In the novelist’s Animal Instinct, an app developer and recent divorcee experiments with online dating during the Covid-19 lockdown.
What inspired you to write an anti-romance of the pandemic?
Like my protagonist, Rachel, I got separated right before then. A bunch of women I knew had left their relationships around the same time, and we were all having these conversations, not just about what hadn’t worked for us but about what else there is.
Your novel is about divorce and dating, but Rachel’s most important relationships are her friendships with women.
There’s too much societal pressure on nuclear families to be everything for people. Divorce makes you realize how important your friendships are, and how, in a way, those are the real loves of your life, the people who are there throughout everything.
Rachel, a middle-aged mom, carries on an adventurous sex life, even flouting lockdown guidelines with her hookups.
I felt an internal rebellion to the idea that adventure, romance, and fresh starts are only for the young. One early reader described Animal Instinct as a kind of coming-of-age novel, which is a funny way to put it. But it is, as well as a coming-out novel. Not that Rachel is closeted, but she is living her queer life for the first time. For a lot of people, that happens after some cataclysm, like a big breakup. I always knew Rachel would be after something different than another marriage to a man. Where does her motherhood fit in? It raises the stakes. It’s one thing to start anew, but when children are involved, you also don’t want to ruin their lives. You want to still be a good mom. Rachel models a different way to be for her kids, counter to conventional wisdom or the narratives we’ve been sold about good placid mothers and bad promiscuous ones.
Rachel develops a chatbot called Frankie that’s meant to be an ideal companion. What sort of research went into this?
When I started writing, I was working at a tech company on the editorial side, so I asked the developers questions about what goes into training a chatbot. Some of Rachel and Frankie’s conversations about Rachel’s bad dates were inspired by my own. Walking into a conversation with someone you’ve matched with and they just say something so horrible. You’re like, That’s so interesting that you think I would respond well to that.
How do you think readers will respond to the vivid sex scenes?
I’m curious to see how people react. It was important to me not to be coy about women’s desire, and to present a spectrum of women as sexual beings. I got lucky with my editor, Kate Dresser, who has worked on a lot of romance novels and was able to help me with the sex scenes. There were a couple of instances where she said, “Here’s a better way to do this.”
