This week, I’m writing about another book featuring a queer woman with a deceased father, meaning ⅖ of my book recs so far fall into this category.
Would you believe me if I said it wasn’t my intention to create a newsletter hyper-specific to my own experiences? I swear this is the truth.
Anyway, my girlfriend and I are driving to Florida next week to spend time with her family, so this book felt like a relevant choice. The state is its own character here, with its thick humidity, alligator-filled lakes, and stray Publix bags on every page.
Fortunately, my time there will almost certainly involve less taxidermy.
— Becca
Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett
Fiction, June 2019
This book kicks off with the narrator, Jessa-Lynn, learning how to skin a deer in her father’s taxidermy shop. Ten pages later she finds him slumped over in the same shop, dead by suicide. And things only get messier from there.
After her father’s death, her mother begins making lewd art out of his work. Think: a panther propped up on a goat in a suggestive position. A racoon in a satin negligee. An alligator skull with panties stuffed in its mouth.
These are some of the tamer examples, and they get progressively wilder as her mother gains the support of a (hot) local gallery owner.
Meanwhile, Jessa is constantly thinking about the only woman she’s ever loved, who also happened to be her brother’s wife. We get the story of their love triangle entirely through flashbacks, as the woman disappeared years before the book takes place, leaving both siblings to cope with her absence and care for her children.
And the physicality of the novel suits the plot. Every surface is sticky or grimy and possibly crusted with blood. Every blanket is covered in dog hair. Everyone is constantly sweaty and wiping their dirty hands on their clothing. Certain scenes made me want to shower.
But it works.
I’ve always sort of hated taxidermy, thanks to my childhood in rural Pennsylvania. The word always brings to mind a specific memory of my uncle, butchering a deer in my grandparents’ basement, telling me to close my eyes and put out my hands. I don’t know what I expected, but what I got was a brain in my palms.
This book can’t erase that memory—nothing will—but it did give me a new respect for taxidermy as an art form. And here, it’s an art form that happens to perfectly represent Jessa’s control freak desire to freeze things and people in time and make them just how she wants.
It’s unsurprisingly dark and deeply unsettling. Rarely have I audibly gasped while reading, but the initial reveal of her mother’s art (which she claims “highlights similarities between sex acts in the animal kingdom and those in modern suburbia”) is so weird I couldn’t help it.
Of course, that’s not to say that the book isn’t funny. If you’ve read anything by Arnett before, you know that it is. But it’s her own specific brand of funny that adds levity to discomfort and sadness, rather than standing on its own.
Ultimately, Mostly Dead Things really just made me want more books with queer protagonists like Jessa. She’s kind of infuriating as a character, with her tendency to avoid everyone’s feelings (including her own) and push people away at the slightest hint of intimacy. But she gets to be a whole person, with struggles and challenges other than the standard “coming to terms with their sexuality” storyline that so many queer characters are stuck with.
With Jessa, we get to see a queer person tackle issues other than her sexuality. We see her struggle with her grief, her intense need for control, her familial relationships, and her attempts to fix the taxidermy her mother ruins with S&M gear. Kind of like lots of queer people do in real life, minus the last part.
Queer points:
+3 for a good ol’ U-Haul stereotype reference
+7 for the fact that almost every description of Jessa’s love interest mentions her long fingers
+14 for a lesbian couple who, at one point during their marriage, owned a woodworking business together
Buy it from Cultured Books