Excavating Memories: On Suzanne Roberts’ “Animal Bodies”

Suzanne Roberts | Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties | University of Nebraska Press | 2022 | 252 Pages

“The essay is a transgression,” begins Suzanne Roberts’s collection of personal essays, Animal Bodies. “The essay reveals the world we grew up in.” It is both “an accumulation of grief” and “a definition for love.” Her essays pull readers in close—to a place that blurs the natural and internal worlds. 

In Animal Bodies, Roberts navigates a topography of loss, sexuality, violence, trauma, love, and environmental harm. Her memoir is told in three separate parts (Death, Desire, Other Difficulties), and presents personal records produced by and stored within the body—above and beneath the skin. These records suggest the impossibility of grief and the fallibility of memory.

Using various narration styles, the memoir weaves fragments of memories into a patchwork of colors and textures. Roberts shares a range of experiences that have shaped her life: the passing of her parents, her infidelity, lost relationships, and the effects of climate change on the world around her. Roberts examines her own biological becoming, inquiring about our animal nature, who we truly are, and the reasons behind our choices. She writes about her epistemology as a woman, treating her body as if it were a setting itself. 

Poetic sensibilities permeate the book. Some essays take surprising formal shifts, or embody the shapes of their subject matter. The result is prose that folds back on itself, intertwining memory and story. “Bone & Skin” is a particularly affecting piece, told in just five short paragraphs. Its series of memories takes place in Roberts’ first person, as most of the essays do, and addresses a second person, who we understand to be an unnamed lover. It builds to a gorgeous meditation on the body, the system of bones beneath skin, and what it holds and knows. She writes: 

I trace scars with a fingertip, the thin, hard edge remembering the blade. The evidence of fracture, wound, fragility. The fine white light, the pucker of skin, the pink star where the bone broke free… the jutted pelvis, iliac crest, sculpted like a seashell… fibrous and calcified, will soon enough be stripped clean without the canvas of skin, red strip of muscle, the jellied yellow tissue. These woven bones, at last, shining naked.

Form fits function as the essay itself takes the shape of a skeleton, sculpted into hard and compact paragraphs. Or, perhaps it’s like a seashell, with a twisting whorl and gaping aperture that holds a sea snail, hermit crab, or water. Bones and shells ossify. The pelvis and iliac crest are contained inside of us: fact. But is memory fact? These glimpses cause the reader to wonder whether these images are the decayed matter of a once “fleshy” moment. Are they imaginings or exaggerations? Dreams? Memories at all?

Roberts isn’t sure. But that’s “how memory works,” she says. “Eventually, it becomes real, whether it happened or not.” Memories eventually lose their chronology and complexity, merging and blending, while becoming enveloped by others and replaced by familiar gestures.

The varying sedimentary forms that Roberts excavates within Animal Bodies become an extended metaphor for memory. While recalling the loss of her friend, Ilyse Kusnetz, Roberts creates a catalogue of birds, tethering each type to a recollection of her. About her mother’s funeral, Roberts writes only half a page, as if surrendering to the incommunicability of her grief. She suggests that metaphor is the way we gesture to what plain language fails to reach. For example, she uses a musical scale to encapsulate loss: “like the notes that bring music out of our bodies, one grief recalls another. Each new sadness dips into the well of the rest, carrying the old grief with the new.” 

With each loss Roberts endures, she arrives at a similar conclusion: it never gets easier, and the difficulty of processing pain—the scar tissue—never quite leaves the body. Grief separates every individual from the world, no matter how universal an experience it might be: “We are too far from death until we are too close. Then we have no way to talk about it,” she says in an essay entitled “Traveling with the Dead.” But still we try to find ways to do so, and Roberts is interested in what we can learn from the harshness of our own lives. 

In this search, she withholds little from readers, treating them like dear friends, and filling the pages replete unto bursting. The essay as a form, after all, is a transgression. The book includes an intimate look at Roberts’ sexual escapades, abortion, troubled friendships, and complicated relationship with her mother, which she describes alongside her mother’s painful death from lung cancer. For each of these, she questions without arriving at any uniform answers. Rather, Roberts offers an honest, messy portrait of loss and its various effects and forms. 

She recounts the affair she had while married and the subsequent affair she had with her (ex-)husband while in a relationship with her lover. In “In Love with the World,” she brings readers along in her reflection as she questions her choices, bringing her consciousness close:

I no longer wanted the life I had created—a life for which I had broken up a marriage and moved to another continent. What if I wasn’t having a fabulous love affair after all? What if I had just fucked up?… I thought I had been courageous, leaving my husband and setting off across the world. But if I had really been brave, I would have gone alone. Instead of creating the life I yearned for, I used this relationship as a stand-in for what I really wanted, which was the extraordinary life I could only fashion on my own.

Each essay in Animal Bodies reminds us that the female body is a site of emotional conflict, experience, intelligence, and memory. Roberts acknowledges her messy choices and admits to her fumbles while showing compassion for her younger self. Her experiences pulsate outward: there is nothing in her behavior that isn’t also inside anyone else. We are irrational and flawed by nature of being animals, she suggests. We can be wild, cruel, and unyielding. Perhaps causing hurt to each other is inevitable. But Roberts sees a difference between the harm we inflict on each other and that which we impose on nonhuman forms.

She questions the morality of ecotourism at a resort in Colombia, for example, and recalls wildfires in Tahoe, which begin as the pandemic strikes. She sketches beautiful scenes of the world as it falls: 

You flee now at 149,684 acres, before the evacuation orders come… You walk on together, avoiding the purplish jellyfish that have washed to the shore… you spot a rafter of wild turkeys under the eucalyptus trees. You both stop to watch them, listen to their strange and soft cooing. For a moment, there is no fire and no pandemic, just the brown striated miracle of these large birds.

Here the second-person returns, implicating the reader in climate collapse. Roberts encourages readers to reflect on how we treat each other—and moreover, how we treat other animals and our world—by confronting us with images of rising seas and burning forests.

Perhaps at some moments in Animal Bodies, Roberts is an antagonist. But here, so are we all. This is the final story she leaves us with: the world is burning, air is unsafe to breathe, animals are either dead or fearing for their lives, and COVID is about to wreak more havoc than imaginable. This is what Roberts has been doing all along: writing the nature of being itself, a state of simultaneous cruelty and generosity. Home to our savage, animal hearts.