REVIEW: Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays by Amie Souza Reilly

Reviewed by Sarah Rosenthal

I grew up in coastal southern Connecticut, likely not far from where the events of Amie Souza Reilly’s essay collection, Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays, took place. When I tell people I am meeting for the first time this fact about myself, they might make a reference to Stepford Wives, Revolutionary Road, or a similar tale of a dysfunctional, monied, white family that is deeply broken despite maintaining a perfect, all-American facade outside of their quaint home.

The implication when invoking these kinds of stories about suburbia is that no community can be peaceful on the outside without profound inner pain, which must remain hidden at all costs to protect the communal peace. This is particularly true for the mothers, who must be one of two extremes: cheery and wholesome, or bitter and angry.

Human/Animal, however, is a story of Connecticut suburbia that upends this trope. When Reilly, her husband, and her son move into the house they just bought, they learn that their neighbors are two brothers with a long-held grudge, who begin a string of bizarre, escalating violent behaviors meant to drive Reilly and her family out of the neighborhood all together.

Despite contacting the police on multiple occasions to no avail, the author is rightfully fearful and vulnerable, not to mention gaslit and ultimately powerless to stop them. Throughout her collection of essays, Reilly braids vignettes about this time in her life with musings on the boundaries of suburban civility, punctuated by animal verb etymologies with violent implications.

Though the suburbs have long been sold to the American public as rich, white, and wealthy, places where women in particular can feel safe from the chaotic violence of urban life, the author’s experiences are anything but secure. Despite this no longer being true demographically speaking, as Reilly points out, the sentiment is pervasive, even when she and her family feel at their most endangered.

Reilly dives into the alarming behavior she witnessed and endured, using it as a jumping off point to analyze our ideas around boundaries on the whole: boundaries between animalistic instinct and polite society; the brutality of, and lack of boundaries within, colonialism and nature; the desire to protect oneself while staying soft. Like the idea of suburbs as a concept, Reilly’s book seeks to find a place of safety in a world that feels increasingly terrifying, even if it’s all in her head (which, to be clear, it very much is not). Her neighbors’ stalking behaviors are a microcosm of an American society where the real danger doesn’t come from within a broken home, but from outside community members who cannot be trusted–and who may, in fact, even wish to destroy us.

Often in artist and writerly circles, the phrase “x as y” is used as a gesture towards metaphor. And in Human/Animal, Reilly takes her suburban home life and neighborly interactions as variables “x” to lift up against a multitude of abstract variables “y”. These variables are interchanged multiple times in each essay, to highlight the porousness of humanity versus ferality, nature versus nurture, vulnerability versus violence. Another layer of complexity is added in Reilly’s desire to highlight verbs with an etymological root in the animal world: to slug, to badger, to leech, to wolf, and more.

Human/Animal is, in many ways, a complicated algorithm of metaphor: property markers as a commentary on the meaning of courtesy; the erecting of a backyard fence as a frame for colonialism and surveillance; physical intimidation by a neighbor as feminist horror film. And this is not to mention the slew of cultural and philosophical criticism braided into each essay, including Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Maggie Nelson, and Jean-Paul Sartre, to name a few.

Reilly arranges this all to ask questions: where does our humanity end and our animal instinct begin? And why do we weaponize those instincts (both human and animal)?

The result is an ambitious, braided essay collection that resists easy answers because, like walking past all the houses lined up on a suburban street, there is simply no way to articulate all of the violence that can take place there, in acts big and small, seen and unseen.

At one point in the collection, Reilly invokes Rene Magritte’s 1934 painting, “Collective Invention,” in which an inverted mermaid (a fish head and torso with a human woman’s legs and genitalia) washes up on a beach. This inversion of the expected, fetishized ideal of a mermaid, subverting expectation, in many ways encapsulates Reilly’s experience of her Connecticut suburban home: “…I am drawn to [Magritte’s fish woman] because she embodies crossed boundaries, and mine have been crossed and I have crossed them…I look at ‘Collective Invention’ and I recognize the feeling of being home and not home, halfway out of my element, gasping for breath and unable to run.” Nothing about Reilly’s life in her “safe” suburban home fits into an easy trope; this is not unlike Magritte’s “mermaid,” who fits the description of mermaid despite her lack of anticipated allure.

Indeed, the easy promises of suburban safety are upended at even the smallest contact with larger oppressive systems. This is particularly true when Reilly is verbally assaulted by one of the neighbor brothers while sitting in a car in her own driveway. They hurl vicious insults at her when she didn’t return their wave while she was driving, specifically declaring her a bad mother.

As Reilly (who was a graduate student for most of the time the book takes place) notes, this is born of a larger fear of women not fitting into neat boxes: “A good mom cannot be divorced, a single mom, a remarried mom. A work mom, a mom in graduate school, an artist mom…Notice, though, how all these assertions subtract woman and use only the word mom, as if the two could not be the same. Fish or woman, but not both.” The suburban woman who doesn’t fit into neat categories, and is not interested in the unspoken expectations set by her neighbors, becomes Magritte’s inverted mermaid–an object meant to be enticing that instead disturbs, repulses, and ultimately subverts.

To be a mother and writer in this situation and in this particular place meant Reilly acknowledging her desire to do violence while simultaneously wishing to protect her family from it: “I wanted to hurt those two men. I wanted to protect my son.” Reilly’s almost feral desire to protect her son and potentially harm those who might hurt him is what makes her a good and bad mother. It is also what makes her human. Motherhood, like suburban life, is rich with paradox.

Unlike Stepford Wives or Revolutionary Road, the objective of Human/Animal is not discovering the lengths we might go to to hide messy human emotions so much as it is acknowledging the paradox of suburban life: safety by proximity without being too close to one’s neighbors; a welcoming community defined by a desire for strict property lines; an adherence to oppressive power structures even in the face of certain danger. Suburban harmony is a delicate balance of fear and protection, vulnerability and violence. And in our fractured political landscape today, the fear of one’s neighbor that propels Reilly’s writing is one I know well. After all, the marginalized have always had to carefully decide if they could trust the oppressor who may live on either side of them. And in today’s political landscape, the fear of one’s neighbor, as well as the simultaneous desire to understand them at their most illogical, is more salient than ever.

And it is for that reason that Reilly’s essay collection is perhaps one of the most honest accounts I’ve read of coastal Connecticut neighborhoods. The collection resists the easy narratives that have come before, mainly because it acknowledges suburbia as a place rife with contradictions at all levels, not just within an individual family. Rather than framing these contradictions as inherently negative, Reilly frames them as emblematic of so many of the problems facing our fraught American culture and politics right now.

I’m grateful for Reilly’s Human/Animal and its desire to subvert my expectations of what writing about women, feminism, and the confounding nature of the suburbs might look like. Because the contemporary suburban woman’s life is not so different from the squirrel or the fox she might spot in her backyard, ruled by hunger and vulnerability. Hunter and hunted; always both.