It’s probably not surprising that I loved Her Body Among Animals so much, since all of its stories circle around themes I find myself circling around in my writing, and in my life—dissatisfying relationships between women and men, the way these relationships tend to peel a woman from herself. Throughout these stories, Ferrante asserts herself as a master at conveying the tension inherent between a toxic man and the woman attached to him. Many of these stories veer into the fantastical, or alternate realities where it seems perfectly normal for a woman to become a spider, for instance. My favourite story was “Mermaid Girls,” which features young Dee, obsessed with astronomy, grappling with her older sister’s shift in obsession from outer space to boys; her shift in priorities from what she wants to what boys want. Viewing this transformation from Dee’s still-naïve point of view makes it all the more heartbreaking. “When you’re a girl alone in the dark, sometimes it’s hard to tell the things you should be afraid of from the things you think you want.” Ferrante’s writing is smart, fast-paced and full of looping sensory images and details that guide her reader into the skin of each deeply fleshed-out and sympathetic character, and zips us into their minds.

Why I wrote Her Body Among Animals

by Paola Ferrante

When I wrote the first story for Her Body Among Animals “When Foxes Die Electric,” it was about a decade since I’d gotten my Creative Writing B.A. In that time I gone to graduate school for psychology, dropped out, battled with untreated depression, got a job teaching, and felt I was going nowhere in my creative life. At the same time as I was working on my first book of poems, What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack, the #MeToo movement exploded, heavily influencing much of that poetry.

I found that while I was writing this poetry, I was constantly grappling with how to talk about difficult experiences, mostly by taking my cue from Emily Dickinson; I was telling the truth, but telling it “slant.” I knew I wanted to write short stories that thematically explored how women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies by toxic masculinity, interrogating the devastation it enacts on women as well as the planet. I wanted to talk about things like domestic abuse, postpartum anxiety, and depression. But I didn’t know how to grapple with these truths in a way that a fiction reader would actually want to read, because any kind of realist telling seemed either way too horrific or cliché.

Discovering speculative fiction saved me. I realized postpartum anxiety could be a poltergeist haunting a new mom, while a robotic hive-mind inspired by the Borg, an alien race that strips “hosts” of any individuality in the Star Trek franchise, became a way to talk about societal expectations of motherhood. By using genre convetions from sci-fi and horror, I did an an Emily Dickison to create the stories of Her Body Among Animals. My hope is that they tell those hard truths in a way readers can engage with.

Paola Ferrante is a woman writer living with depression. Her first short fiction collection, Her Body Among Animals, came out September 2023 with Book*hug Press and made Quill & Quire’s 2023 Fall Preview: Fiction and Short Fiction , CBC Books’ 74 works of Canadian fiction to read in fall 2023, The CBC Books fall reading list: 40 Canadian books to read this season, and The Globe and Mail’s Sixty-two books to read this fall. The Toronto Star’s  Robert J. Wiersema called it “a profound, unique reading experience”. Her Body Among Animals received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, which said “There is no filler here; each story is devastating, brilliantly imaginative, and almost impossible to summarize neatly. Ferrante is a vital new voice in short fiction.”