Because I Love You by Joy Watson
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What does it mean to lose yourself inside a relationship? Not dramatically. Not all at once. But slowly, quietly, in the small erosions that accumulate until one day you look in the mirror and struggle to recognise the person looking back.
That's the territory Joy Watson walks into with unflinching clarity in her extraordinary new book, Because I Love You.
This is not a book about breakups. It's about erasure. About the quiet harm that can live inside love, the kind that doesn't leave bruises on the skin but rewrites the architecture of your mind. It's about gaslighting and silence, withdrawal and control - and the slow, destabilising experience of being made to doubt your own reality by someone who claims to love you.
Watson traces the inner lives of three women - Zara, Mira and Thuli - whose stories unfold in fragments, the way real experience does. And woven through their stories is her own. It's for anyone who has ever wondered whether they were overreacting, too sensitive, too much, too little. Anyone who has asked: Am I the problem?
Joy Watson is a feminist researcher, writer, and Book Editor-at-Large at the Daily Maverick. Because I Love You is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
In today's episode of Pagecast, Joy is in conversation with someone who knows her better than most - her sister, and fellow author, Mary Watson. It's an intimate kind of interview, the kind where the questions go somewhere deeper because the love in the room is already established. Settle in for this one.
That's the territory Joy Watson walks into with unflinching clarity in her extraordinary new book, Because I Love You.
This is not a book about breakups. It's about erasure. About the quiet harm that can live inside love, the kind that doesn't leave bruises on the skin but rewrites the architecture of your mind. It's about gaslighting and silence, withdrawal and control - and the slow, destabilising experience of being made to doubt your own reality by someone who claims to love you.
Watson traces the inner lives of three women - Zara, Mira and Thuli - whose stories unfold in fragments, the way real experience does. And woven through their stories is her own. It's for anyone who has ever wondered whether they were overreacting, too sensitive, too much, too little. Anyone who has asked: Am I the problem?
Joy Watson is a feminist researcher, writer, and Book Editor-at-Large at the Daily Maverick. Because I Love You is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
In today's episode of Pagecast, Joy is in conversation with someone who knows her better than most - her sister, and fellow author, Mary Watson. It's an intimate kind of interview, the kind where the questions go somewhere deeper because the love in the room is already established. Settle in for this one.
