A couple of years ago every stand-up with a TV credit under their belt seemed to be knocking out an autobiography as if they were going out of style. Sara Pascoe’s first book is very different to that. Animal is more anthropology than autobiography. No mention of life on the road, big breaks or meeting celebrities, this is more of a self-help manual. Mainly for young women I would suggest, but all women and all men should read it too.
Animal is divided into three main sections, Love, Body and Consent. Within them Pascoe takes a long, hard, well-researched look at what it is to be female. An underlying theme is owning your own body and being comfortable with your own sexuality. Pascoe is brutally honest about her own insecurities, recalling how in the past she has not left the house because she thought she didn’t look right and how when she was younger she carved the word “FAT” into her skin because she felt overweight.
It is hard to get the balance right between comedy and serious ideas – the final unflinching part deals with rape, which is not exactly a natural subject for humour – but Pascoe gets it pretty much spot-on. It probably helps if you are familiar with her stand-up style as it means you can hear her voice as you read it. Like her recent stage work it is both well-informed and witty as it negotiates the tangle of modern sexuality. Pascoe never takes a knee-jerk stance. At one point she, albeit briefly, mounts a defence of the much-mocked Fifty Shades of Grey for acknowledging female desire, calling it "a step towards balance". She is less convinced by the merits of Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina steaming.
Where in stand-up Pascoe might pull the rug at the end of a routine here she writes one thing, crosses it out but leaves it readable, then writes something else. There are also pictures of trumpets whenever she makes a point that she wants to shout from the rooftops. Elsewhere footnotes and little D-I-Y illustrations pepper the text - Pascoe has done her own drawing of a vagina in the section on genitalia. To be honest she is better at stand-up than drawing. But then she is a very good stand-up.
A lot of the personal passages relate back to Pascoe’s youth, which sounds turbulent – divorced parents, casual sex, crushes on pop stars, house-being-trashed-during-party – but nothing out of the ordinary. She explains that she made a lot of mistakes when she was growing up in Romford as anyone might have. Even if they did not grow up in Romford. And even as a young adult she was still not necessarily making the right decisions. She is particularly frank about her own sexual history during the section on rape and consent.
Pascoe suggests at one point that growing up never really stops. Animal is the kind of book that everyone who is in the middle of growing up should read, so I guess that means all of us. We could all learn something from reading it. And at the same time as making us think it will make us laugh.
Buy here.
