Animal by Lisa Taddeo

 

Animal by Lisa Taddeo.

Published 24th June 2021 by Bloomsbury Circus.

From the cover of the book:

I drove myself out of New York City where a man shot himself in front of me. He was a gluttonous man and when his blood came out it looked like the blood of a pig.

That's a cruel thing to think, I know. He did it in a restaurant where I was having dinner with another man, another married man.

Do you see how this is going? But I wasn't always that way.

I am depraved. I hope you like me.

*************************

We first meet our anti-heroine Joan as she is leaving New York after an incident during which her married lover Vic commits suicide in a restaurant, in front of her and the man she really wants to be with - another married lover. Her hopes of happiness with her new lover dashed after this explosion of violence, she sets off on a road trip across country to California, in search of a young woman called Alice, who she has developed an obsession with, although neither of them have ever met.  

When Joan reaches California, she rents an house in a blistering hot LA canyon, populated with an odd collection of misfits and a whole bunch of wily coyotes, finds a job, and sets about manufacturing a meeting with the mysterious Alice. As events play out, and we learn the connection between these two women, the story jumps around in a staccato fashion, bringing in episodes from Joan's past that allow us to piece together the brazen life she has lived and understand the trauma that has shaped her into the person she is.

This is a book filled with numerous wild, disturbing and sexy episodes from Joan's life. which paint her as a home breaking, self-absorbed she-devil from page one, and indeed she describes herself as 'depraved' from almost our first meeting. However, over the course of the story, it becomes clear that Joan is very much a different kind of animal from the one she believes herself to be and the answers to her behaviour lie in the significant trauma she experienced in her childhood, which we only understand the full truth about near the very end of the story when all the pieces fall into place - and which intriguingly Joan herself seems oblivious to the validity of until she meets Alice.

There is a lot to take from this book, all wrapped up in a thriller with a compelling central character, who thinks of herself as the monster in this story, deserving of all the heartache and abusive situations she puts herself in. The story evokes such a mesmerising feeling of nostalgia, at times reminding me so much of the writing of Eve Babitz, but what makes it so interesting is the way Taddeo sets Joan against such a variety of different backdrops through the flashbacks she recounts, drawing out the many different aspects of her personality, her innermost feelings, her strengths and her vulnerabilities - and I was really stuck with the clever way she explores the notions of physical and emotional 'rape'. My goodness, it runs the whole gamut of the emotional spectrum, and is filled with a poignancy and yearning in its reflections on motherhood that cut straight to the quick. 

I think this is a book that is likely to divide the crowd, and there is much in these pages that readers will find upsetting about both Joan's behaviour, and her experiences. It actually left me feeling rather sad and angry about the fate of a woman so driven to extremes by the legacy of the selfish, insidious, and violent acts of men - a woman who ultimately just wants to be heard. But make of her, and her inner animal, what you will...

Animal is available to buy now in hardcover, ebook and audio formats from your favourite book retailer.

Thank you to Georgine Moore from Midas PR for sending me a proof of this book in return for an honest review.

About the author:

Lisa Taddeo spent eight years and thousands of hours tracking the women whose stories comprise Three Women, moving to the towns they lived in to better understand their lives. She has contributed to New York Magazine, Esquire, Elle, Glamour and many other publications. She has won two Pushcart Prizes for her short stories, one of which, ‘Suburban Weekend’, was also selected as a favourite piece of 2017 by Granta. She lives with her husband and daughter in New England.