I think that, for me, it was important to create a female character with honest and real flaws.”

“We are all heroines and heroes of our own stories. Joan is overtly described as an anti-heroine on the jacket. “Really in tune,” comes the instant response. Should Joan be described as a misandrist or someone who’s really in tune with the cruelty men are capable of? I’m writing a novel and if the character says she feels raped by something, that’s her prerogative.” We’re ‘supposed’ to have these solid definitions. I’m always interested in the fact that we don’t allow women mainly to describe how something makes them feel. “It has different connotations and meanings.

“The word ‘rape’ in the legal sense means a certain thing,” says Taddeo. There are a hundred such small rapes a day. He was picking a pimple on his chin and staring at me. I was in a white nightgownish dress, thin as smoke. The young man at the cash register noticed me and then didn’t take his eyes off of me. Taddeo conveys Joan’s undisguised disdain towards men throughout the novel, often describing daily violations as “small rapes” or “feeling like rape”, as seen in the following passage during Joan’s visit to a marketplace: “I’m very affected by the notion of the mad woman.” Taddeo’s motivation for penning a novel about a woman who has spent her life surviving men and holds utter contempt for societal expectations as dictated by instutionalised patriarchy, originated from her research after writing Three Women: “I had seen so many stories of so many women who were told they were crazy when they were just upset. She’s trying to own the nomenclature herself.” “When she tells people she’s depraved she’s telling people what they’re going to call her before they call her that. “Joan is very much going through this awakening where she has stopped caring what people think of her,” Taddeo explains via a WhatsApp call from her home in Connecticut, US. Meet Joan: a 36-year-old Italian-American woman who witnesses her ex-lover’s suicide over a dinner with her current (married) lover on the first page of Lisa Taddeo’s feverishly hypnotic debut novel, Animal.

If someone asked me to describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use.

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