Sample

Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties

$18.00
List-price:
Sale Price: $18.00
Sold Out

(Run Time: 6:58)

How do we reckon with our losses? In Animal Bodies, Suzanne Roberts explores the link between death and desire and what it means to accept our own animal natures, the parts we most often hide, deny, or consider only with shame—our taboo desires and our grief. In landscapes as diverse as the Salamanca's cobbled streets, the Mekong River's floating markets, Fire Island's windswept beaches, Nashville's honky-tonks, and the Sierra Nevada's snowy slopes, Roberts interrogates her memory and tries to make sense of her own private losses (deaths of people and relationships), as well as more public losses, including a mass shooting in her hometown, environmental devastation in the Amazon rainforest, and wildfire evacuations.

With lyricism, insight, honesty, and dark humor, these essays illuminate the sometimes terrible beauty of what it means to be human, deepening the conversation on death and grief, sexuality, and the shame that comes from surviving the world in a female body with all of its complexities.

Please note: This collection features writing on sensitive topics for some listeners, including but not limited to abortion, sexual assault, and death resulting from various causes.

  • Julia Whelan interviews Suzanne Roberts about the connection between grief and desire and how to write about life's most personal aspects. (Run Time: 38 mins.)
  • An extended outtake and mini-essay from Julia about why a particular passage made her break down while recording... and why she chose to re-record it. (Run Time: 7 mins.)

Suzanne RobertsSuzanne Roberts is the author of Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties, Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel, and Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail, as well as four collections of poems. Named "The Next Great Travel Writer" by National Geographic's Traveler, Suzanne's work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and included in The Best Women's Travel Writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, CNN, National Geographic Traveler, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno, teaches in the low residency MFA in creative writing at UNR-Tahoe, and lives in South Lake Tahoe, California. She's currently under contract for a creative writing craft book based on her Substack newsletter 52 Writing Prompts, as well as at work on a novel.

Julia WhelanJulia Whelan (Narrator) is an author, screenwriter, lifelong actor, and acclaimed audiobook narrator of over 700 titles.

She is, most recently, the recipient of Spotify's Narrator of the Year Award (the most listened-to narrator globally), the first-ever Gracie Award for Best Fiction Narrator (presented by the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation), the SOVAS (Society of Voice Arts and Sciences) Lifetime Achievement Award, and winner of the Audie Award for Best Fiction Narrator of 2025. She also captured both the winner and runner-up slots in the inaugural audiobook category of the Goodreads Choice Awards.

Her latest books — the Audie nominated duet romance, Casanova LLC (coming in print, Spring 2027), and the annotated Victorian poetry anthology The Poetry Of My Oxford Year — debuted exclusively on Audiobrary. jmwhelan.com

Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

“Suzanne Roberts’ essays are eloquent and vibrantly imaginative. They are lyrical in the best sense: the language is rhythmic, pulsing on the page, but they are never poeticized, flowery or vague. Roberts’ wisdom and humor are evident throughout. I so welcome a collection of her essays, all in one place.
— Carolyn Forché, author of What You Have Heard Is True and In the Lateness of the World

“I have been thinking about one particular Suzanne Roberts essay, “Breaking the Codes,” since I first read it. Sometimes, I open a closet door and my stomach drops, remembering one painful scene in her essay. Sometimes I see a group of teenagers and I wonder, and worry, about all of them. Roberts’ writing rearranges me in some fundamental and necessary ways. A book like this, a book by her, is a book I desperately need.”
— Camille T Dungy, Author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers and Editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Poetry

"Animal Bodies is a marvel, a heartbreaking road map of living, loving, and grieving. Roberts bravely recalls the deaths of her alcoholic father, her dear friend, and her mother, a complex force in her life. Here, we read about rape, escape, affairs, and repair. There is wilderness and then, somehow, the clearing--both in her world travels and the dying around her. Thinking about death clarifies life, and Roberts knows the thin line between grief and joy, the importance of living fully and fighting for freedom without apology. This is hard-earned wisdom and liberation. I can't stop thinking about it."   
— Lee Herrick, author of Scar and Flower and Gardening Secrets of the Dead 

“No one travels the depths of place and experience more phenomenally than Suzanne Roberts. In these essays that explore being, beauty, desire, death, and our collective animal journeys on the planet, Animal Bodies gathers our questions about life and brings them to the only place where meaning might emerge: adaptation. This book is a triumph that transcends human and gives us a chance to re-story ourselves into the larger world.” 
— Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Verge and The Chronology of Water

"In Animal Bodies, Suzanne Roberts offers surprising insight, both intimate and universal, into death, desire, and how we all move through this difficult world. Her essays are ruthless, beautiful, graceful, and endlessly fascinating. A wonderful book."
 — Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire

 “The essays in Animal Bodies unflinchingly yet so importantly meditate on loss and grief. As readers, we are fortunate to experience such stories of survival. They are poignant testimonies of passion, honesty, pain, and grace. I grieve for the young woman in each of us who, like Roberts, navigated a world of treachery, of love, and of double standards. Here, we travel with Roberts to beaches in Florida, to hospital rooms for chemotherapy, to Nashville Honky Tonks, and to the Amazon Rain Forest. We suffer with her the loss of family and dear friends. With us she carries to each of the locations her acute insight and her courageous and uncompromising desire to witness and record the world. Because these truths are the truths of so many, this is a book to be read by us all.”
— Didi Jackson, author of Moon Jar

"These essays soar like falcons and dive octopus deep; they carry the power and agility of tigers, the intelligent play of cetaceans. These essays are alive with lyricism and humor, thrumming with pain and pleasure and the complex spaces we inhabit between. Suzanne Roberts is a wonder and a force."    
— Gayle Brandeis, author of The Art of Misdiagnosis and Many Restless Concerns