Animal Bodies

On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties

Suzanne Roberts

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781496231871
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner in Essays How do we reckon with our losses? In Animal Bodies Suzanne Roberts explores the link between death and desire and what it means to accept our own animal natures, the parts we most often hide, deny, or consider only with shame—our taboo desires and our grief. In landscapes as diverse as Salamanca's cobbled streets, the Mekong River's floating markets, Fire Island's windswept beaches, Nashville's honky-tonks, and the Sierra Nevada's snowy slopes, Roberts interrogates her memory and tries to make sense of her own private losses (deaths of people and relationships), as well as more public losses, including a mass shooting in her hometown and environmental devastation in the Amazon rainforest. With lyricism, insight, honesty, and dark humor, these essays illuminate the sometimes terrible beauty of what it means to be human, deepening the conversation on death and grief, sexuality, and the shame that comes from surviving the world in a female body with all of its complexities.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• DEATH
• The Essay Determines How It Will Begin
• The Grief Scale
• Eight Hours
• The Same Story
• Becoming Bird
• A Kiss for the Dying
• Bone & Skin
• Wearing Her Eye Shadow
• A Love Letter to My Hometown after the Shooting
• The Red Canoe
• Traveling with Ghosts
• Friending the Dead
• DESIRE
• Keep Your Numbers Down
• In Love with the World
• Sportfucking
• This Far from Desire
• Traveling Alone
• Winter Travel
• The Hungry Bride
• Breaking the Codes
• My Mother’s Daughter
• Funerals, Safety Pins, and Flaming Saddles
• The Good-Time Girl
• What She Must Do
• OTHER DIFFICULTIES
• Animal Bodies
• The Queen of the Amazon
• A True Story about Jealousy
• The Last Goodbye
• Rites of Passage
• Traveling with the Dead
• The Disappearing Act
• Honky-Tonk Woman
• Auntie Suzanne
• The Danger Scale
• Words Etched into Skin
• Mother Keeps Daddy on the Shelf
• Ways to Speak the Unspeakable
• Dreaming in the Time of Wildfire
• Acknowledgments
• About Suzanne Roberts