While growing up in Palo Alto, it was not uncommon for animator Lisa Hanawalt to pretend she was a horse. This game of make-believe was a way for Hanawalt to escape her “burdensome and awkward” body, as she writes in her candid new illustrated memoir, “I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses And Sex.” “But when I was a horse, I was powerful, graceful, and gorgeous.”
Although Hanawalt might be an unapologetic horse girl, she really hates a horse pun. So when it came time to choose a title for the book, she decided to keep it literal. “This is just the most true version of what this book actually is,” Hanawalt says about the utterly confessional nature of her book’s title, which groups two seemingly unrelated subjects that her mind wanders to when she’s bored. “They’re the two most mentally engaging things I can imagine,” she writes as a self-described “anixous lil freak.”
Sitting in her Los Angeles home, the designer of such adult animated touchstones as Netflix’s “BoJack Horseman,” “Long Story Short,” and her personal creation “Tuca & Bertie” is drinking from a mug of tea as we chat over Zoom. When I ask what people’s responses have been so far to her book’s cheeky title, she says, “They just laugh. A lot of them are just like, ‘Well, I have to read that.’”
In many ways, “I Can’t Stop” represents a culmination of Hanawalt’s shtick for truth-telling via colorful anthropomorphized characters. The 43-year-old’s sketches are famously loose, bright and unrefined. Topics like weird body stuff, sex and horniness are never off the table. A typical drawing might feature an animal-human hybrid (say, a bird head on a human body) doing something utterly mundane while Hanawalt’s inner monologue appears in thought bubbles to reveal an intensely personal thought most people would never say out loud, let alone publish in a book.
“They all have personal things in them, some more overtly than others,” Hanawalt says about her particular oeuvre, which includes 2013’s “My Dirty Dumb Eyes,” 2016’s “Hot Dog Taste Test,” 2018’s “Coyote Doggirl” and 2020’s archival collection “I Want You,” as well as countless contributions over the years to publications like the New York Times, McSweeney’s, Vanity Fair and the now-defunct women’s humor blog the Hairpin.
“I think [‘I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex’] fits in with ‘My Dirty Dumb Eyes’ and ‘Hot Dog Taste Test’ in that it’s another kind of mishmash book, and it all goes together in my mind,” Hanawalt adds of her nonlinear storytelling, which in this book intersperses memories of couples therapy and egg-freezing with drawings of a sloth dancing with a bear. Or a deep dive on the filmography of Kevin Costner.
Hanawalt has never shied away from getting personal, but there’s no question that “I Can’t Stop” takes her disarming and revelatory style to a new level. “I think it just needed that extra layer of me going through a midlife crisis and breaking up with my partner and going through all this weird stuff. It’s a weird combo with the horse stuff because my love of horses is so pure.”
If Hanawalt ever felt embarrassment at being a horse girl (and she certainly has — as she got older, Hanawalt eased off of the horse games out of fear of being bullied), that shame has since evaporated. About eight years ago, as she faced a combination of career burnout and gut-health issues, Hanawalt started taking riding lessons in an attempt at self-care. “There’s something about riding that clears my head and eases my physical pain, for a moment,” she writes in a comic titled “How I Got a Horse.” When her then-partner (comedian and podcaster Adam Conover) noted how relaxed Hanawalt seemed when she’d return home from riding, he urged her to consider buying a horse of her own.
So Hanawalt reactivated her dormant Facebook account and began scrolling through local horse sale groups. That’s where she discovered Juniper (“Juni” for short), a 2006 Norwegian Fjord Mare. “I bought her somewhat impulsively,” Hanawalt says. “It was a huge lifestyle shift. Having a horse is often very stressful because it’s like a pet you have to rent an apartment for. It’s expensive, and they injure themselves … But then, being with her, I’m present in a way that I never am in the rest of my life. It just feels nice to care for another creature, human or animal.”
Spending time with Juni and a cast of new friends at the stables was physically and emotionally therapeutic for Hanawalt, particularly as new issues began to sneak up on her. For instance, she began to wonder if she still wanted to remain child-free. Simultaneously, her long-term relationship of 14 years was beginning to come apart. She describes in the book how she and Conover made a Hail Mary attempt at ethical nonmonogamy — an experience she’s glad to have had, even if Hanawalt jokes today about how she’s “a true polyamory fail.” She adds, “I don’t think it’s for me at all, and I never did. But I was willing to give it a go [as a] last-ditch effort to save something I really cared about. I think that’s the case for a lot of people.”
Hanawalt admits how anxious she was to talk about her breakup in the book — so much so that she considered avoiding it altogether. “I was dancing around it, and then I was like, ‘I don’t need to explain every little part of it,’” she says. Hanawalt even solicited creative feedback from Conover, who responded by playing her bits of a new stand-up special, which showcased his perspective of their breakup (that special will be the forthcoming “Big Divorce Energy,” out Oct. 23 on YouTube).
“It’s really nice that we still have that kind of relationship,” Hanawalt says of her ongoing connection and friendship with Conover. “Because I really value his opinion and input. He’s just a really smart, creative person, and that was always a strong point in our relationship. I also just wanted him to be OK with how I was representing us. I’m still very protective of that.”
The latter half of “I Can’t Stop” finds Hanawalt processing the end of her relationship, dipping a toe back into the dating world, and exploring fertility options such as egg-freezing. Despite its heavy subject matter — one especially tough passage looks back at a sexual assault Hanawalt experienced when she was an adolescent — “I Can’t Stop” is packed with absurdist doodles that keep the mood light without seeming dismissive. For example, as she describes how Juni behaves when she’s in heat, Hanawalt considers her own overwhelming “livestock mode,” which once included a hyper-fixation on Kevin Costner. This is all laid out in a section titled “Costner Watch,” where Hanawalt decides to consume every film the actor ever made.
“Yeah, I was losing my mind,” Hanawalt laughs at “Costner Watch.” “I don’t know. It was a cope, in hindsight.”
As she prepares to celebrate the release of “I Can’t Stop” with a six-date book tour, Hanawalt can’t say for sure if she’s answered any existential midlife questions. She jokes that her eggs are “still on ice.” She’s working on several new animation projects, though isn’t sure at this point which, if any, will move forward. (It probably also doesn’t help that the animation industry is currently experiencing a severe downturn, with record-high unemployment among even the most seasoned creators. “It’s a weird time,” she says.) To round things out, Hanawalt says she’s “selling hats” and even working with a perfume maker to eventually release a “horsey-themed” fragrance.
Hanawalt also has no clue what being a self-proclaimed horse girl even means in the year 2026. The other horse people she hangs out with at the barn, where Juni lives, come from “every possible income level and political belief, and they’re all kind of shoved together,” Hanawalt tells me. “It’s kind of like ‘Lord of the Flies.’
“It’s just so fun to have a community with people and be able to trust them,” Hanawalt says of the friendships she’s made through caring for Juni. “We help each other. Just to be able to go out on the trail and talk about blow jobs or whatever with women I truly connect to … They’re some of the coolest people I’ve ever met in my whole life.”
All that is to say, Hanawalt has grown more comfortable in not quite knowing what’s next. “You’re never fully happy or fulfilled,” she says. “And that’s part of being alive.”
Catch Lisa Hanawalt live Oct. 22 at 7 p.m. at Skylight Books in conversation with Priyanka Mattoo. 1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles.
Brodsky is an L.A. culture and music writer. Her biography of Stevie Nicks, “Lessons & Lace,” published by Penguin Random House, is out now.
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