Breaking down the name of the book with Autostraddle, Arnett says, “I’m looking at it as mostly dead, not all dead, like there’s still something there, there’s still the beating heart in it.” Jessa’s “mostly dead-ness” is a byproduct of her bereavement. The novel’s title also speaks to Jessa’s hybrid state of living death. I had that power in me,” Arnett writes. Jessa herself also straddles that blurred boundary between life and death: she appears slightly ‘dead’ to the reader, as if she’s vacantly going through the motions of living - most days end with her getting profoundly drunk and passing out in the apartment that she hasn’t cleaned in months. “My hands commanded the flesh, brought life back from the grip of death. But, in an abstract sense, she also gives life back to the dead. Jessa’s income - literally her ‘living’ - is funded by death, so she takes ‘life’ from death. Since a taxidermist tells the story within Mostly Dead Things, the muddied borders between life and death structure the novel. Throughout the story, Jessa also struggles in the wake of another loss: Brynn, the woman Jessa loves, has skipped town and left her (Brynn also happens to be the wife of Jessa’s brother. The story is narrated by Jessa-Lynn Morton, a taxidermist who took over the family business after her father committed suicide on their work table. The posture looks uncomfortable, but the flamingo is probably dead, so can’t feel the pain anyway.Īlthough we never meet a taxidermied flamingo in Mostly Dead Things, plenty of other animals are stuffed, manipulated, and trapped in permanent stasis throughout Arnett’s novel. The flamingo’s neck is dramatically stooped, the bird’s beak at the level of its toenails. There is a flamingo on the cover of Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things.

Book mostly dead things