The Pisces by Melissa Broder is potentially the wildest book I have ever read. I don’t remember what first drew me to it, only that I read in 2023 as part of my research and preparation to write The One Who Called Me Chérie. The basic premise of Ceera’s story was a slow, occasionally impulsive affair that she uses to implode her life so I found myself reading quite a long roster of books with messy female protagonists.
In The Pisces, our messy female protagonist is Lucy. She’s 38 years old and she has just left a stifling nine-year relationship as well as abandoned a boring graduate school job and her dissertation. In the aftermath of all this, she accepts an invitation from her sister to move from Phoenix to California and house-sit/dog-sit for her. While she’s there for the summer, she starts to attend group therapy with a group of tragic and hilarious women seeking help for love addiction.
When she first listens to their assortment of problems — one is in love with an online stranger, who is obviously a scammer milking her of her savings; another is addicted to appearance-enhancing cosmetic surgery — she finds them ridiculous. In fact, she thinks that she can’t possibly be one of them and that her problems surely aren’t that dire.
This is until she starts going out on Tinder dates and the misadventures start stacking up. Bad sex with a not particularly attractive Uber driver that she (gasp!) pursued; devastatingly worse sex in the bathroom of an expensive hotel with yet another douchebag she was eager to please (to name but a few). Most peculiar of all is the relationship she begins with a merman. The book is named the Pisces for a reason, and that picture of a woman hugging a fish on the cover is quite literal.
This relationship is reminiscent of that between Elisa and the Amphibian Man in the award-winning movie ‘The Shape of Water’. I must also mention Mrs. Caliban in the same breath as these two works because it featured a romantic fantasy between a woman and a fish-man first. People online said that Rachel Ingalls deserves some credit for her novella (and I agree).
Being an intellectual, a nihilist, and potentially an existentialist, Lucy ponders the questions of loneliness, emptiness and life’s meaning or meaninglessness.
‘Could there be people on this Earth who never stopped for a moment, not once, to say: What is everything?’ she asks while in the midst of the tedious preliminaries of a date. ‘Sure, compared to the greater nothingness — the void, the lack of explicit meaning in life, the fact that none of us knows what is going on here —it was at least something.’
This is mostly how she experiences the summer — bad dates, bad sex, and all the while searching for meaning. It’s a relief when she finally has her moments of epiphany and growth through it all.
Predictably, the book had mixed reviews, the bad ones from people who don’t understand or appreciate satire, have no sense of humour and are incapable of following along on a meditation of life’s deeper questions. The Pisces is not a shallow, beach read. It tackles questions about addiction, self-destructive impulses and desires to erase the self, but it is no way boring or even self-serious.
Melissa Broder is so unflinching in her style of writing that it is at once cringe, refreshing and hilariously relatable. A five-star read for me; can’t rave enough about it.
What are you reading?
