A Real Animal: A Guest Post by Emeline Atwood

Emeline Atwood's debut novel follows a young woman caught between her youth and adulthood, who starts an unexpected chapter in a new city and navigates uncertainty, loneliness and identity. Read on for an exclusive essay from Emeline on writing A Real Animal.

I started writing A Real Animal in 2019, after having experienced a traumatic event. I was just twenty-two, and I think it was the first time I felt and understood my mortality—not in the form of “I am going to die one day,” just in the form of, “What if this pain I’m feeling is permanent?” I also remember thinking: I don’t know what to do with my body anymore.

I didn’t know back then that the sentences, feelings and snippets of the scene I was putting into my notes, in the wake of that event, were the seeds of this novel. I wasn’t writing as a way of making me feel better, or a way of consciously recording my experience. Writing is just what I’ve always done, to move through any moment in my life, both the difficult ones and the not so difficult ones.

What did I do back then to make myself feel better? Somewhat randomly and impulsively, I decided to learn how to scuba-dive. And scuba-diving did make me feel better. Being underwater—in the ocean, among bodies so different from mine, in a habitat that wasn’t mine—reconnected me to my body in an amazing way. It made me think: wow, my body can change into anything. I can become anything! And then, at some point, I also remember having the thought: I don’t want to be inside another body just yet. I still want to be inside this one.

A lot of A Real Animal explores what it means to exist within a traumatized body, what it means to live within a traumatized world, and how our survival and healing ultimately depends upon our ability to coexist and connect with others.

I really believe that the most powerful things we create in our life are our relationships with one another. This book has characters like Lucy who are complex and wounded and frustrating, who make decisions and have desires that are difficult to witness and inhabit. But I think, and hope, that the adventure of reading and of living is grappling with this challenge of how to accept, how to love, how to understand.

This is the first book I’ve had out in the world, and I still feel like I’m at the very beginning of this disorienting and extraordinary experience of having people I don’t know read something I wrote. People have described the book as visceral. This description has helped me understand something important about Lucy, and how desperately she’s searching for a way back into her body, how this is what drives her “coming-of-age.” One of the agonies she suffers in the wake of trauma is the way it’s cut her off from her body. She wants the experience of having a body back. She is not trying to numb herself out – she wants to survive. She wants to feel things, anything, even pain.

I can only hope that my book, if you ever read it, makes you feel anything at all. I hope that you have any kind of experience with it, that it makes you feel at all seen, at all understood.