Unveiling the Wild Within: How Amie Souza Reilly Redefines Our Connection to Animals in ‘Human/Animal’

Though the suburbs have long been sold to the American public as rich, white, and wealthy, places where women in particular can feel safe from the chaotic violence of urban life, the author’s experiences are anything but secure. Despite this no longer being true demographically speaking, as Reilly points out, the sentiment is pervasive, even when she and her family feel at their most endangered.

Reilly dives into the alarming behavior she witnessed and endured, using it as a jumping off point to analyze our ideas around boundaries on the whole: boundaries between animalistic instinct and polite society; the brutality of, and lack of boundaries within, colonialism and nature; the desire to protect oneself while staying soft. Like the idea of suburbs as a concept, Reilly’s book seeks to find a place of safety in a world that feels increasingly terrifying, even if it’s all in her head (which, to be clear, it very much is not). Her neighbors’ stalking behaviors are a microcosm of an American society where the real danger doesn’t come from within a broken home, but from outside community members who cannot be trusted–and who may, in fact, even wish to destroy us.

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