A Real Animal

thank you so much to catapult for inviting me to the book launch party for ‘a real animal’ and providing me with a copy of the book. i was expecting to enjoy it, sure, but i ended up staying up late and waking up early to finish. i became obsessed and needed to know what happened next. this easily became a new favorite book for me. lucy is a girl navigating life as someone who is a watcher and an overthinker. as an animal lover, everything and everyone is a metaphor for some sort of animal. herself, a leopard in a tree. the nosy neighbors, waddling geese. a partner as he lashes out, a lion. lucy is a girl who keeps everything in until the point of explosion. who cannot articulate her thoughts no matter how badly she wants to. who says the wrong thing at the wrong time with a powerful,bitter tongue to disguise the softness and vulnerability on the inside of herself. the experiences of lucy are tragic despite being realistic and too common. the acceptance of the bad things as things that are just things, without an adjective. the way emeline atwood thinks is so real- i felt like she was walking inside my brain scraping up the things i cannot articulate and placing them on paper. this touches on the way that some women hold their trauma close to their chest and allow it to seep into everything they do, whether consciously or not. bringing small parts of who you once were into the person you end up becoming. wanting to be peeled back layer by layer by everyone you meet, but no one cares enough to ask. and when they do, it’s too hard to talk about anyway. there is a fear of not being good enough to love, not being interesting enough, being too different, being too needy. the fear of not being enough yet being good enough for everyone. the anxiety that comes with existentialism and introspection of self. the fear of being hurt and how it always comes true, even by those who promise they will never hurt you. but lucy isn’t the only one getting hurt, she is hurting people t