I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both follows Khaki "Olive" Oliver as she looks back at her toxic, codependent teenage friendship with Fiona, and her time at university and within the punk scene.

Really mixed feelings about this one, because wow it could have gone badly if I wasn't in the right headspace. The blurb gives absolutely no indication of this, but 95% of the book is about eating disorders. I recommend extreme caution to anyone with a past or present history of food struggles, because this book is intense. 

I overall enjoyed my reading experience, the characters are wonderfully unlikeable and self-destructive, and it's a good coming of age book. I think it will be especially enjoyable for anyone who is/was into the 2010's Punk scene, and it's great to see it from a non-white perspective because punk is one of those subcultures that can outwardly appear to be very white. 

I really liked the writing style, it has a bit of a meandering stream of consciousness vibe, and sometimes reads like when you try to name-drop obscure bands so people think you're cool. There are some real stand-out sections. Some people have said they didn't like the ending, but for me I think it worked really well and felt realistic to how such a reunion would go. 

This doesn't reach a 4 star purely because I'm actually concerned by how the blurb, surely intentionally, withholds the entire, very serious, subject matter of the book. Reading it again now, it lowkey feels like it's describing an entirely different novel. And judging by some reviews it's clearly to the book's detriment. Thankfully I'm in a place where I've managed to get through it (mostly, I think) unscathed. 

So yeah, mixed feelings about this one. A compelling piece of work when taken in its own little bubble, but suffers somewhat from mismarketing.

Thank you to the publisher for sending me an advance copy of this book. The above is my honest review.  

Phew, where do I even start?  This book was a lot--and I can definitely say it's not going to be for everyone but I am one of those someones that ate it up. I'm in my 30's now but if this book dropped when I was in my late teens to early twenties it would have been my whole personality. Tumblr would have eaten this book up in the early 2010's.

This book was steeped with nostalgia being a former punk/emo kid that also grew up in New Jersey. I mean there are little lyrical Easter eggs to The Gaslight Anthem (and many more bands!), plus a full playlist in this so how could I not like it?

Like others have stated this is at its core a very heavy, and sad coming of age story which centers around a toxic, unhealthy friendship and how it affected our protagonist over the span of ten years. I do wish the book was more forward with using trigger warnings--there are (many) graphic depictions of eating disorders along with S.A. and discussions of self harm which are not mentioned in the book description or displayed as trigger warnings which I think is unfortunate. I see a lot of complaints about the characters being unlikeable but weren't we all insufferable to a degree as teenagers?  The prose is beautiful and there are plenty of memorable quotes but the pacing and overall plotting did fall short for me at some times. Still, I would absolutely read more from this author in the future and thought it was a great debut. 

"I told her I'd love her forever if Iever loved at all, loved her more than I'd ever loved anyone before, more than I'd love anyone to come. And she had no idea I was just smushing together a couple of songs." if you know, you know.

I sort of feel awful rating this so low but it just felt like such a mess, which is so disappointing because I was so excited for it. The pacing and time jumps of the book felt confusing, the relationship between Khaki and Fiona was supposed to feel obsessive and connected but I didn't get that at all. I was so excited for the band/song references but that didn't feel cohesive either. I also am uncertain as to why the references to the Scooby schools existed, as that is a direct reference to the Five College Consortium but they were in California. I wanted to like this so much but it felt fragmented and honestly I was on the verge of DNFing it for most of the book.

Brittle and hard, like ice. Soft and bruised. Loud and intense but extremely internal even claustrophobic. Destructive in a real misery loves company way. 

The synopsis is a fking lie ok we need to start there, the original sin. This is not a story about toxic friendship or whatever tf it said, this is a story about girls wanting to disappear so achingly badly. They choose their hiding methods: anorexia and bulimia ofc, to minimize their surface area and control the chances of being perceived; each other, to know someone else so deeply that they have an escape from the misery of their own minds, to have someone to blame, someone else to pour into so they don't have to think about how empty they are; music (or movies) that they can fixate on in a way that allows them to become nothing more than a vessel, a body that only hears, only shoves, only perceives but is never individualized, is the masses. Either way, you never have to be yourself. Your only friend , who knows you so completely, still can't escape her own head long enough to think about you or consider you and maybe that's what drew you to her. 

I'm so torn, this was really beautiful writing but she used it to write the most godawful internal monologue ever written. A gutting exploration of mental illness - particularly depression, anxiety, OCD, and heavy heavy heavy eating disorder content. Like 80% of the book is just about one or both character's anorexia. And like no content warnings at all? Not even a mention of ED in the synopsis? When it was like literally 75% of the book? The synopsis fking lied to me. And it's 2024 put some fking content warnings in this book. 

Anyways. Like I said I'm torn. it was an honest exploration but god it was dark. I understand that whatever healing we're supposed to think went on was just barely enough  for them to hang on to life and that's real, and ED is a chronic illness and it's not magically cured at 30 and people still struggling with it do choose to do things like adopt a child... from Africa? But it just felt like fking raking myself across the coals towards the end there being inside a brain starving itself for 10 years.  And like I love a character study, I do, but what is the point of this story? To spend 300 pages in the passenger seat of a car being repeatedly driven nearly off a cliff? To glorify or humanize or honor or honestly  profit off of anorexia...  what is this book doing? What is it saying? No fr someone tell me.  

If you feel like DNFing at 30%, 40%, DO IT. SAVE YOURSELF while you still can. Nothing changes. Or it gets worse. I didn't highlight a word past page 69. I guess I'm not torn if my thoughts are that the last 250 pages aren't worth reading. 

I think this book was maybe just not for me. It was the type of literary fiction where the character is so inside her own head that it gets grating and hard to read. Maybe that was the point, and if it was, then like I said, I think this book just wasn't for me because I don't enjoy that sort of thing. Most of the issues I found with this were that the characters were so insufferable and obsessed with their own suffering, particularly Khaki and Fiona. The book often put me in a bad mood just reading it because the stewing in one's own suffering and punishing oneself for nothing was just hard to read about. I understand what the book was trying to do, but phew, it was not fun or interesting to read. It felt less like it was making a point and more like it was just a deep dive into the brain of someone who has a lot of issues and isn't resolving to get help for any of them. Also this book needs so many trigger warnings so I'd really recommend looking into that before reading.

Very stream of consciousness in a way that became tedious to me about halfway through. I kept going but just didn't care how it ended unfortunately.