.. most nights I find myself trying to combine with someone else to become this two-headed thing with flailing limbs, chomping teeth, & tangled hair. This new animal. I am medicated by another body. Drunk on warm skin. Dumbly high on the damp friction between them & me.
It’s not easy getting close to people. Amelia’s meeting a lot of men but once she gets the sex she wants from them, that’s it for her; she can’t connect further. A terrible thing happened to Daniel last year & it’s stuck inside Amelia ever since, making her stuck too.
Maybe being a cosmetician at her family’s mortuary business isn’t the best job for a young woman. It’s not helping her social life. She loves her job, but she’s not great at much else. Especially emotion.
And then something happens to her mum & suddenly Amelia’s got too many feelings & the only thing that makes any sense to her is running away.
It takes the intervention of her 2 fathers & some hilariously wrong encounters with other broken people in a struggling Tasmanian BDSM club to help her accept the truth she has been hiding from. And in a final, cataclysmic scene, we learn along with Amelia that you need to feel another person’s weight before you can feel your own.
Deadpan, wise, & heartbreakingly funny, New Animal is a stunning debut.
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