Red Hen Press, 2020

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REVIEW BY SHANNON PERRI

The cover of Lara Ehrlich’s debut short story collection, Animal Wife, might make you scream. On it, a quintessential 1950’s housewife, dressed in a frilly apron and with a bow in her meticulously curled hair, offers a look of shock on one side of her face, while the other half has transformed into a snarling wolf. The effect is jarring. The cover suggests that, inside of this domesticated woman, lives a wild and dangerous beast clawing for release.

The characters in Ehrlich’s collection battle a sense of entrapment, too. These dark, fairy tale-esque stories reckon with how a civilized world holds girls and women captive. Like wild animals locked in cages, the characters rage against their plight. They bare their teeth, only to have their captors saw them off. For instance, in “Night Terrors,” a girl wakes up with an ominous feeling that something terrible might happen to her or her family. She is taught to quell her fear, only to learn that her instincts were right. In “Kite,” a mother “feels alive like a soaring kite and ignores the pull from far below, as if someone were tugging the string.” But the pull is there, limiting and restricting her.

Though these fifteen stories vary in length and only some contain elements of magical realism, they all share an absurdist, allegorical, and feminist tone, similar to the works of Carmen Maria Machado and Kate Bernheimer. Many of the stories are told in the present tense, heightening the brooding suspense. One is not even confident that the characters will survive to the end of each page.

The first several stories in Animal Wife center on girls, many of whom struggle with the anxiety of not knowing what it is they don’t know. They wade into murky waters, unsure of what danger lurks beneath the surface, but certain that danger is there. The protagonists age as the book moves forward. In fact, the collection is bookended by two linked stories, “Animal Wife” and “Animal Wife: Revisited.” The title story is told from the perspective of a girl whose mother suddenly vanishes. Many gendered rules constrict this girl. Her father instructs her not to fidget, develop calluses, or make others feel uncomfortable. Yet her mother, a sad and restless homemaker, has taught her differently. The girl reflects:

“My mother said girls have to take care of themselves. That’s how we avoid turning into sea foam and falling down wells. That’s how we escape hunters and kings who chop and carve and snip and steal. That’s why I practice punching every afternoon.”

The girl is devastated her mother has disappeared, and though there are hints as to what happened, it is not until we read the final story, told from the point-of-view of the mother, that we fully grasp the choices made and the transformation that has occurred. Ehrlich reveals why the mother had to leave, as well as the painful consequences of her decision. We feel for both the daughter and mother. We sense their ache. It is this sort of complexity that makes these beautiful stories so haunting and evocative.

Throughout the collection, many of the characters rebel, though rarely without a hefty cost. Often, their freedom from the captivity they’ve known only leads them to another prison. In “Vanishing Point,” one of the strangest, yet most stunning stories in the collection, a newly single academic “needs a change she can’t come back from,” so she tries to transform herself into a deer. She eats grass, wears a deer suit, even tricks a buck into mounting her. Yet as the story goes on, she finds herself enslaved to a new master and committing acts of betrayal.

Another compelling and especially timely theme explored in Animal Wife is the weight of motherhood. With the pressures of a deadly, uncontrolled virus on the loose, mass financial stress, evaporating childcare, and escalating racial tensions, many women are bursting with what The New York Times deems “mom rage.” Though perhaps intensified by the current moment, Ehrlich reveals how this anger is nothing new. It is not that the mothers populating Animal Wife don’t love their children, it’s just that they love themselves, and the worlds they inhabit make it nearly impossible for both to be true. One story states:

“In the fairy tales, a stag eludes a prince, drawing him deeper and deeper into the forest. There, the prince finds a maiden: a swan princess, a sleeping beauty, a girl dressed as a beast with three dresses folded into nutshells. He finds her in a lake, or a hollow tree. Although he doesn’t threaten her outright, he rides a stallion and carries a bow or a gun. Often, there are dogs. He bears her back to his palace, assuming she yearns for domestication. She grieves her wildness, even as she bears the prince’s children, maybe even comes to love them.”

Despite the devastating entrapment so many of these characters endure, a sense of hope prowls these pages, too. These girls and women are mighty. They do not give up or accept their fates. They swim across monster-filled bodies of water. They attend emerging writers workshops after years of putting their families first. They construct cage-fighting alter egos who can crush skulls between their thighs.

It is no surprise that Animal Wife is the winner of the Red Hen Fiction Award. Through gorgeous, searing prose, Ehrlich has created a cast of unforgettable heroines who rail against the unfair societal expectations that confine them. By telling their stories with beauty, nuance, truth, and magic, she has finally set them free.   

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SHANNON PERRI holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University and a master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Texas. Her words have appeared in a variety of newspapers and literary magazines, such as Houston Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, Texas Observer, Joyland Magazine, Fiddleblack, Literary Orphans, and fields magazine. Her short story, “Liquid Gold,” was a finalist for the 2019 Texas Observer Short Fiction contest; her story, “The Resurrection Act,” was awarded a 2016 Joyland Magazine Publisher’s Pick; and her story, “Orientation,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in South Austin with her husband, son, and menagerie of pets. Follow her on Twitter @Shannonperriii.