Animal Like Them

Another lock-in at my local, where they knew my order by heart. My best friend and I talked to the bartender I fancied through a haze of cigarette smoke. ‘Scrumpy should be as strong as vinegar and feel like you’re swallowing sandpaper,’ I declared, always self-righteous about my home county’s finest export. ‘We want the driest cider available to humanity…’ my friend slurred, adapting Withnail’s infamous words. 

I awoke the next morning in a sweaty, cidery tangle of bedsheets. It was 2014. I spent my nights in damp rooms with red wine and roll-ups and my days beneath duvets or downing coffee at the backs of lectures. I revelled in my hedonism, inspired as I was by the likes of Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson — men who wrote about their sordid lust and drink and drug-fuelled escapades with brutal poetic honesty.

But I was frustrated by the lack of women who wrote with the same wild abandon. Sure, there were books by women of the Beat generation, but none that matched the freedom I adored in On The Road (1957).

One day, desperate for distraction from yet another hangover, I flipped the pages of a new book. ‘You know how it is. Saturday afternoon. You wake up and you can’t move.’ It was a female voice, like a friend talking to me across a pub table — intimate, funny and honest. I read on, overjoyed at discovering Laura and Tyler, two women navigating their messy way through life, unapologetically raucous… having rough sex, rough nights, and rougher hangovers. I had stumbled upon Emma Jane Unsworth’s Animals (2014) and at last, I saw myself on the pages of a book.

Like Laura, I was an aspiring writer, could never resist the distraction of my best friend and a bottle of wine, and I inhabited a female body.

Unsworth subverts the shame hoisted on women about sex and bodily functions by letting her characters talk freely about everything — from cunnilingus to farting. On a dawn walk home from a one-night stand, I wondered what Laura and Tyler would say about the man who’d inexplicably cut off my pubic hair while going down on me. Inspired by them, I later held forth at a party, telling the story to a room full of people, refusing to be ashamed.

Until then, I thought no one wanted to read about young women’s lives unless they were extraordinary, but the only thing extraordinary about Tyler and Laura was their capacity for intoxicants.

In the end, seeing my own world reflected back at me in Animals gave me the impetus to write the stories I wanted. These days, I drink less and write more. I have a literary agent; I write about the complicated, flawed, confused lives of ordinary young women, and I can say with certainty, I would not be the writer I am now without Emma Jane Unsworth guiding the way.