Author Amy Shearn on connecting with one’s truest, wildest, least-censored-for-society’s sake self
Q&A with author of Animal Instinct, Amy Shearn
I have read two really good novels that take place during the pandemic: Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence and Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea.
But the latest pandemic novel, Animal Instinct by Amy Shearn (published last Tuesday), might be my favorite one of all. I wrote about the book here, but this is the gist: A recently divorced mother of three spends the summer of 2020 rediscovering her sexuality. It’s Brooklyn, it’s lockdown, and it’s saucy. Rachel wishes she could pluck the best parts of each of the men and women she dates and compile them all into one person. Enter Frankie, the AI chatbot she created and feeds all the data she collects from her dates.
I got to spend some time chatting with the author of Animal Instinct, Amy Shearn. She is a delight and a joy and a sensational writer. Here’s an edited version of our Q&A:
KOLINA CICERO: Covid has been kind of a do-not-write-about topic in publishing. How did you know it would play out well in this market?
AMY SHEARN: I was originally trying not to write a pandemic book. All us writers in 2020 were taking our little walks and being like, we're never going to want to write about this or read about it, right? It was so dark and everyone felt so trapped and it was so hard to see the big picture.
In the earliest draft of the book, I was trying to write it without the pandemic. And I thought, okay, there's this woman who just got divorced, she's dating in midlife for the first time, she wants to create this AI to make the perfect person. And it just didn't work because I realized she didn't have the kind of motivations to do it. [Create the AI chatbot]. So much of her risk-taking behavior is indirect and has been shaped by this feeling of death is everywhere — death is coming for us, I guess we better smoke 'em while we got 'em, because who knows what's gonna happen tomorrow? Her desperation only made sense if there was that existential threat. So now the pandemic is integral to the fabric of the book.
My editor and the publishers were very mindful about when this book should come out. They thought maybe it would work if it came out around the fifth anniversary of the initial lockdowns; maybe by then we’d be ready to process and reflect, and I do now feel ready to process and reflect. We still have not really processed the extent of the fallout, but I feel like I have enough emotional distance from the fear of 2020 that I'm ready to look at it again and be like, what happened?
I also got divorced right before the pandemic, just like my character. It was this really weird moment to feel like, my whole life has fallen apart. But I think everyone's life fell apart at once. We were all in the same boat.
Everything Rachel does is racier because it happened during the pandemic.
Yes. And she’s also dealing with the idea that she can't control her ex-husband. They don't have good communication, so it's not like she has good information on what he's doing when he's not with the kids. A lot of her journey throughout the book is realizing there are things she can control and there are things she can’t control, and she has to just let those go and hope for the best.
I remember reading at the time that psychiatrists and neuroscientists were studying how we process risk in the brain and how a lot of people felt like they were using up so much of their brain's energy trying to follow all these Covid precautions, trying to be the safest they could given the relative lack of information they had about what was and wasn't safe. And I think at a certain point a lot of people just reached capacity.
In your essay, I blew up my life, then I wrote this book, you say you wrote Animal Instinct for the old you, the one going through a divorce.
I always tell students and clients of mine to think about their one true reader. For me, every time I would lose my nerve with the book or feel like, what even is this? I would think about me right before my divorce. The person I was writing it for is someone who is in this terrible moment and feels like, is this just me? Do other people feel this way? How do I articulate what is dissatisfying or harmful about my current life, and how can I imagine a way forward? I wanted it to be a portrait of someone who’s struggling. She’s not happy about being divorced and having her life break apart. But she's also positive and optimistic. She’s like, I have a lot of life left, what other sort of adventures and big loves and changes are ahead of me? I was trying to counter-program the story that we have as a culture about women hitting midlife and becoming done with everything and not being interesting anymore.
What message did you want your former self and other divorced women to get from this book?
Maybe it’s a lofty dream for this novel, but just listen to yourself. We all have these internal voices, especially once we're in our late thirties and early forties, that become very strong. I love the way Anne Helen Petersen wrote about it in her Substack a couple years ago. It’s about what she calls the portal. She says that midlife for women is a portal, and often they enter this time and have this burst of creativity and energy and clarity and self knowledge.
We are very good at talking ourselves out of things in the name of safety — I want to do this thing but I'm too afraid and people will judge me and I don't know how it will work. But I’m hoping there’s a little nudge in the book that says, just listen to that voice; just honor it.
In the book, Rachel decides to give no fucks about anything anymore — and she thrives! What made you want to write about connecting with one’s truest, wildest, least-censored-for-society’s sake self?
I've grown and developed as a writer and am now thinking more consciously about the reader and about saying what I want say. I’m trying to make it a work of art and also something that's fun for the reader and is giving something to them. I'm hyper-aware that readers have so many choices. There are so many things asking for attention — so many ways we can be entertained — that I want to give the reader something real and fun and page-turning.
I like being as honest and raw as possible on the page because I feel readers deserve that, like they’re reading something real and not something polite or sanitized. I don't want the book to be beige.
If you're writing something that pleases everyone, it's really pleasing no one. Other people might read this and not like it, but that's okay. I think that's what Rachel is going through, too. She has that good girl programming that so many of us have and has been trying to win everything her whole life and just trying to be the best employee, family member, wife, mother, and then reaches this point where she's like, but who am I? Like, what am I, what about my desires? Can I have desires and still be a good enough mother and employee?
This passage really struck me: “The real Rachel wasn’t any of those Rachels and was all of those Rachels. The real Rachel was a golem sculpted from the dirt of Long Island, a creature cobbled together from stardust and genomes and lullabies absorbed in the womb and pollen breathed in from a thousand plants and a gut biome impacted by everyone she’d ever kissed and the DNA of her children bobbing along in her bloodstream. Rachel could package herself for dating app consumption, could present herself as this or that. But the truth was — like any woman, any human — she wasn’t any one thing. Everyone was their own kind of monster.
There is something so beautiful about this consideration, that we are all our own kind of monster. I love the duality, and especially love that last line: everyone's their own kind of monster. There are Frankenstein and monster references throughout. Tell me about that?
Rachel is a multiverse.
I think the monster references were about giving myself permission to make Rachel be a little bad sometimes. She’s also reflective enough that she would think, wait, am I being a monster right now? Which I think real monsters aren’t like. She has all this programming and all these terrible things her ex is saying to her and all these other voices in her head judging her. I wanted to play with these voices in her head telling her she was being a monster, and meanwhile she's sort of creating her own monster.
I was playing a lot with this idea of what is a monster and also what are we made of? We're all kind of Frankenstein’s monsters, pieced together from all these things. And I think also in our very digital world it's easy to present this personal brand. But isn't it so much more interesting to get to know the complicated, messy person that's not just prepackaged?
Let’s talk about books! I can tell by that bookshelf behind you that you must be a big reader. Is there a genre you gravitate toward?
My bookshelf situation is so intense and chaotic. I tend to read the books I like to write. I love books that are a little cross-genre. I have an internal genre I call Women on the Verge — any book about a woman who's on the verge of something and trying to figure it all out.
What about a favorite author?
This is a really basic answer, but the author I've loved the longest and always go back to is Virginia Woolf, who in many ways was an iconic woman. I like love how every book she wrote was totally different and how she was always so interested in diving into the interior of a person's brain.
Do you underline or annotate when you read?
I'm a really messy reader. I do a lot of dog ears, I do a lot of underlining. My girlfriend and I share books a lot and like pass them back and forth. So we kind of underline for each other too, which is very fun.
Do you find yourself reading as a writer or a reader?
It's really hard for me to turn it off. But I have a very tiny book club with my teenage daughter and we've been reading romcoms together. It’s really fun because I feel like I can be an uncritical reader. It's completely not what I write, completely not what I read usually. These are books you inhale in a day and you're like, alright, what's next? Reading out of a genre helps me to read like a reader again. I feel like I can get back to how I read as a kid.
Is there a book that you tend to recommend over and over?
I get really excited when people ask me for book reccs and I ask a lot of follow up and diagnosis questions, so it's very tailored. I’m like, what was your last favorite book you read? What's the book that you love even though you feel like you shouldn't? What kind of mood are you in? And then I make very bespoke book recommendations. Because all I want to do is recommend books to people.
I started a newsletter to do that. It's my whole personality.
It's so fun. And then when someone is like, I read this book and it was perfect, thank you — it’s so satisfying! But I do have a go-to book now that I think about it. Especially if it’s somebody I don't know that well, or I don't know their reading life very well, or if someone is a little stuck and haven’t found anything they want to read lately, I always send them to this book called The Sisters Brothers by Patrick De Witt. It’s just one of those books that I feel like everyone who reads it likes. It's a western, it's very funny. It's a really strange book but it's pretty great.
I also like to recommend Nora Jean the Termite Queen by Sheila Ballantyne. I don't know if anyone takes me up on this because it's out of print, but it's one of my favorite books. It’s this incredible novel that came out in the 70s about a woman who's an artist. She's a mom and she feels like she's like losing her mind because she doesn't have time to make her art. It feels so contemporary, I love it so much. I feel like it was so ahead of its time.
You have so much going on! Writing, teaching, working with authors. Can you tell me about some of it?
I feel like so lucky to be doing what I'm doing. I teach, I work one-on-one with writers, I do developmental edits of book drafts, I do agent query reviews, I do writing coaching, I run a couple of writing retreats throughout the year. I love all of these jobs and they feed me creatively so much. I really love working with other writers.
Thank you for a brilliant conversation, Amy!
Amy is teaching two upcoming classes, Writing for Women on the Verge and Journaling Toward Clarity. Visit Amy’s website here, subscribe to her newsletter here, and buy Animal Instinct here.
If my chat with Amy doesn’t have you convinced to read Animal Instinct, maybe you want to see the humor:
[A conversation between sisters:]
“You’re pretty wise for a mere child.”
”I’m forty, you elderly bitch.”
Or beautiful turns of phrase:
“She was now getting a drink. Or rather, having a picnic, as if they were a pair of small children in a fairy tale, meeting on a blanket beneath a tree, the sun bleeding out histrionically behind them.”
Or universal truths:
“When was the last time she’d been excited about something? It was so much more fun than feeling anxious!”
Or evocative bodily yearning:
“They were drunk enough then to hug, despite all the warnings, because they had to, it really felt like they had to, or their bodies would flatten into paper dolls.”
What are you reading?
What I’m reading: The Eights by Joanna Miller.
If you found any value in today’s essay, please forward it to the readers in your life!
Love,
When you purchase books through my links, you support Words on Words (I get credits for more books) and an indie bookstore of your choice at no additional cost to you.
Loved this interview!! “I’m forty, you elderly bitch,” made me buy the book!
I used your link to buy the book. The courage of this author is good medicine for me right now. Thank you!