Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties

by Suzanne Roberts

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.

Genres: Memoir, Essays, Nonfiction, Poetry

252 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2022

About the author

Suzanne Roberts is the author of Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties (March 2022), the award-winning travel essay collection Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel, and the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award), as well as four books of poems. Named "The Next Great Travel Writer" by National Geographic's Traveler, Suzanne's work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and included in The Best Women's Travel Writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, The Normal School, River Teeth, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno, teaches in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University, and lives in South Lake Tahoe, California

Reviews

[Book Clubbed · Rating 1 out of 5]

Welp, this one didn't work for me. Obviously, many other reviewers disagree, so the usual caveats apply. Thank you to NetGally for the ARC.

This selection starts off promising as meditations on grief. I'm not sure how one critiques such personal material, but I found the revelations to be emotionally stringent and honest.

Things quickly went downhill from there. The next several essays addressed Roberts' personal life, crumbling marriage, and sexual habits. Honestly, I applaud the move. If we want to get messy, let's get fucking messy. Spill the tea, along with any other fluids in question.

Astonishingly, Roberts is able to make such material boring. Her prose is lackluster and reminiscent of mid-2000s bloggers. The company she runs with (fellow academics) are about a tenth as interesting a they think they are. And, most impressively, Roberts details all of this without a single interesting insight into sex, intimacy, or marriage. Other than being a cathartic writing exercise, I'm really not sure what the point could conceivably be.

Next up, we get some travel selections. For every essay in this section, the narrator wrestles with the same tension: being a privileged white woman whose happiness and wealth of experience is dependent on the local guides exploiting the natural land and animals. The only thing worse than rich white people writing about vacation is rich white people bemoaning how a small amount of awareness if interfering with their vacation.

[emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley and University of Nebraska Press for providing me with an e-arc of Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire and Other Difficulties. I don’t even know where to begin with this book it made my heart break and then mended it all whilst the occasional satirical comment made me laugh. This collection follows stories and incidents abkut topics such as divorce, cheating, fat shaming, slut shaming, sexual assault and grief. Roberts tackles each difficult topic in a raw and new way through the lens of her life. Everything written about in this collection was striking and beautiful. I would highly recommend this to everyone, it is an essential read.

[Mary Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Suzanne Roberts’s 2022 collection of essays titled Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties is her strongest work of creative nonfiction yet. Animal Bodies showcases masterfully crafted personal essays on beauty and blight in both people and landscapes as well as the constant cycle of despair and respair that makes up human life. This collection’s powerful, poignant short memoir pieces that relay some of the author’s significant experiences and timely observations with regard to individual and collective loss and longing leave you wanting more—more of Roberts’s sensory descriptions of place, more of the complex characters (including the narrator herself) who populate these essays, and more of the author’s insightful reflections. Indeed, Roberts’s Animal Bodies refreshingly holds up a mirror to readers and to the world, causing us to critically examine both our inner and outer existences.

[Nette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Animal Bodies to me was a very personal book to read. I was reading and seeing the vulnerabilities and life experiences of Suzanne Roberts, someone I have never met, and yet was able to feel the same things I have in periods of my life. Experiences like grief, which people handle differently, and experiencing losses, were where I connected the most with Animal Bodies. I have never read a book like this before and I'm glad that I did because Suzanne Roberts made me feel like it was okay to grieve and to reflect on that time, it makes you understand what you were going through as you read how someone else went through their own.

[bookswithmaddi · Rating 3 out of 5]

*Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review*
Animal Bodies is a series of short nonfiction essays that follow the author, Suzanne Roberts, experiences through grief, love, and life. She explores the link between death and desire while revisiting her own life experiences. Through beautiful and lyrical prose she walks readers through some of the most devastating and beautiful moments of her life.
This collection is undoubtedly unlike anything I’ve read before. Roberts' distinct voice gives each essay its own spotlight, pulling readers into her stories. She imparts important life lessons and advice with each essay, creating an important and unique connection between the reader and the author.
I really enjoyed Roberts’ writing and definitely want to read more from her. It’s hard to rate essay collections like this because some stories I found phenomenal while others were just okay. Roberts’ certainly possesses wisdom within her that readers are lucky enough to receive through this collection. There are some parts which I found a little tedious and think could have been edited down a bit more. But for the most part I really appreciated Roberts’ unique use of language and prose.
My main criticism of this book is the tone. A lot of parts of this collection came off as pretentious to me. I’m sure that was never the intention however, at certain points it really turned me off from the book. Between stories of traveling around the world and the way relationships were written about, certain parts had a pretentious tone that created a distance between myself and the text.
Overall I think this book was really well written and Suzanne Roberts has a lot of really important things to share. I would highly recommend this for people who enjoy personal anecdotes and life lessons in medium to slow paced books.

[marta · Rating 5 out of 5]

e-arc provided by netgalley in exchange for an honest review

it's not often that i skip my usual pre-review quote, but the prose in this book is so beautiful i'm afraid i'd have to copy and paste the entire text.

'animal bodies' is a collection of essays about everything you could possibly think of, from travel to grief to lost friendships, but at the same time a very narrow part of human emotion. despite that, the focus on the darker sides of life was unexpectedly light. i never felt too bogged down in the events described because a turn of phrase here and a nice metaphor there gave these stories an almost surreal quality in my mind and allowed me to view them with the same hindsight as the author instead of shattering my heart. despite the seemingly eclectic subject matter, this collection of essays was cohesive- as much as life can be, surely.

i didn't expect to relate to some of these essays so hard, but even the ones dealing with matters i've had no experience with left a mark on me. expert wordplay does that to a text, i've gathered. there could've been a ten page essay detailing the author's day to day routine and i still would've highlighted every passage to death.

[Jessica Rinker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely collection of essays and poetic bits of honest insight and reflection of the author's life. Would be nice reading for a creative writing or memoir class/workshop.

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you so much to Suzanne Roberts, University of Nebraska Press, and NetGalley for an advanced reader's copy of this book. Expected publication date: March 1, 2022

I really, really enjoyed reading this book in a really non-enjoyable way. What I mean is that this book covers a lot of difficult topics, ranging from sexual assault, grief, divorce, politics, the environment, and more. It's hard to say I "enjoyed" reading about the many trials and difficulties faced by the author. Yet, I somehow did. Roberts manages to talk about these issues in a way that doesn't feel exploitative but personal, raw, and honest. By the end, I felt like I had spent the night talking to that really cool Aunt you always admired, hearing all her experiences and life-defining moments by a cozy fire with a massive glass of wine.

I highly recommend (if you have the capacity to read such content).

(side note: I'm sure it's just because I was reading an ARC, but the formatting of it was all over the place, which did distract from the reading experience. I'm assuming that'll get all worked out further in the publication process)

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

It felt like I'd fallen under a spell as I read this book. Roberts weaves stories into powerful insights that honor the complexities of life. She's also darkly funny. The subtitle "Death, Desire and Other Difficulties" covers a wide swath of issues. The ones that most resonated with me were her relationship to her mother (and her mother's past and death), her observations of the way we treat "Animal Bodies" and women's bodies, and how political divides can affect longtime friendships.

Favorite lines:

"I'm always happier wearing travel's cloak of anonymity."
"All life leads to death, so why is it impossible to imagine?"

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy.

[aliasw · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been a long time since I cried over a book.

I'm not sure how to give a summary here. It does what it says on the tin, if we're talking structurally - essays of loss, of loss of self, of loss of others, of greed and selfishness and pain. It is a travelogue of place and emotion. It is also very, very brave.

It is easy to read, in a rubberneckers way, and hard to read, in an emotional way. She talks of the parts of life that I have always been too cowardly to write about, and describes other parts that I am yet to encounter and still able to feel. I feel guilty for saying that, really - those parts aren't my pain, and this isn't fiction but it's testament to her writing, for certain. I think the word 'unapologetic' is overused in terms of creative works, and anyway, she isn't unapologetic - she is honest, but very, very guilty. I'm trying to avoid talking about Suzanne, as I know that goes against the ethos of a review, but as it is a memoir it's no easy talk. I'll leave it on a less emotional note - the descriptions of travel are incredible, her lyrical prose astounding. It is a very powerful piece, and it's not out of politeness that I thank Suzanne Roberts, NetGalley and University of Nebraska press for the chance to read and review this advance copy. No, seriously - thank you. This was excellent, in so many ways.

[Suzanne Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Advanced Praise for Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties (forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press, March 2022)

“Suzanne Roberts’ essays are eloquent and vibrantly imaginative. They are lyrical in the best sense: the language is rhythmic, pulsing on the page, but they are never poeticized, flowery or vague. Roberts’ wisdom and humor are evident throughout. I so welcome a collection of her essays, all in one place.
— ​Carolyn Forché, author of What You Have Heard Is True and In the Lateness of the World

“I have been thinking about one particular Suzanne Roberts essay, “Breaking the Codes,” since I first read it. Sometimes, I open a closet door and my stomach drops, remembering one painful scene in her essay. Sometimes I see a group of teenagers and I wonder, and worry, about all of them. Roberts’ writing rearranges me in some fundamental and necessary ways. A book like this, a book by her, is a book I desperately need.”
— Camille T Dungy, Author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers and Editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Poetry

"Animal Bodies is a marvel, a heartbreaking road map of living, loving, and grieving. Roberts bravely recalls the deaths of her alcoholic father, her dear friend, and her mother, a complex force in her life. Here, we read about rape, escape, affairs, and repair. There is wilderness and then, somehow, the clearing​--both in her world travels and the dying around her. Thinking about death clarifies life, and Roberts knows the thin line between grief and joy, the importance of living fully and fighting for freedom without apology. This is hard-earned wisdom and liberation. I can't stop thinking about it."
— Lee Herrick, author of Scar and Flower and Gardening Secrets of the Dead

“No one travels the depths of place and experience more phenomenally than Suzanne Roberts. In these essays that explore being, beauty, desire, death, and our collective animal journeys on the planet, Animal Bodies gathers our questions about life and brings them to the only place where meaning might emerge: adaptation. This book is a triumph that transcends human and gives us a chance to re-story ourselves into the larger world.”
— Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Verge and The Chronology of Water

"In Animal Bodies, Suzanne Roberts offers surprising insight, both intimate and universal, into death, desire, and how we all move through this difficult world. Her essays are ruthless, beautiful, graceful, and endlessly fascinating. A wonderful book."
— Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire

“The essays in Animal Bodies unflinchingly yet so importantly meditate on loss and grief. As readers, we are fortunate to experience such stories of survival. They are poignant testimonies of passion, honesty, pain, and grace. I grieve for the young woman in each of us who, like Roberts, navigated a world of treachery, of love, and of double standards. Here, we travel with Roberts to beaches in Florida, to hospital rooms for chemotherapy, to Nashville Honky Tonks, and to the Amazon Rain Forest. We suffer with her the loss of family and dear friends. With us she carries to each of the locations her acute insight and her courageous and uncompromising desire to witness and record the world. Because these truths are the truths of so many, this is a book to be read by us all.”
— Didi Jackson, author of Moon Jar

"These essays soar like falcons and dive octopus deep; they carry the power and agility of tigers, the intelligent play of cetaceans. These essays are alive with lyricism and humor, thrumming with pain and pleasure and the complex spaces we inhabit between. Suzanne Roberts is a wonder and a force."
— Gayle Brandeis, author of The Art of Misdiagnosis and Many Restless Concerns

[Soula Kosti · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The ways we recognize a musical score -by its scales, the repeating octaves- is similar to the way we recall grief. A musical scale can transport us to another time and place, as if the music has always lived inside us, and like the notes that bring music out of our bodies, one grief recalls another. Each new sadness dips into the well of the rest, carrying the old grief with the new."

3.5 ✨

Animal Bodies by Suzanne Roberts is a collection of essays split in three parts: Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties. My favorite part was the first and probably read all essays included within a couple of days. The second part on desire was my least favorite even though it was deeply honest and the last part included a mix of stories that often touched on themes of death and desire.

The essays included in Animal Bodies are chronicled through various timelines and touch on Suzanne Roberts' loss of her father, mother, and dog, but also on her divorce, travels, and friendships.

This was my first encounter with Suzanne Roberts and various of the themes discussed in her essays (such as feminism, sexual assault, loss, nature, and childfree lives) are among my top interests when I'm reading such collections and especially nonfiction. But a few times while reading I wasn't sure that I actually liked the author that much which made me disconnect a bit.

However, I found some comfort in her writing about grief and related to how complex our feelings and emotions towards our parents can be even after their loss.

"Without love there is no grief."

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this ARC in exchange for my honest review!

[Kayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set to publish March 1, 2022, I HIGHLY recommend this read!! This collection of essays explores death, desire, and other difficulties we face throughout our lives. I found myself drawn to this book from the very first essay. The author’s style is beautiful and makes you feel that you are experiencing these life events with her. There are many relatable emotions throughout and I found myself constantly looking forward to being able to pick up and read again. The personal aspects of this book is what really hit it home for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and University of Nebraska Press for the advanced copy. Thank you to Suzanne Roberts for sharing this work with us!

[Anwen Hayward · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Review from an ARC via Netgalley)

This essay collection is one of the best I've read, and I've read a lot of them (over 30 last year... I may have a problem.) I absolutely loved how Roberts excavated her grief and made something so beautiful of it. The essays about the craft of writing were perhaps my favourite, especially the ones which deliberately deconstructed the process of turning the personal (e.g. her husband's medical procedures) into something for the public to read, and how memoir is both a selfish and selfless act; how it's often presented as an entirely internal, introspective genre, but in fact it brings in the experiences of all those people close to the writer, and is inevitably the story of others, too. It made me want to write. Perhaps ironically, I wish I could write more here about it, but it's the kind of book that I think has to percolate in your brain a bit before you can really parse it. I know I'll be thinking about it for a very long time. Now to seek out everything else that Suzanne Roberts has ever written.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it!

I'm thankful I received an advance uncorrected proof. As the subtitle suggests, the book is divided into three sections: death, desire, and other difficulties, and it has a range of writing styles and story lengths. There are short lyrical essays, powerful and intriguing, nestled in-between more extended essays about seemingly unrelated topics on loss, friendship, traveling, and sex. Yet, they all fit together because these are all challenging topics we experience as we navigate through this thing we call life.

Expect to read not just about death but dying, loss, and grief and not just about desire but lust, sex, and the complexities of navigating relationships. The Other Difficulties section includes essays on managing friendships in a tribal political climate, decisions on whether to have children, dealing with the loss of a pet, managing aggressive drunk men, and more.

I experienced a whole range of emotions while reading. I teared up, squirmed uncomfortably, became angry, and laughed out loud. I wrote down several quotes as I was reading, but this one resonated with me, "Each new sadness dips into the well of the rest, carrying the old grief with the new." I'd recommend this book.

[Raj Nandani ( Wrap the Fury) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Animal Bodies is a memoir written through a collection of personal essays. It is a very personal way of presenting your life and contains some gruesome details as well. although if you are thinking that it is nothing more than just a memoir then I guess you are wrong here. It contains issues ranging from racism to negligence towards covid and vaccination by some people. It swings between two generations and more than three decades to show us how the life of the author has evolved for better and for worse. This kind of confessional book demands courage to be able to recall and reproduce what you have endured throughout your life. it really was an honor to read about the author so closely.

The writing style is poetic and philosophical. I felt punched with harsh truths while reading this book. the author has explained in detail her life while she struggled to get hold of what's right and what's not. It discussed childhood trauma, sexual abuse, political disagreement and its impact on relationships, racism in practice, and man more such intricate topics. The author doesn’t give her proclamation but presents her point of agreement and disagreement strongly. Even without actually attacking the doer, she attacks the very practice that had been happening all around her since her teenage and childhood days. She talks about ignorance, victim-blaming, self-depreciation and so much more. It felt like she has poured all the anguish and sadness and wisdom gained over time in this life into this piece of work.

I can't say that I enjoyed reading this, it was painful to read about all the atrocities and wrings the author had to endure. It was uncomfortable to know that she is not the only one and that this story is so similar to so many other people. It really was a bare mirror to society. It is a reality that people try to cover up and decorate with veils. Veiled realities.

Overall, I will recommend this book to anyone who can handle the above-mentioned sensitive topics. Please keep in mind your triggers while picking this book. If you can handle this, then do pick it up and look into the veiled mirror.

[Casey Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hadn't thought, a few years ago, that I was a fan of memoirs-in-essays. I'd thought I preferred a clean narrative arc, a story I could be drawn into, one that would keep me reading until I learned what happened at the satisfying end.

Suzanne Roberts is one of a handful of writers who has set me straight by virtue of their gorgeous collections. The circular and often layered nature of the essays that make up Animal Bodies adds a depth that surprised and delighted me.

Suzanne writes with often-ascerbic wit and grace--a winning combination--about death and all manner of other situations at once specific and universal. From the The Grief Scale, with its bin-hog accuser and a close-but-not-quite goodbye that squeezes your heart, to The Hungry Bride, a story with which the vast majority of women are all too familiar, Suzanne takes a deep dive into the very things that make us human. In Rites of Passage, I recognized myself in the wife who promises not to share her husband's medical concerns, then does so anyway, and I loved him all the more for his ability to put aside his frustration and join in the humor.

And this line: "But as time has gone by, I realize my former self, the one who still had a mother, made the decision that felt right to her at the time, and the self I am now should probably stay out of it," pretty much sums up the perspective I've come to embrace as I look back on the endless questionable decisions I made in decades past. I did the best I could with who I was at the time--this makes so much sense to me.

Suzanne Roberts holds nothing back, and in doing so, allows us to take a new look at our own foibles and difficulties with an extra dose of understanding, forgiveness, humor.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Suzanne Robert’s “Animal Bodies” is a song of a collection that rises from a fog of grief and harmonizes with Robert’s persistent exploration of death, death’s haunting, and what it means to build an authentic life brimming with desire. There’s a questioning to her essays as she follows the line of love, relationships and self and her language catches and holds in your mind as lyrics do. Robert’s gifts us with her honest, fumbling dark humor in the same way laughter relieves tears, but she never strays the reader too far from her melody; one of gorgeous searching as she works to both survive and make sense of what it means to be alive.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Prose is lyrical in it’s precision and the authors formidable vulnerability and honesty is in every essay. The emotions and experiences that we tend to shy away from, conceal, misunderstand, make up the themes of these essays.

Some highlights for me:
- the grief scale and how grief is a part of the human experience we all share, while also being completely unique to each person and situation.
- exploration of sexuality in a world that both overtly sexualizes women and also punishes them for being sexual.
- the mention of hatchbacks and the childhood nostalgia of ‘the way back’
- how trauma can pile up simply through just existing. the traumas we have yet to process don’t just go away during wildfire season or a global pandemic, etc.

I think everyone could learn a bit more about themselves through reading these essays.

[Ann Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the bravery displayed on every page of this insightful book. Roberts' essays on loss portray the sadness and grace to be found in our shared human journey—one that inevitably includes the death of our beloved relatives, friends, and pets. On several pages, Roberts' vivid and elegant prose brought me to a full, breathless stop. I read many sentences over and over, then underlined them, then swallowed them whole. Animal Bodies is powerful medicine.

[Ashleigh Renard · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What can you live without? Everything. Nothing.” Suzanne Roberts sums up and digs deep into the inescapable awkwardness and exquisiteness of being human in this collection of gut-wrenching, and cackle-inducing, essays. This book will live on my bedside table.

[Tammy D · Rating 5 out of 5]

I anticipate reading this book over and over. Suzanne’s essays are so relatable. The essays about her mother dying and loss of a friendship made me deeply sad. I loved that it was intermixed with humor, colonoscopies.

[Eve Quesnel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've only just begun reading Animal Bodies and all I can say is "Wow!" Roberts moves through her essays with ease, honesty, and eloquence. I was captured from the get go. In these essays, she expresses the stages of grief-the disbelief, the frustration, the extreme sadness, and more. How to put those feelings into words is incredibly challenging, but Roberts' experience (I looked up her other books) and I'm guessing natural talent address the human condition in a relatable way. I recommend this book to everyone because death, desire, and "other difficulties" (I won't give them away) happen to us all.

[Lisa Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyrical, vulnerable and raw, Roberts' memoir-in-essays is a window into the complicated emotions of what it means to be human.

[Jacquelin Winter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Suzanne Roberts’ “Animal Bodies” is an outstanding collection of nonfiction essays. Roberts plays with form often and as a result, her writing reads as a sort of poetry-memoir fusion that really stands out. Highly recommend this book.

[Debbie Hagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Suzanne Roberts writes with a certain urgency, eagerness, and enthusiasm that propel readers forward from the first sentence on. Lucky for us, her adventures almost always involve something new... often unexpected...and grace us with lasting "aha" moments. This is only part of what makes reading her work so much fun. With Roberts, you never know exactly where you're headed until you're there ..and it sort of takes your breath away. You think it's an essay about avalanches, but really it's about how to deal with a long friendship that ends over politics. Yes!

I became a Roberts enthusiast last summer when I read "Bad Tourist." Being that Roberts is a worldwide traveler and writer for leading travel publications, her jaunts in "Bad Tourist" take us far and wide (Disney World, Florida Everglades, Las Vegas, Mongolia, Scotland, Peru, India, and elsewhere). They involve danger, alcohol, drugs, lots of sex, and then, of course, the odd things that happen when you don't fully understand the local language and customs.

"Animal Bodies" is perhaps more relatable and a bit tamer (less sex and alcohol). Like "Bad Tourist," it is a collection of essays, but in this one Roberts ponders the link between death and desire and our animal nature. Her subjects range from how a couple splits custody of their beloved pet after they divorce to two women who discover they're pregnant by the same man at the same time, and losing ten pounds just a week before a wedding.

Lovers of creative nonfiction will not only find the content of "Animal Bodies" compelling, but will also enjoy the way Roberts experiments with form, finding new ways to tell a good story.

[Bob Hughes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a very welcome surprise, and entirely not what I thought it would be about. It definitely covers the topics in the title, but in a very different way to how I expected.

For starters, the topics above appear as if they would lend themselves to a slow, reflective book. If anything, parts of this book go at a break-neck speed. That is not to fault the writing at all, but rather is one of its strengths- Suzanne Roberts can write, and often hits her stride with a story that just unspools in layers of conversation, meaning and imagery almost breathlessly.

Similarly, this book feels deeply personal and vulnerable, really pushing to the absolute borders of what most share, and then traversing beyond it. We cover her parents' mortality, the death of animals, painful memories of former relationships, and lighter moments of her current life, with the anxieties that lurk beneath.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Rebecca Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Roberts’ 2022 essay collection, Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties, is a beautifully crafted lyrical memoir in sprints. Roberts explores the heavy topics—body shaming, infidelity, sexual assault, death, divorce—with vulnerability and rawness, holding a mirror, first for herself and then, for all of us. This reflection offers a sense of community and connection, a necessary conversation for much needed change and healing. Her writing strikes a nerve, a verve, a chord—truth, honesty, awareness. Though the subject matter is often difficult, Roberts pulls us along, sprinkling in humor while grounding us in the cocoon and beauty of language. This book will bring change, bring healing, bring awareness.

[Jamie Gehring · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of essays made me cry, laugh, and reflect. So relatable and relevant.

I loved how the author was able to take me from a difficult scene in an airport, a fling with a poet, a jealous lover, and then the emotions involved with abortion, all so seamlessly!

Loved the structure, flow, and writing in this book of essays!

Highly recommend!

[Lucy Bryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I could go back in time and give Animal Bodies to my twenty-year-old self. In this collection of 38 essays, Suzanne Roberts revisits the adventures and misadventures, the wanderings and wonderings, and the traumas and losses of her twenties and thirties. But this book is more than just an account of Roberts’ movement from young adulthood into middle age; it’s also a guide for how to learn from one’s mistakes, how to treat those who disappoint you (including yourself) with generosity and grace, and how to build a sense of self in times of change and loss.

Roberts exhibits courage and sensitivity as she probes challenging (and sometimes taboo) topics, including divorce, death, abortion, and sexual assault. Her writing is lyrical and carefully crafted, full of evocative descriptions and inventive structures. In short, it’s a true pleasure to read.

If I’d encountered this book earlier in life, maybe it would have urged me away from some of the mistakes of my younger years and toward greater acceptance of myself and those I loved. Or maybe those are lessons we must learn on our own. In any case, I am grateful to have found a book that speaks truth so beautifully.