Theses and Dissertations Collection

Perfect Animal is a pseudo-bildungsroman in essays that asks how to construct a life worth living. The narrator, who might define herself as “a girl,” is preoccupied with the question of how to be good, and failing this, searches for answers in a promiscuous array of personal history, literary analysis, psychoanalysis, art criticism, spiritual lore, and esoteric modes of knowing. Meanwhile, the collection’s geography (and her own) finds its contours in the narrator’s encounters and entanglements with others: a pet dog, boyfriends, landscapes, adoptive and “birth” families, friends, God, and the ghosts of neighbors past. Daily life, in this manuscript, grounds itself in attachment to place and repetition, and thinking often takes on a spatial effect: the mind contains rooms and trap doors, routines become an architecture built through time, art and myth are reenacted somatically, and dreams feel as tangible as a town once visited. As the narrator moves through these spaces, doubles back, and strays far away, she grapples with the force of the very pure animal inside her and the overwhelming desire to control herself into a state of perfection. How does one learn to live with both?