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

Indeed, the easy promises of suburban safety are upended at even the smallest contact with larger oppressive systems. This is particularly true when Reilly is verbally assaulted by one of the neighbor brothers while sitting in a car in her own driveway. They hurl vicious insults at her when she didn’t return their wave while she was driving, specifically declaring her a bad mother.

As Reilly (who was a graduate student for most of the time the book takes place) notes, this is born of a larger fear of women not fitting into neat boxes: “A good mom cannot be divorced, a single mom, a remarried mom. A work mom, a mom in graduate school, an artist mom…Notice, though, how all these assertions subtract woman and use only the word mom, as if the two could not be the same. Fish or woman, but not both.” The suburban woman who doesn’t fit into neat categories, and is not interested in the unspoken expectations set by her neighbors, becomes Magritte’s inverted mermaid–an object meant to be enticing that instead disturbs, repulses, and ultimately subverts.

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