When a sad lady falls in love with a fish- The Pisces by Melissa Broder (Review)

 A/N: This review contains mild spoilers for The Pisces by Melissa Broder. This is your spoiler warning. And for the ones who are easily scandalised, I’m sorry in advance because I just couldn’t avoid it.

While the phrase ‘I support women’s rights but most importantly women’s wrongs’ is just trending all over the internet, (I’m not sure I quite understand what it means just yet) but in the case of this book and our protagonist Lucy, I do not agree. This character needs a mother, multiple therapy sessions and jail time for all the crap she puts Dominic through. 

Let me give you some context. Lucy is a thirty-eight year old lady who has been writing her dissertation about Sappho for the past thirteen years while working as a part time librarian at the university, until she has a life crisis when her boyfriend breaks up with her, the breakup which technically she instigates and then she descends into a downward spiral realising how she’s going nowhere in life- both career and relationship-wise. To the rescue comes Annika, her older sister who offers the chance to house-sit her LA house so that Lucy can catch a break and get her shit together while getting free therapy and also some great bonding time with Annika’s baby-Dominic the Foxhound. Thus begins the frustrating and uniquely absurd story of Lucy sleeping around and eventually falling in “love” with a fish-dude. 

It is funny and written with such vivid clarity. I feel that there’s two ways people could react to this book considering the fact that Lucy is such an unlikable but very real character- either you enjoy this raw journey of self-realization or you hope someone slaps the shit out of Lucy for every stupid thought process and action. The series of bad decisions Lucy makes sometimes just makes you want to scream- “Stop. Get some help.” 

Oh. Let’s talk about the fish-dude who I refuse to call a mermaid or a siren. She meets him on the shore every time she sees him and makes out with him without wondering if he’s a psychotic killer???? Like did no one warn Lucy about the dangers of accepting bodily fluids and candies from strangers? To be fair, the fish-dude subplot ended in a satisfying way and I loved that part. For anyone curious about this love story- no, it’s not like The Little Mermaid. Yes, it kinda is like The Shape Of Water, if you get where that goes. So here’s your warning about all the weird fish x human copulation.

If you ask me, Annika is the real victim in the story. She loses her poor dog and has a terrible, unsupportive sister that abandons her to run away with some fish-guy she just met. I wish Annika had gotten a happier ending. Also the group therapy gang (the women in the group who attend therapy with Lucy) was a riot to read about, their individual issues and concerns with love and the world, their obsessions and weird quirks and the sadness of it all.

What I really loved about this book is the way the narrative focused only on Lucy and the women she meets over the men. Even though they obsess over love and being lonely it’s still more focused on the female perspective, the men are important characters because they’re the objects of the women’s obsession and desire, but they take a backseat in the story. Even the fish-dude who makes an appearance very often throughout the novel doesn’t become integral to the plot as much as Lucy’s reaction to the situations involving him.

And to conclude my weird review on an equally weird book, let me share some direct quotes that made me laugh out loud and some that startled me.

I imagined a bouquet of d*cks, a stack of abdominal muscles like a deck of cards, painted across the sky. The hunger in me suddenly felt bottomless. It scared me a little.  

(It scared me a lot, Lucy.)

“I guess the gaps are sort of a reminder that, in love, things get disconnected,” I said. “People just disappear.”

“Maybe they leave room for something more infinite,” he said. 

(This is actually so profound because Lucy’s starting point for her thesis is about all the lost lines in Sappho’s poetry which I thought was fascinating.)

“I hate being separated from him for so long. You don’t think I’m a bad mother, do you?”

“No, it’s the twenty-first century, don’t be a helicopter parent.”

“But—”

“That’s just patriarchal guilt. Enjoy your trip, Aunt Lucy is taking great care of him.”

(Totally. She totally does take care of him. Yeah.)

Slutty, but an island.

(A cool way to say “not like other girls”. I appreciate it.)

Was it only their voices that called men forth or did they have some other kind of power? It seemed manipulative. Maybe they needed group therapy for romantic obsession.

(She’s talking about sirens. If you read this book with the complete context, you’d understand why this made me snort out loud on public transportation. The irony.)

Seeing myself through the eyes of a projection, however uncomfortable the judgment, made me feel safe in a strange way. It was like a box in which to live: a boundary against the greater nothingness, to think one knew something about what others thought of you. It was there I could begin and end. And perhaps it was a prison, to have to begin and end, but it was also a relief.

This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, the cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them—gods who looked suspiciously like themselves—so that even if they were powerless over nature, there were better versions of them in control.

(Melissa Broder is a compelling writer and you can’t tell me otherwise. Despite my frustration with the protagonist, the writing was stellar.)

Was it ever real: the way we felt about another person? Or was it always a projection of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?

Did it take a mythological deformity to find a gorgeous man who was as needy as I was?

(Yup.)

What would it take for him to be enough? Even if I were to cook him up and eat him, fry his deliciousness with butter and a bib, swallow him up and digest him inside me, it still wouldn’t be enough.

(Exactly what your SO hopes that you’re thinking.)

All those years I had tried to get us to cohabitate, and all it took for this blond scientist b*tch was some little womb booger and there he was, boom, ready to commit.

(I love this quote just because she calls the fetus a womb booger.)

If I was dead and he wasn’t dead, did that mean he had all the power? If I died for him, it was kind of like him not texting me back on a cosmic level.

(Lucy has her priorities straight.)

He had such a want for me, a desperation that I go under. He had wanted so badly that it be my own want that brought me under, that was how vulnerable and powerless he was over his own feelings. His need was so big that he couldn’t own it. He needed it to be my need.

(Gaslighting your gut feelings be like.)

Didn’t we all just want a thousand hard c*cks attached to the bodies of boys who have died for us, still warm, to plug our infinite holes?

(Um. No.)

A/N: Thank you for getting to the end of the first installment in my ‘Women of Words’ series where I read feminist literature by a new feminist author each month.

To read the second installment- here’s my take on The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson.