If you enjoyed Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, I think you might enjoy this too. I still haven’t made up my mind about whether that is because they were well-rendered, or because they are tropes. I couldn’t relate to any of the characters, especially not Joan and Alice, but despite that they felt immediately recognizable. The things we sometimes do to each other to protect ourselves, to fend for ourselves, not just between friends or colleagues, but even between mothers and daughters.

While I always get some satisfaction from stories that take a critical look at how men systemically tread on women, I found the way Taddeo examined women’s complicated relationships with each other even more interesting. I almost wish I had read it in one sitting, to really be immersed in that feeling. The novel feels oppressive, a bit frenzied, evoking a feeling as if you’ve had a sunstroke and your mind is repeatedly going over the same five thoughts. I think she did take it too far, but I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy it. And again, until I find myself wondering whether maybe Taddeo had taken it a tad too far, exaggerated too much. One of the core issues that Animal explores is the way that men can ruin lives without a care, to get what they want. After this traumatic event, she decides to drive from New York to California, looking for a woman named Alice, who she thinks can help her unravel her past. Joan has just witnessed a man shooting himself in a crowded restaurant, where she was eating dinner with her lover, a married man.

It was simply women’s pain that manifested as madness. The way they could overturn an empire for a girl on bended knee.’ It was not until she began interviewing her subjects that she noticed that, while the stories of men all seemed to adhere to the same pattern, women’s stories were tantalisingly oblique when a woman spoke of desiring a man, it was almost never (or never just) the man himself that she wanted.The world had set me up to believe that it was women who went mad. ‘I thought I’d be drawn to the stories of men. In the prologue to her first book, Three Women (2019), a work of non-fiction exploring the structures and expressions of desire, Lisa Taddeo writes that she had not initially intended to focus on women.

Animal by lisa taddeo review