LT: At first blush, that story seems insane, but I think that having that sort of pain and sudden rage is a real thing. I always think about the astronaut Lisa Nowak, who found out her husband was cheating on her with another woman, so she drove across the country with all these tools in the back of her car in order to kill them. I wanted to look at how someone gets to a dark place. I was interested in showing a character like Joan who, while that’s not necessarily her deal in the book, does make these reprehensible choices. It’s not a moral thing, it’s just they don’t want to read about it.
Lisa Taddeo: I don’t think many readers are comfortable with the idea of a suicidal mother in literature or even just one who abandons the kids in any kind of way.
Jacqueline Alnes: In an interview about your first book, Three Women, you expressed that you were “interested in the complexity of female desire, which… have a lot more prismatic and complex feelings attached.” Animal, in many ways, is about desire. Over Zoom, Taddeo and I spoke about depravity, blunt prose, animalhood, perceptions of motherhood, the male gaze, and the mechanisms behind reprehensible choices. Taddeo, in her propulsive narrative, builds on her exploration of women’s desire from her debut, bestselling nonfiction book, Three Women, and also seeks to understand how women’s rage builds and builds until it reaches a breaking point. As a child, her mother taught her that “we are all monsters, we are all capable of monstrosity.” The book brims with sex and violence, two urges that Joan is familiar with. Lecherous men tell repulsive stories coyotes sniff out women’s menstrual blood and howl children survive horrific acts of abuse men’s eyes linger too long and women are rendered as prey or predators.
The landscape of Animal, Lisa Taddeo’s debut novel, is brutal.
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