Money Back Guarantee (MBG) is a series of reviews of books for which I would offer a personal money back guarantee (theoretically). These are books that are so incredible I feel confident singing their praises at an in-the-shower level volume. All hits, no misses, or your (theoretical) money back.
MBG includes three parts:
IG Stories — my review in my IG Stories BEWKS highlight
3 Quotes — I use the Kindle highlighter function a lot.
Further Reading — references, allusions, and works with a similar vibe
Got it? Ready? LET’S DO THIS!
Money Back Guarantee — Animal, Lisa Taddeo (2021, Simon & Schuster)
Joan, a thirty-something woman who often finds herself on the wrong end of a married man, experiences a life changing trauma that sends her across the country, from New York to California, in search of something true about herself. In many ways, she’s searching for family while unpacking the baggage her mother and father left for her when they died.
There’s something unhinged but/and infinitely relatable in the protagonist, Joan, who describes herself as “deranged“ and seems acutely aware of how others see her at all times. I imagine myself having coffee with Joan, and I think I would hate it, the forced feminine sizing up of each other, the competitive instinct. But as the recipient of her second person “you,“ I feel close to her. I understand her. Taddeo gives us something sympathetic in a character who could be written much more bleakly. It’s as though she’s saying that even a ‘monster’ like Joan has her story, her reason, and the way she unravels the details, page by page, for the most part, feels successful. There might be a little hiccup with the pacing around 3/4 of the way through, but overall, this narrative absolutely floats.
IG Stories
Infidelity, molestation, rape, murder, suicide—this one drew a lot of blood, a clotted primordial crimson. Joan, our protagonist, at first felt a bit Holly Golightly and then quickly sort of Blanche Dubois, with a hint of Cathy Ames, but by the end of this odyssey, she is entirely her own being, and isn’t that the point of any journey—to emerge as something new?
Three Quotes
“I am someone who believes she knows which people should be dead and which should be alive. I am a lot of things. But I am not a sociopath.”
“It was a very ugly car but large, and I was able to fit many things inside. My mother’s jewelry in a taupe tin. My best dresses, each sheathed in plastic and folded over the passenger seat. There were my Derrida and photographs and menus from restaurants where I’d spent memorable evenings. Essential oils from a holy place in Florence. A shallot of marijuana, a pipe, ninety-six pills of varying shapes and shades of cream and blue. Very expensive copper yoga pants and mustard bralettes. Boxes of smoked Maldon and twenty squat cartons of pastina, which I’d heard they did not carry at the Ralphs or the Vons. I took the things that could come with only me, that could not be trusted to travel under anyone else’s care. My favorite scarf, my panama hat. My Diane Arbus. My mother and my father.”
“Before I even found you, I imagined loving you. It felt like someone was serving my heart to me on a plate and forcing me to carve out pulsing segments and eat them without condiments."
Further Reading
Three Women, Lisa Taddeo (obviously)
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
Florida, Lauren Groff