I grew up feeling that there were parts of me that were definitely not welcome aboard the ark. I come from an Italian immigrant family where mental health was not spoken of, and where depression was a dirty word. I remember being told never to tell my grandfather how I was feeling because he would think it wasn’t “normal;” I remember my cousin trying to tell us, around the Christmas dinner table, that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and my zia and zio becoming furious. When I found Timothy Findley’s work in my late teens, there was an overwhelming relief at finding a writer who portrayed characters living with depression, anxiety and other mental health challenges with empathy, compassion, and a profound respect for their experiences.

Not Wanted on The Voyage was the second book of Findley’s I picked up; a feminist, post-modern retelling of the Biblical story of Noah’s ark. In it, battle lines are drawn between the characters who uphold a problematic, patriarchal and ableist system, and the characters who are outcasts because of the system; the blind cat Mottyl, the child Lotte who has a “mental disability,” Mrs. Noyes who drinks too much, and an actual demon (Lucy, who of course, was struck down from heaven simply for asking God “why?”). I devoured it, because finally, it centred the perspective of the outcast. Instead of having something “wrong” with them, these outcasts were the wise ones, the compassionate ones, definitely NOT the ones committing heinous atrocities against dolphins and children and unicorns alike. Not Wanted on the Voyage was a book that spoke to me as a human being; finally, I had found a writer who thought the people (and animals!) marginalized because of their society’s ableism were the ones who were “right.” When I began writing, I hoped my readers would also find the solace I had in feeling someone saw and welcomed them on the voyage.

Not Wanted On The Voyage was also the first time I’d read anything in the way of non-realist fiction, and in it, I discovered a different CanLit, a tradition that moved away from small towns and sad marriages, one where seven-foot-tall demons were fully realized characters. I mean, any story that lets us spend time in the head space of a blind cat gets major points in my book. When it came time for me to write my own stories, this novel inspired me to go beyond realism, telling tales from perspectives of sex robots and unhappy wives who turn into spiders. This book made me a writer who could use genre conventions from horror and sci-fi and fairy tales to write Her Body Among Animals, continuing on in the non-realist tradition of Not Wanted On The Voyage.

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Learn more about Her Body Among Animals:

In this genre-bending debut collection merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and sci-fi, women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies while living in a world “among animals,” where violence is intertwined with bizarre ecological disruptions.

A sentient sex robot goes against her programming; a grad student living with depression is weighed down by an ever-present albatross; an unhappy wife turns into a spider; a boy with a dark secret is haunted by dolls; a couple bound for a colony on Mars take a road trip through Texas; a girl fights to save her sister from growing a mermaid tail like their absent mother.

Magical yet human, haunted and haunting, these stories act as a surreal documentation of the mistakes in systems of the past that remain very much in the present. Ferrante investigates toxic masculinity and the devastation it enacts upon women and our planet, delving into the universal undercurrent of ecological anxiety in the face of such toxicity, and the personal experience of being a new mother concerned about the future her child will face.

Through these confrontations of the complexity of living in a woman’s body, Her Body Among Animals moves us from hopelessness to a future of resilience and possibility.