But then she takes an extended leave from her life, at first resisting the biological pull to go back east in favor of breaking the rules of her open marriage - but eventually allowing herself some familial closure by revisiting towns she once swore never to set foot in again. So Claire takes a page from many a man in literature and leaves her husband and newborn - at first briefly, for a book reading in her hometown of Reno, Nevada.

But rather than accept the PPD diagnosis, she recognizes the injustice of making mother and woman and artist and lover into mutually exclusive identities. Six years later, her new novel I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness sees Watkins' alter-ego narrator - also named Claire Vaye Watkins - answer the same questionnaire in darkly funny fashion. 'I spend my days with a baby and that, patriarchy says, is not the stuff of art.' That Watkins wrote Battleborn, her debut, as a self-described pander to white male readership amplifies her fears that she has lost her artist's gaze entirely: Her attempt at a novel stalled out at a short story in the form of a postpartum depression questionnaire that felt 'quaint' and 'domestic.' 'I don't wander in the desert much anymore,' the author of American West collection Battleborn wrote. In her 2015 viral essay ' On Pandering,' Claire Vaye Watkins confessed her inability to write 'anything of consequence' since the birth of her daughter.

Battleborn watkins