13 October 2024
But Aren’t We All Animals?: On Lisa Taddeo’s Animal
Lisa Taddeo’s got quite the list of authorly accomplishments, having been published in the New York Times, Elle, and Glamour. She’s also been included in the Best American Sports Writing and Best American Political Writing anthologies for her nonfiction. Apparently Animal is Taddeo’s debut novel, although she may be more well-known for her nonfiction bestseller, Three Women, which I have not read. But what I find most enigmatic and interesting about all this is that despite this novel’s borderline antisocial content, despite Taddeo’s almost creepy see-into-your-soul photo on the back jacket, she has a husband and a daughter—which seems just so…normal? Perhaps the problem is that I am projecting: because my debut novel is semiautobiographical, perhaps I presumed hers is too. And this makes it possible to map Joan’s character onto Taddeo, where that would commit biographical fallacy. In truth, I know nothing about Taddeo beyond what’s listed about her on Wikipedia, and that’s just mostly her writing accomplishments.
Spoiler Alert
Animal is the story of a woman who cannot connect with others—neither women nor men—because of her traumatic childhood experience of being raped at age 13 (?) and then surreptitiously finding her parents dead: her mother murdered her father, then committed suicide by slitting her wrists in the bathtub (of course, we don’t learn this until the very end of the book). While Taddeo claims that this is a story of “sisterhood and female rage,” I see it rather as a psychological thriller exploring the emotional and attachment theory impact of childhood trauma, generational trauma, and detached mothers. The plot of the novel is quite simple: Joan seeks a relationship with her half-sister, daughter of her father and his mistress. Everything else in the book happens via flashback, starting with the moment Joan’s romantic liaison, a married man, blows his brains out in a restaurant when he finds Joan there with a younger man.
The discourse community for this book, according to Taddeo, is anyone supporting a certain flavor of feminism—and feels deeply aligned with the “Me Too” movement. It is a community with which I have a tumultuous relationship, as at times, it approaches blanket vilification of men, an overgeneralization with which I cannot agree. Taddeo’s book did rankle a bit for this reason; I intentionally overlooked this particular theme and focused on the generational trauma aspects.
We chose this text for my craft analysis because it is an example of an “unlikeable protagonist.” And indeed, it serves well for that purpose. Joan is not able to connect with anyone in the book, male or female. Men she distrusts because she was raped so young, and although she idolized her father, he had a mistress on the side. Women she cannot connect with because her own mother was emotionally absent—then killed her father and herself, leaving Joan an orphan before she hit her teen years. This disconnect from everyone makes Joan hyper-independent and distrustful of anyone around her. Further, her behavior is decidedly anti-social: she conducts extramarital affairs, steals, judges, stalks, lies. Yet somehow we cannot blame her entirely for her animalistic tendencies because they have direct roots to childhood trauma. This does inform my own craft, insofar as now I can see how my own “dislikable” protagonist might still garner the reader’s compassion if her behaviors have clear foundation in her early traumas. From this, I’ve decided to develop one vivid, visceral scene—event—that happens between my protagonist and her parents the afternoon before her father dies. Not sure what it will entail yet…but it’s brewing in there.
Another thing I learned from this text, though perhaps not intended when it was assigned, was that it’s perfectly okay to have a plot that moves very little (Taddeo’s plot is comprised entirely of Joan developing a relationship with her sister) but is propelled at intervals by backstory—backstory that unravels slowly, giving the reader one bite-sized tidbit of the mystery at a time. For example, we do not learn that Joan was raped as a child until over halfway through the novel. We don’t learn that her mother murdered her father then committed suicide until the novel’s climactic moment. Taddeo withholds information about the backstory to create tension, curiosity, mystery. And when we learn about these incidents, the reader has an a-ha moment: this is why Joan acts the way she does. This is deeply informative for my own novel: my plot spans just one week in time, but there will be decades of backstory woven in at logical intervals to reveal why the protagonists acts the way they do.
Overall, I hated that I enjoyed this novel. I wanted to dislike it. Indeed, I found some parts of it not to my taste; however, the overarching themes of attachment theory, childhood trauma, and psychology were deeply engaging—and mostly, I loved how it unraveled via flashbacks.