth clamped tight” and a tongue that is “hard to find.” Similarly, Khaki says, “I muted myself, accidentally,” on her first day of high school, perhaps due to her intimidation, having skipped eighth grade and finding herself among a new set of older peers. Fiona fills the void of Khaki’s unspoken self, and the classmates are drawn into a codependency. “How many more friends would I have were it not for the bar she set, then failed to clear?” Khaki wonders as she opens a letter from Fiona in the present that sends her spiraling into memories of their past. “Because of her, I’ve trained myself not to develop attachments to human beings. This seems to have improved my health.”
Khaki’s memories travel to 2011, when she finishes high school and trades coasts, leaving northern New Jersey for what appears to be one of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California. But any momentum she begins to find on campus and in life writ large becomes burdened by a secret personal conflict, one that Stovall reveals incrementally. Flashbacks disclose bits and pieces of a friendship inseparable from disordered eating, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. This flitting back and forth in time can be disorienting. My expectations for the narrative trajectory were often thrown off by Khaki’s changes in tempo, and I would be left recalibrating, like leaving a concert after failing to wear earplugs.
In Stovall’s 2024 interview with ZERO CRED, music writer Dan Ozzi says I Love You has “enough niche music references to fill a Kallax,” referencing the ubiquitous IKEA furniture unit whose open square shelving is familiar to record collectors everywhere. Indeed, the novel emits a steady cadence of music scene references. One of Khaki’s love interests “chose a Kid Dynamite song after my Lifetime.” She catches Burn Idols, HOY PINOY, and a few more comparable acts as they “sludged together, in the best possible way, in the back of an Arabic restaurant.” She speaks all of a few sentences with Evan Weiss after seeing his solo project, Into It. Over It., mentioning the New York punk collective ABC No Rio and noting how they hailed from opposite ends of New Jersey. She namechecks Rise Against’s appearance in Lords of Dogtown covering Black Flag’s “Nervous Breakdown.” She distinguishes between the influence of Tim Kinsella’s bands Cap’n Jazz and Joan of Arc on the contemporary emo scenes in Philadelphia versus the Midwest, teasing the prospect of cousinly competition between Algernon Cadwallader and American Football. She loses her Dead to Me lapel pin at a show.
In the interview, Stovall acknowledges to Ozzi the challenge of writing independent music into fiction, fielding guidance from publishers to avoid being “too niche” while also fearing that readers who understand the references will doubt her credibility if she isn’t niche enough. She notes the need to find a balance between accuracy and accessibility. I felt this tension in certain moments, like when the narration zeroes in on the pitch of the laughter ending 7 Seconds’s cover of Nena’s “99 Luftballoons” on the seminal album Walk Together, Rock Together but then avoids naming the specific artists or venue when Khaki sees “a New England lineup” in Anaheim, presumably at Chain Reaction.
But all of these moments act as pinpoints, drawing a map around Khaki’s greater pain. As the story reveals more of her relationship with Fiona, which fractures around the strains of anorexia and bulimia, the frequency of music references dissipates.
As an adult, Khaki attempts to part with her vinyl collection as she has done with her band T-shirts, show flyers, and handmade zines: “I’ve packed the records into boxes and milk crates, walked them to the curb, set them down, and come back for them five minutes later.” Similarly, in her relationships—with Fiona, with her college roommate Cameron (to whom she writes a letter that opens, “Dear You,” again referencing Jawbreaker), with boyfriends of dubitable reliability despite consistently being named Matty, and ultimately with her family and her relationship with herself—Khaki becomes caught in the doom loops of obsession and a lack of healing. For each effort she makes to move forward, she finds herself pulled back and—like her ninth-grade self—at a loss for words.
Undergirding Khaki’s struggles are broader dynamics of power and control, both personal and interpersonal. The name Fiona, in the Irish language, is a feminine derivative of fionn, meaning “fair” as in “white.” When Khaki receives an invitation to celebrate Fiona’s adoption of a Black daughter, Khaki can’t help but see herself in the child’s photograph: “For a moment, I think I’ve given birth and given her up, soft curls and all.” When an “attractive” man at a bar asks where she’s from, Khaki answers honestly, then grasps his meaning even before he can clarify—“Where are your people from?”—wishing she could float upward and drape herself over the rotating blades of the ceiling fan. “It was a cut-and-dry case of recessive genetics, vis-à-vis a few generations of chattel slavery and its requisite rapes,” she notes to herself, conceding the knowns and unknowns both hidden and obvious within her own genealogy and her country’s. But she is unable to speak in time, and the fact lingers behind her silence.
When Khaki earns an anthropology fellowship to conduct linguistic research within a Māori community in New Zealand—known in its Indigenous language as Aotearoa—Khaki dismisses the opportunity as “something about the legacy of colonialism.” She finds herself unable to commit—kept up at night, fearful of what she “might be expected to politely eat during a professional gathering or culturally meaningful event” and increasingly finding the idea of ethnography beginning to “churn in her stomach” like eggnog. She works instead in a lab with a taxidermist, observing the skin of a fox peeled from its connective tissue perfectly under his careful practice, a delicate and disappearing craft in a field moving toward the adoption of virtual reality technology. But she has little faith in her “inelegant” hands, unable even to remove the rind of an orange.
There’s a temptation to look for narrative redemption, a sense of completeness, some reassurance that the trouble was worthwhile, that all will be okay. But I Love You dwells in brokenness, splintered across fragments of high school, college, and afterwards. “The joy was often only in hindsight,” Jawbreaker’s Schwarzenbach said in another interview with Punk Planet. “I was constantly looking forwards and backwards. I was incapable of actually being there. In a way, I don’t think we could enjoy it because we didn’t know where we were.”
A similar disorientation swells throughout I Love You. Khaki relies on her music—no matter how niche it is to the world at large, including to Fiona—for grounding and escape. Punk in particular, in its various forms, appeals to her in large part because of its vocals. When Khaki attends a Touché Amoré concert before leaving for Los Angeles, she begins to daydream ways to say goodbye without saying goodbye. She arrives midway through the band’s set and marvels over the rawness of Jeremy Bolm’s voice, considering his vocal cords’ ability to keep going to be a “medical miracle.” But the fleeting therapeutic power Khaki derives from the show is not only through the example of resilience on stage but also in the shared vulnerability of lyrics that grapple with grieving. Bolm told Anti-Matter in an October 2024 interview, “I always like to think that writing is going to resolve something for me, or that performing is going to resolve it for me, but there’s always something new to feel about it,” referring to the persistence of grief.
Just as a mixtape can be a kind of love letter, replete with nostalgia and its songs often in tension with themselves, I Love You rises and falls with its discrete parts in conflict, and in many ways unresolved. Stovall’s debut channels a feeling familiar to anyone who has lifted a voice in chorus from the floor of a show—trusting that even against the insurmountable, music, like any art, need not deliver salvation to provide a salve.
