Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties
by Suzanne Roberts
Why You'll Love This
Roberts argues that grief and desire are the same animal — and the essays that follow dare you to disagree.
- Great if you want: essays that braid environmental grief with deeply personal loss
- The experience: meditative but restless — essays that move across continents and emotions
- The writing: Roberts pairs lyrical precision with unsettling honesty about shame and longing
- Skip if: you prefer memoir with clear narrative arc over fragmented, essayistic reflection
About This Book
What happens when grief and longing refuse to stay in their separate corners? Suzanne Roberts builds her essay collection around a single, unsettling premise: that desire and death are not opposites but intimately tangled, and that the animal parts of ourselves—the raw, embarrassing, inconvenient parts—are exactly where our most honest reckoning with loss lives. Moving through landscapes as varied as the Sierra Nevada, Fire Island, and the Amazon, Roberts examines private grief alongside public catastrophe, asking what it means to be a body in a world that keeps taking things away.
What distinguishes this as a reading experience is Roberts's refusal to resolve what shouldn't be resolved. Her prose shifts registers with confidence—lyrical in one sentence, wryly funny in the next—and the essays accumulate meaning the way memory actually works: sideways, circling back, landing somewhere unexpected. The structure rewards patience; individual pieces feel complete on their own, but read together they deepen into something more demanding and more generous. This is a book that trusts its reader to sit with difficulty rather than reach for comfort too quickly.