Melissa Broder

Lucy has stretched the writing of her dissertation out for years, working in the university library and trying to get her boyfriend to commit to more. When a spat ends with them breaking up, Lucy falls apart. Her sister invites her to dog sit for her in Venice Beach, and Lucy grabs the opportunity, reluctantly joining a therapy group for love addicts and walking on the beach at night. Every decision Lucy makes is a poor one, often dramatically so, and while she would be exhausting to know in show more real life, she's fascinating to read about. One evening, she meets a cute swimmer and while there are some surprising things about him, maybe he's her chance for love, especially when the first guy turned out to be a creep and the second won't return her calls.

I don't know why, but I do enjoy novels in which women are the agents of their own misfortune. And this one has the interesting twist of the logistical difficulties of getting together with a merman, who may or may not exist. show less

Now this is a story! I’d reserved a copy of Melissa Broder’s book The Pisces at the library, but since it wasn’t immediately available, I opted to start with her most recent release, Death Valley. I wasn’t impressed, but The Pisces came so highly recommended that I was still looking forward to reading it. I was not disappointed.

First, many people did not like this book. After I finished I perused the reviews and found that people hated the MC, who by her own admission is a completely show more fucked up asshole, and therefore decided to give the book one star. This boggles my mind. The purpose of fiction is to pull you into a story and allow you to think, feel, and experience the world through a different lens. If you hated the main character of the book, it’s because the author was SUCCESSFUL at making you feel things about them. Like, what? Some of the best books I’ve ever read were about terrible people.

Anyway, yes, Lucy – the main character – is a dick. She’s neurotic, selfish, and terrible at relationships. She’s also an academic (natch) and has been working on her thesis about Sappho for over a decade. The book starts with her pretending to break up with her longtime boyfriend, just to ‘shake things up’ a little, and is dismayed when he agrees it’s a good idea. She freaks out, breaks his nose, and then goes to California to stay at her sister’s glamorous Venice Beach house to get away. Whilst in L.A., she joins a therapy group for women who don’t know how to love (or be loved) and who all manifest this in various self-destructive ways (which I found highly entertaining).

Lucy forms a bond with her sister’s dog, a creature in whom she begins to see unconditional love. She finds joy in nurturing and being nurtured, but this relationship is quickly sabotaged by the discovery of a hot guy out for a swim one night when she walks down to the beach. The two of them have an instant chemistry, and Lucy is sucked into a powerful, erotic relationship with what turns out to be… a merman. Yes. That’s right. A merman. Half sexy human, half sexy…fish.

Now, look. This could have gone badly. Erotic fiction featuring mythical sea creatures isn’t exactly the kind of thing I seek out, but I love magical realism, and I’m down for almost anything as long as it’s done well. And it is! It’s a testament to Broder as a writer that such an absurd conceit doesn’t detract from the novel’s underlying messages and themes. The relationship that forms between Lucy and her handsome fish-man is at once an epiphany and an escape from the harsh reality of Lucy’s deficiencies, leading her to increasingly ignore her sister’s dog and withdraw further from any healthy connections she has with other people.

Broder’s prose is quintessentially Millennial, her characters are self-aware even as they flail and drown in their own dysfunction. Her descriptions of sex (and other bodily functions) are unapologetically frank, riddled with self-depreciation, and ridiculously graphic – none of which is a negative, in my personal opinion.

Ultimately, after a heart-wrenching climax, Lucy is presented with a choice about how to proceed with her life…and love. She has to choose whether to pursue the idea of love that leads to her destruction, or to embrace the un-fun, unsexy, day-to-day relationships that, while void of ecstatic orgasms and the promise of being possessed, are where her true humanity lies. show less

I can actually understand the rave reviews for this one – it was well-written, compelling, provocative, unexpected, intelligent. Really, a lot of great things.
For me though, I’m pretty sure this is the worst book I’ve ever read. I hated it and will continue to never forgive it for as long as I remember it, which will unfortunately probably be much longer than I’d like to.
Horrible, fucking, terrible no-good book.
LitHub put this on a list of ‘a-typical romances’, the blurbs were show more genuinely intriguing, and the cover is gorgeous, so I thought, I can suspend disbelief enough to deal with a merman romance. I didn’t love Shape of Water, but it was more believable a romance than Disney’s new Beauty & the Beast, so okay, sure, why not?
She kills the damn dog. That’s why not.

Lucy is a mess, she’s mentally and emotionally unstable. She’s a judgy bitch and at times I genuinely found this both relatable and refreshing (and then promptly felt bad about feeling that way, because I’m a woman and we’re supposed to be nice, and kind, and maternal and blah, blah, blah… but that’s the point and that is one thing that Broder has done really well in this book).
But as her spiralling escalates (as does the crazy of every other female character in book), I began to lose interest. Good thing, that was when fishboy comes along. Theo is the sensitive version of a romance novel hero and he’s fine, whatever. Their love story is fine, whatever.

As the weeks carry on, Lucy eventually ends up accidentally overdosing the dog for so she can spend more time with fishboy. Perhaps I should have just stopped reading then. But, this is about 90% of the way in and she’s already planning to join Theo in the ocean, so I figured her suicide might make me feel better. But, yeah, no. She decides to live, and never feels remotely bad enough about how she killed the damn dog. How she let her own baggage get in the way of taking care of an innocent life depending on her.

I’m still so sad and angry and, for lack of a less melodramatic word, completely overwrought about this. I know that this is a personal problem and reaction here, and that it isn’t the point of the narrative, but there’s nothing else I’ll take away from this book. Which is a shame, because this is a smart and compelling work and it makes a lot of interesting points about the pressures of being a woman today. The mental and emotional instability ring true and shades of them were relatable. The merman love story was a clever metaphor, it could have been enough…

But, just, why did she have to kill the damn dog?!? show less

tentative 5 star?
i had a wild ride with this one. keep in mind that i loved 'bunny' and 'big swiss'-- if these kinds of stories aren't up your alley and you hate a narcissistic FMC that is consistently self-centered and cracking jokes to nullify the discomfort, you might want to pass here.

our narrator is an author struggling with her manuscript, a firstborn daughter coping with the dread of her father dying in the hospital, and a wife navigating how to love a husband who she knows will die show more before her. so why not flee to a best western in the middle of the desert and rot for a while? nothing bad could happen.

that being said, the grief of this story felt very real and familiar. when you're desperate for something to anchor you through the pain, for there to be a god of any sort, for there to be some magic in the world or in you... your mind may fulfill the prophecy, and it might create a giant cactus for you to unpack your trauma in.

have fun! show less