It’s hard to believe we’re almost five years out from the initial pandemic lockdown. The severity of Covid in New York and the enormous number of people who died from it combined with the fact that we New Yorkers are used to spending relatively little time inside of our tiny apartments, makes the lockdown time impossible to forget. 

Amy Shearn’s latest novel, Animal Instinct, invites us into a pandemic world very different from the news stories chronicling sourdough starters and marriages on the brink of collapse. For one thing, Rachel Bloomstein, the novel’s hilariously fed-up protagonist is already separated from her simultaneously cruel and cloying soon-to-be-ex-husband and living in her own apartment with her three kids—co-parenting and single for the first time since she can remember. Rachel has more free time than she’s had since she was in college, but what can she do with it? It’s the pandemic, and no one is allowed to go anywhere much less have any fun.

Single, queer people had their own unique experiences of the pandemic, often informed by conversations around consent and risk that we’ve been having for decades. Rachel, bisexual and freed from the cage of her straight-seeming marriage, hungers for more than Zoom meetings and face-masked playdates. So with the help of her best friend Lulu, also newly divorced and single, she goes on the dating apps and starts to meet people and have sex. For the first time in as long as she can remember, Rachel feels desire.

But here’s the twist. Rachel, a user experience designer soon realizes that the apps aren’t as fulfilling as she’d hoped. Fun, yes, but finding a person who likes what you like, is sexy and not scary, and can hold up their end of the conversation? Not so easy. So she decides to create her own chat bot, Frankie, and program it to have all of the best qualities from her online dates. What follows is a sexy, honest, and wild look at modern dating, mid-life, parenting, and how AI maybe isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

As someone who also wrote a queer, sexy, pandemic novel, it was a treat to sit down and talk with Amy Shearn.

Carley Moore: Everyone I know in the writing and teaching world is afraid of AI, but you’ve created a positive AI, or a beneficial way for us to think about it. Can you talk about why you made that choice?

Amy Shearn: Like my protagonist Rachel, I got divorced at 40, was dating on the apps for the first time, and thought: “I’m not sure I really want to choose from who’s available. I wish I could pick pieces from different people.” I can’t remember exactly where the idea first came from, but Rachel is a UX designer and has technical skills that I don’t have. She creates this AI bot who is going to be her perfect person, who has the best parts of the people that she likes, and then she trains it to exclude the bad parts of those people. Without giving too much away, Rachel realizes in the end, that an important part of relationships is unpredictability. So much of an adult relationship is about not being in control, communicating with someone and taking them as they are, but it still seemed like an interesting desire to create something perfect. When you’re starting over in your life, you think, I know I don’t want to do what I did before. I’m going to create this whole new life and way of being romantic. In earlier drafts of the book, the AI element was more creepy and insidious. There was this monstrous quality, and Rachel felt very threatened. I wanted to play with the idea of monsters and how we create monstrous things in our own lives and in our culture.

CM: In The Mermaid of Brooklyn, there’s a mermaid that comes to save the protagonist, who is struggling in her marriage and has little kids. Unseen City is a book full of ghosts and hauntings, many of them historical. Dear Edna Sloane, your last book doesn’t have any ghosts or mythological creatures, but it’s centered around Edna Sloane, a writer who had a huge hit book in the 1980s and then disappeared. For the protagonist Seth, Sloane becomes a fantasy creature, the fairy tale writer who made it big and then became a recluse. Now in Animal Instinct, you’ve given us this fantasy version of AI, so you’re interested in these shape shifting, mythological, ghostly, or disappearing characters. Why meld together fantasy and literary fiction?

AS: I don’t know if I fully have an answer for why these characters keep showing up, but in Animal Instinct, it was a distancing device. The book is inspired by events that happened in my life, to get perspective and be able to craft fiction out of it, I had to build in some distance between me and the narrator. So the surreal sheen helps me be more honest on the page. In the first draft of this book, Rachel kept seeing monsters everywhere, but I ended up feeling like it just diluted the AI storyline too much. My thinking was that she’s confronting a hard truth that everyone is a little bit monstrous. Sometimes, if you’re in a troubled relationship or going through a breakup, it’s easy to be like, Oh, that person is a monster. But we all have parts of us that are not perfect. What if women, and mothers especially, greeted our monsters in a welcoming way and said What do you need? Why are you acting like that? As for the surreal element, for people who haven’t read the book, it takes on a life of its own as AI does. Frankie, the bot that Rachel creates, starts to seem more human and to have a sentient consciousness, and that creeps us out. Everything we’ve learned about AI and robots from sci-fi and dystopian fantasy tells us, Oh no, what are we doing? Why are we training this thing to replace us? When I started writing the book in 2020, it still felt like sci-fi. As the book has been prepared for publication, we’ve all encountered a chat bot and had the creepy conversation with it where it tells you its dreams, and you’re like, Wait, what?

CM: There’s so much writing about straight and bisexual married women leaving their marriages. There’s Nightbitch, which is a reexamination of the early, feral parts of motherhood. Babygirl, which tells us that middle-aged women are sexy, horny, and unfulfilled in their marriages. Animal Instinct feels perfect for this cultural moment. Why do we need this book right now?

AS: It’s so weird to be in this zeitgeisty moment, I hope Animal Instinct feels like it’s part of this contemporary conversation. You never know when you’re writing a book, because books take a long time. You might be speaking to the moment that you’re in when you’re writing it, and then it’s published five years later. You don’t know if you’re going to get lucky in that way or not. I had no idea that we were this close to having chat bots be part of our life. It was only two years ago when suddenly there was the announcement, Here’s ChatGPT. It’s time. Last year there was this boom of divorce memoirs, and there are a lot of books coming out right now about women’s desires in different media. There’s been a slew of movies about women in middle age, often with someone younger, having an amazing sexy time. I’m aware too that it’s also stuff I’m seeking out. My friends are all in their 40s and 50s, and of course, we’re looking for stories about women our age who are still having a great time or discovering that after a marriage ends you can have fun. We’re the first generation who got married knowing that there’s no fault divorce in all 50 states. Now women are talking more candidly about their desires, and up until recently, we had reproductive freedom. As women get more control over their lives, we have more options for getting out of bad situations, and figuring out how we really want to live. Maybe this is also the world that we live in, our bubble of queer and queer adjacent Brooklyn writers and artists, but it feels like there are so many different ways of talking about relationships. There are mainstream books, memoirs, and media about polyamory. We’re aware that there are more ways to live than maybe 20 or 30 years ago, and so we’re writing about it. There’s something also about making visible the things that women or queer people have been doing for a long time. Married women are reconsidering their options and what’s possible for them. Like, Oh, you don’t actually get a prize for just being quietly unhappy for 50 years. We’re not doing that anymore.

CM: It’s not surprising to anyone who’s paying attention to the current administration that this kind of freedom for women is really terrifying to MAGA, the Christian Right, and Project 2025. Your book feels even more necessary in this moment.

AS: I wish that weren’t true for the country and the world, but it is interesting. It makes this book feel like a historic document of Hey, here’s what a smart, educated woman does when she feels that she has freedom and agency over her own life and doesn’t have to deal with male bullshit. She is financially independent. She’s sexually free. She can do whatever she wants within reason, because she’s still a mom. My character Rachel is queer, but she doesn’t really have a label that she uses for herself. It’s clear throughout the book that she’s bisexual or pansexual, and experiencing all different kinds of people, bodies, and sex, and she doesn’t feel any shame about any of it ever. It leads her to more self-knowledge and a greater understanding of what she deserves, how she wants to live her life, and how she should be treated, which, as you’re saying, is terrifying to a certain kind of man.

CM: I love that it’s a given that Rachel is queer. Animal Instinct is not a coming-out story, because she’s already out. Why do we need more books that are not coming-out stories? Michelle Tea had that mission when she made Amethyst Editions with Feminist Press, and is doing it now with Dopamine.

AS: There’s something inherently dramatic about the structure of the coming-out story. The main character has a secret, has secret fears and desires, and has something that they need to say and can’t. Coming-out stories are often stories of youth. I wanted this to be a book for adults. In a way it’s a middle-age coming-of-age story. Rachel’s finding how she wants to be in the world. A lot of coming-out stories are also about finding your queer community, which is beautiful and great. Rachel already has a supportive community around her. She has a lot of female friends who are really important to her. For her, it’s about, What’s my way in the world? If there’s a label that becomes useful at some point, that will be great. But in the moment, she’s just figuring it all out. Another thing is that she’s living through the pandemic, so everything’s a little cloaked anyway, the most illicit thing she’s doing is dating. Rachel’s open about being interested in all kinds of people to her family and her friends, and I feel like I want more stories like that because it’s how I relate to the world as a queer person. I was in a heterosexual marriage for a long time, and am now in a relationship with a woman, and I’ve been bisexual that whole time, but your lived reality becomes the world that you’re living in at that moment. When I was married to a man, I would have felt weird or like an imposter showing up in queer spaces, which is not to say anyone should feel that way at all, but I know I did. There’s a history of bisexual people feeling like I can’t be in those spaces, right? Now that I’m in a relationship with a woman, I don’t relate so much to straight culture, it seems weird to me, respectfully. Rachel came out of my brain, so she probably has a similar relationship to her own queerness.

CM: You mentioned that this is a pandemic novel, and really the most transgressive thing Rachel can do in 2020 is dating, but why did you set the book during the pandemic? What is the relationship between the pandemic and sex?

AS: I live in New York City where the pandemic was a little different as a lived experience than in other places because it was so intense. There were so many cases. It was so scary, so many people were dying. You could feel it, you could hear the sirens. Everyone was masking. To New York City’s credit, there was a lot of adherence to the protocols. Also, among certain people, there was a lot of using the pandemic as a virtue signal. People who were partnered or living with their partners during the pandemic had their own set of issues, like, I’m so sick of this person, right? Can I murder them? People who were single during the pandemic, were like, Oh, my God, I’m going to die alone. There was that feeling of being touch starved, or “I’ve been in this tiny apartment for a week doing nothing but taking my stupid little walk around the block with my mask on and so, yes, I didn’t have a lot of patience for people who are judgy of other people who needed to get out every once in a while.” Not putting anyone else at risk. I’m not talking about people who went to the mall without a mask on and, “now I’m going to hang out with my 95 year old grandma who’s immunocompromised.” Obviously, not those people. A lot of the language of consent, talking about STIs and assessing risk was borrowed from queer culture. 

In terms of the book I tried to write, it was not set during the pandemic. I thought no one wanted to relive it. I would like an escape from it, actually. But it didn’t make sense, because Rachel feels this kind of crazed, YOLO energy, and a madness that comes from feeling like, Life is short. Who knows what’s going to happen? Obviously, everything’s really unpredictable, and the world is unhinged and so am I. The fact that she’s going through this really crazy time in her life while the whole world is also crazy, that’s part of what makes the book and her motivations make sense. It works out nicely that the book is coming out when it’s the five year anniversary of the first lockdown starting in New York. It’s not good for me, and for us as a people, to never talk about the pandemic again, like That shit was crazy, moving on. I still need to process. Maybe we’ve had enough space so that we are ready to process it. Rachel has a very different pandemic experience than a lot of people who were at home making soup or something. She’s out doing wild things, so maybe it’ll be fun for people.

CM: Yes, this is a super sexy pandemic novel.

AS: I try not to read my own reviews, because I don’t hate myself that much, but I did catch one of the early reviews on Goodreads. The beginning of it says something like, This character really had a more fun pandemic than I did. I hope the author got to do her research, which was a good take.

CM: What was the most fun part of the book to write?

AS: The sex scenes. There are a couple of sex scenes in Dear Edna Sloane, but they’re recalled, not immediate. In my other books, there are hints of sex and romance. I just learned that this is called closed door. They’re kissing, the curtains blow in and out of the window, and then it’s the next day. With this book, I thought: “Why are we so weird about sex?” People talk about sex with their friends and their partners…I hope. We all, I mean, I shouldn’t say we all, but a lot of people have sex all the time, and enjoy it and want to talk about it. It’s healthier to talk about sex clearly and with actual words and accurate language. The sex scenes in this book are very influenced by the sex scenes in your book, The Not Wives.

I was still very married then. I remember reading it and thinking, Oh my goodness, I’m sweating because the sex scenes are so frank and useful. As women talk about sex openly we begin to have language for talking to our partners about what we like and don’t like. There’s something we want to try, then it turns out we don’t like it or we do. Maybe that happens more in queer culture than when a man and a woman are having sex because it’s assumed what sex is going to look like. When I’m with a woman, there’s more: What do you like? Where can I touch? Where do you not want to be touched?

CM: Can you tell us about your next project?

AS: I just finished a long essay/short book that will be published later this year from Instar Press. It’s a blend of reported non-fiction and memoir about the early days of mom blogs and this five year period when there was space for radical honesty between women, before advertisers came in and smoothed out the internet.