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Technically, says Kristen Arnett, a taxidermied animal is a ravioli.
This is not something she can spell out for anyone.
Suffice it to say that, like the best memes, it is both deeply existential and phenomenally silly.
She hedges before saying, Well, actually, maybe!
How many times has my 7-Eleven cashier had to figure out the riddle of what someones asking them?
Fuck, maybe a 7-Eleven is a library!
I read next to the Slurpee machine and they let me bring my dog, she recalls.
I signed a bunch of books next to the hot-dog roller.
Mostly Dead Thingswill take Arnett considerably farther afield, spreading her Florida realness via a coast-to-coast book tour.
Its deeply rooted in a place, central Florida, that seems utterly singular yet archetypically American.
Its a romantic tragedy about a love triangle in which the female narrator gets involved with her brothers wife.
Jessa-Lynn hates the art, but falls into bed with the gallerys owner, Lucinda.
I know that theres space for coming-out stories, Arnett says.
What does a day look like in the life of a queer person?
Whats the day-to-day domestic routine if you just happen to be a queer woman?
Jessa-Lynns family accepts her queerness implicitly, as does the novel; its just a fact of her existence.
Its not anywhere as prominent in the story as, say, taxidermy.
(The Morton family is not modeled on Arnetts, and she certainly isnt Jessa-Lynn.)
The author is no taxidermist, but she grew up around plenty of it.
At my house we had taxidermy.
The church I grew up in had deer mounts, she says, laughing.
Youll be looking at someones Precious Moments figurine and then theres also a stuffed squirrel there.
Id never really thought too much about it until I was thinking about how funny taxidermy could be.
This gives Arnett all kinds of room to play.
Brynn never shows up in the present, but in flashbacks she becomes one of the books best-rendered characters.
Memories are brought on by a scent, a smell, an image, a sound we hear.
Thats how memories pop up and crop up on us.
So I loved the idea of thinking about them in terms of the physical embodiments of these specific animals.
Time isnt a flat circle, but a stuffed animal a ravioli.
In terms Arnett might use but never explain, its about being the best ravioli you might be.
