I had uncovered a lot of stories that I didn’t tell in Three Women and there was so much kickback on some of the conversations. For example, imagine a mother with suicidal ideations, people wouldn’t have wanted to hear the story. I was so struck by that and the idea that women can’t be honest about their desires, or their anger and grief. There’s this impression that when men need to, they can go off and sow their wild oats and take long trips away to reconnect with themselves, and women don’t really have that. I think we invariably are seen as being ‘bad women’ in some way if we do that. And so Animal was born out of a desire to let someone have a primal howl.

It starts off with the protagonist Joan, or the anti-heroine as people have taken to calling her. She is having dinner with a married man and another married man comes in and shoots himself in the head in front of her. Sometimes you need a reason to leave New York or any city in which you’ve fitted in for a while, and that is the sort of kick-off for her. She realises she has to get out of New York and decides to go and find the woman who holds the key to her past; Alice who lives in Los Angeles. Joan takes this road trip and the book is both a physical road trip and an inner journey of going back and sorting through the moments in her past.

It was later on. I started working on this as my thesis for my MFA in fiction at Boston University. The title was ‘The Overheated House’ to begin with. There was always the idea of this heat and stifling oppression at the point she was at in her life.

A lot of Animal and Joan’s grief mirrors my own experiences. I did not lose my parents in the same way as Joan does in the book but I drew some inspiration from my past. I wanted to interrogate the feelings that we have and to show that in order to completely empathise, sometimes we need to see things under higher pressure.

I’ve lived all over the country and I’ve lived in both those places. I lived in New York for the longest and LA is the one place that still feels so unknowable. It never really gelled for me – it always felt like a little bit out of reach and out of touch. I was taken by that. I also think it’s a very dangerous place. There are these canyons, steep drops, coyotes, and rattlesnakes, and there are always car accidents. It’s a lot. I wanted to really explore the Gothic nature of Los Angeles.

I feel that as women, we still insist upon making each other perform for one another. It’s so heartbreaking. For example, we have to pretend to be tired of our husbands or excited by something else – there’s constant pressure. There are all these different things and if you don’t fulfill them, you are kicked out of the club of women. That’s a point I really wanted to make. We have to do so much in order to be liked by our fellow women. I think it’s really dangerous and it just makes us angry.

The book is called Animal and at that moment, Joan is becoming her animal self. For me, it was metaphorical. I’ve had miscarriages and I know so many women who have, and there are all these stories that we don’t talk about. We don’t discuss what we do when we’ve had a miscarriage at home. Someone I know flushed it down the toilet and another person I know froze it in their freezer. That’s just what happened. It makes the most sense for where Joan is in the story and it’s open and raw because that’s often the reality.

The relationship between Joan and Vic was one I had an interesting time thinking about because I didn’t want Joan to just feel like a victim throughout the book. I wanted her to feel an element of getting involved in something herself, with more agency. When we read this we know where she’s come from and what she’s lost.

Meanwhile, although Vic’s back story isn’t explored as much, the same things have likely led him to be needy and tentacle-like with his extremities. I wanted to tap into the idea that he isn’t just this terrible predator and she isn’t just this perfect victim. It’s a relationship that didn’t have to be rotten but ends up being so because of both of their stories and where they came from.

Definitely, Joan, although a little bit of everyone else too. I can identify with Vic and that sense of obsession. I wanted to capture it in a way that didn’t reduce him to this hideous human being. Obsession often comes from various sources, and I completely understand this.

It felt really good to write fiction and not have to worry about real people, in the way I did with Three Women. I enjoyed writing in my own first-person voice too, rather than taking on the voice of others this time.

The first time I wrote it, I wrote the first 100 pages or so in the third person and it didn’t felt right. I then rewrote it in the first person, and sometimes the second person because I wanted it to feel much closer.

It’s helpful to me to write exactly the way that I want to write, as though nobody is watching or no one will ever read it. That is the one thing that that stops me every single time from succeeding – when I think about someone else reading it. In some instances, having a specific reader in mind works well but often, letting go of that and writing for yourself is the best thing to do. Say exactly what you want to say. It’ll allow you to be less scared and more excited. It’ll all feel more real and honest.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw, Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz.

That some people live incredibly difficult lives, whilst others have not been touched by tragedy at all, or anywhere near as much. Understanding that people have lived incredibly bloody lives is important because there’s always a reason for how we get to where we are today.

If we get to a point where we are pushing the world away, it’s important to ask why we are doing that. That’s what Animal was for me. It’s the origin story of how this woman, Joan, got to where she was.