I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT HORSES AND SEX, by Lisa Hanawalt
Sometimes the best course of action is horsing around. “I wasn’t an appealing child,” Lisa Hanawalt writes in “I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex,” her new, winningly messy cartoon memoir. “I was mopey, I wet the bed for way too long and I was afraid if I pooped too much, all my organs would fall out of my butt.” So she pretended to be a mare: crawling around on hands and knees, feeling “powerful, graceful and gorgeous.”
As her title suggests, horses are one of two things the adult Hanawalt — an illustrator and designer behind the terrific animated sad-com “BoJack Horseman” — requires to lead a full life. Both of those pleasures, she says, require a lot of care taking.
Hanawalt’s beloved pony, Juniper, with her since 2018, is a luxury and a comfort despite being horny, demanding and hard to keep alive. Hanawalt’s sex life is a regular source of turmoil, shame, injury and loss; though it, too, can be fun. “They’re the two most mentally engaging things I can imagine,” Hanawalt writes above a panel of herself fantasizing about both: an elegant horse with a ribbon around its neck, and what is apparently an image of her ideal sexual partner — a shirtless Chef Boyardee holding up a pizza. The actual men (well, rabbits and cats, but you get the idea) in this book range from disappointing to appalling, and it’s hard not to see her point: At least Mr. Boyardee can cook.
Bodies — human, equine and beyond — fascinate Hanawalt, who dares us to imagine what it would be like to find increasingly ridiculous things sexy. I probably laughed hardest at the eroticized version of the PBS host Mister Rogers (he takes off more than just his loafers and cardigan), but the reader is spoiled for good gags.
Sometimes Hanawalt’s perspective veers into the horrifying, and the transition from Richard Scarry to Extremely Scary can be shocking. She imagines letting a guy take off not her clothes but her skin and muscles; he’s only satisfied when he saws apart her femur. Her self-depictions alternate between a pink bird, a green, Muppety monster and (briefly, literally) a butt hole.
Hanawalt’s jokey vignettes and colorful animal drawings belie a very serious narrative precision. “Horses and Sex” is not a book of short stories, but “memoir” feels too narrow to encompass its long sections of text and silent pages of loose sketches punctuated by striking, Hockney-esque paintings and beautifully composed photographs. She is telling a story, but not the story her earnest cartoon avatar says she’s telling; in fact, the author’s depictions of events often contradict her character’s assessments of them.
In the book’s most complex section, pink-bird Lisa hooks up with a blue rabbit who cooks her dinner. When they start to make out, she begins to dissociate. “This is a nice man who just wants to have a nice time,” she thinks, despite many indications that he is not. The story segues into a truly horrible flashback of childhood abuse, and Lisa leaves her oblivious date’s house crying. “Well, another hookup ruined by me being insane!” Lisa says, but Hanawalt leaves us to try to pin down shifting questions of agency, misogyny and trauma for ourselves.
Hanging over the book like a fog is the more general observation that things are a lot harder for women than they ought to be, and that a lot of supposedly liberatory innovations are basically con games. Early on, Lisa’s boyfriend Adam confesses that he wants to sleep with other people; quickly, a polyamory-positive community assembles itself around the couple like a Spirit Halloween in a vacant storefront. Multiple therapists advise that they’re practically duty-bound to explore this exciting new frontier in their 15-year relationship, which is probably strong enough to withstand a foundational change.
It isn’t, sadly. The couple break up, and Lisa decides to freeze her eggs. Juniper becomes both her main source of happiness and a living metaphor for Lisa’s sense of herself as high-maintenance and skittish. The horse is also a crucial tether to the world of bodily needs, functions, pleasures.
If these problems aren’t new, it’s a relief to read them in such vivid, contemporary and occasionally gory detail, and not as a preamble to some overbroad philosophical treatise. Hanawalt uses her considerable gifts to describe parts of herself she might prefer to obscure or hide. And yet her openness and authenticity feel carefully calibrated: Lisa cheerfully tells the reader that most of her relationship with Adam is “none of your business.”
Whatever lessons Lisa learns about sexual liberation and its discontents she learns from Juniper, who is going through it too, and is just as frail and emotionally volatile as the author. But whereas Lisa’s endless introspection — the “I Can’t Stop Thinking” part of the book’s title — often brings her to tears, Juni has avoided self-knowledge altogether. She isn’t crying. She’s just a little horse.
I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT HORSES AND SEX | By Lisa Hanawalt | Drawn & Quarterly | 251 pp. | $25
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