Claire Vaye Watkins

Claire Vaye Watkins author photo.
Photo credit: Lise Watkins

Claire Vaye Watkins was born in 1984 in California. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Nevada, and her Master of Fine Arts degree from Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential fellow. Claire is also a Guggenheim Fellow. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of California, Irvine, and is part of the faculty at Bennington Writing Seminars at Bennington College.

Her first work, Battleborn (published in 2012 as a collection of short stories), has won The Story Prize, Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Gold Fame Citrus, published in 2015 as Claire’s first novel, was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her second novel was published in 2021, titled I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness. It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Claire has also written an essay, “On Pandering.”

Claire’s work has been reviewed by The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She was also selected as a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” author after the publishing of Gold Fame Citrus.

Excerpt from Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins

Punting the prairie dog into the library was a mistake. Luz Dunn knew that now, but it had been a long time since she’d seen a little live thing, and the beast had startled her. She’d woke near noon having dreamed a grand plan and intending to enact it: she would try on every dress in the house. They hung like plumage in the master closet, in every luscious color, each one unspeakably expensive—imagine the ones the starlet had taken with her! In the dream Luz had worn every dress all at once, her breasts bestudded with rhinestones and drenched in silver dust, her ass embroidered with coppery alleyways of sequins, pleated plumes of satin fanning from her hips, pale confectioners’ tulle floating like spun sugar at her feet. Of course, things went one-at-a-time in the lifeless waking world.

It was important to have a project, Ray said, no matter how frivolous. The Santa Anas winged through the canyon now, bearing their invisible crazy-making particulate, and Ray said she should try to keep her hands busy. She should try not to sleep so much. Some of Ray’s projects included digging out the shitting hole and siphoning gasoline from the luxury cars abandoned throughout the canyon.

Yesterday, Luz’s project had been to present Ray with a gift of herself swaddled like a chocolate in a fur coat she’d excavated from one of the cavernous hall closets, though she was not so dark as chocolate. She’d roasted under the mink, her upper lip already jeweled over and trembling with sweat when she breached the backyard where Ray was working, into the ever-beaming, ever-heating, ever-evaporating sun. Sun of suns. Drought of droughts. These were their days now, Luz and Ray and the merciless sun up in the canyon, a family of light in this mansion cantilevered into the hillside, a bridge for a driveway. Luz had shucked the preposterous coat to the dirt and instead napped naked on a sun-stiffened chaise under the lines of a leafless grapevine until dinner. The once Ray approached her, sliding his hand between her knees, she’d groaned: too hot for sex. The mink was still heaped out back, sculpture of a failure.

This project was better, she confirmed, twisting before the easel mirror in a peachy silk shift, lovely even against her grimy skin. In the closet was a handwoven poncho of oranges and golds, perfect for the shift, except wool was suicide. Instead, a Hermès scarf—no, a delicate tennis bracelet whose tiny clasp gave her some trouble. Like dewdrops strung around her wafer wrist, something the photographers would have said. But practically everyone was thin now. Luz stepped out of the shift and wriggled into a clinging cobalt mermaid gown dense with beads. It was gorgeous and she was gorgeous in it, even with her filthy hair and bulgy eyes and bushy brows and teeth that jutted out from her mouth as if leading the way, the front two with a gummy gap between them that caused her to seal her thin top lip to her plump bottom lip, even when she was alone, even now as she twirled and the dangly beads went click click click, softly. She looked liquid and wanted to show Ray.

Continue reading from Gold Fame Citrus at Penguin Random House.

Links