After that episode she decides to learn to be a dominatrix. She has one experience as a sub and gets badly hurt. She takes the time in Tasmania to move further into risky sex acts. She doesn’t want to think about them, to feel anything for them, or to be safe or responsible. Amelia appreciates his reserve and rejects any overtures he makes to get closer, refusing to discuss their previous life or her mother as he tries to justify why he left the family.īut Amelia feels too much responsibility in being tethered to other people. He is delighted to see her, but being with him is not the same as the warm and embracing home life her mother had created. Amelia can’t cope with losing the mainstay of her life she decides not to attend her mother’s funeral and flees to Tasmania to stay with her estranged father. Then the second episode of grief explodes into her life: her beloved mother falls down stairs and dies. I need both boxes, one balancing the other out, me ping-ponging between them.Īmelia lives her life this way for the first part of the book and she thinks it is working for her. Then in another box, I shove all the vivid warmth and liveliness of the people I see at night. I fill it up with uncomfortable emotions and images. In one box, I put all the delicate, fractured wounds of the bodies I see all day. I can separate feelings into imaginary boxes inside the mind. She explains her behaviour to herself by saying that: In one scene she asks her partner to say the words ‘I will ruin you. My body could take the baton on and jog us both forward.Īmelia attempts to deal with this grief by engaging in sex with men found on websites, not one partner a night but a chain of men, going from one to the other, tracking them on her phone. I squashed his existence into my own and took it upon myself to jump into everything for both of us.
And takes it upon herself to live for both of them:Īfter Daniel’s death I had a duty to live in double time. She sees Daniel as an ‘everyman’, someone she might encounter walking down the street, or meet online.
Amelia is affected by his death because she believes he did not respect his body – something she understands.
‘Yeah just for a bit,’ I say, hand on the steering wheel ready to go.Īmelia has been deeply affected by the death of Daniel, the son of a local councillor, who jumped off a cliff. I’m about to pull out of the car park when I see my mother jogging towards me. After each job she escapes to a lookout where she can chill out and recover: She spends time and emotional energy on getting the corpse looking natural as a comfort to the deceased’s family.
This needs to be said upfront because a reader could get caught up in the detail of this story and forget that this young woman is experiencing deep pain.Īmelia’s family has a funeral business and Amelia is the cosmetician, a job she enjoys. Grief and its consequences are at the heart of Ella Baxter’s New Animal.Įlla Baxter’s debut novel is about a young woman attempting to make sense of her world and her body after she has experienced two serious bouts of grief.
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