MAGA Next Door: An Interview with Amie Souza Reilly
Amie Souza Reilly is the author of Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays (2025).
“Come with me, and let me tell you an animal story,” opens Amie Souza Reilly’s bestiary. It’s an ancient literary genre, the bestiary. A compendium of descriptions, stories, and depictions of animals both real and mythical, the form peaked in popularity during the Middle Ages and served to both inform and morally educate its readers. Despite there existing only about 50 original medieval bestiary manuscripts today, the format has remained dear in the history of art and literature, with figures from Da Vinci to Borges creating their own takes.
So what about a bestiary of 21st century suburban Connecticut? Who belongs in that compendium? Reilly’s Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays tells the true story of the nine hundred and forty-three days the author lived next door to the most frightening beasts she’d ever encountered: red-hatted brothers Wes and Jim, who for those three long years stalked, harassed, provoked, and intimidated Amie and her family with the hopes of driving them out of their Connecticut home so that the brothers could buy it themselves.
Reilly transforms her horror story of persistent boundary-crossings and gender-based harassment into a classic bestiary, inserting her own beautiful pencil drawings of animals. Each featured animal, inspired by familiar and beloved fauna found in her home state, also represents a word: a verb whose meaning pertains to the violations she and her family endured at the hands of Wes and Jim––words like badger, ape, slug, cow, cock, dog, squirrel, hawk, wolf, ferret, leech. The words, along with Reilly’s deeply researched etymologies, become oxygen that help the reader surface from the suffocatingly vicarious experience of Reilly’s story. In this book, Connecticut emerges as its true, unvarnished self: a settler state (one of the original thirteen colonies, Reilly reminds us) whose cowboy-colonizer relations of production and destruction still reign.
Indeed, the red hat insurgency Reilly and her husband and son experience up-close represents a larger shift in our collective sense of safety and autonomy since the rise of Trump. We each wade daily through unprecedented surveillance, relentless scams, emboldened white supremacists, and chilling nativist rhetoric––and that’s just when we’re scrolling on our phones. Step outside, and you’ll likely encounter any manner of hateful iconography adorning increasingly enormous fossil-fuel-burning vehicles better suited for a battlefield. By telling her story without shame or fear, uncowed (a bestiary word), Reilly creates space for all of us to begin to name, and maybe even begin to heal from, the constant violations and intimidations that the Trump regime entails.
It feels overly simplistic to call this book a thriller, but that’s exactly what it is: a terrifying, intense mystery involving predator and prey. But what elevates this book is the way its form––the besitary––becomes a container for so much more than the psychology of fear. In the tradition of books like Machado’s In the Dream House, Reilly draws from omnivorous sources to teach us how to historicize and anthropomorphize (a term she reclaims) the land we now call Connecticut, and in so doing she invites us to question our understandings of territory, ownership, and nature within the bounds of the patriarchal settler nation-state.
I was fortunate to have a phone call with my fellow Connecticut native, and within a minute of our conversation we were gushing over that week’s viral NY Times interview with another Connecticut native: poet and novelist Ocean Vuong. His new novel The Emperor of Gladness has topped bestseller lists since its release in late spring. It centers on two hidden sides of Connecticut: first, the generation of aging immigrant residents surviving on Medicaid, living in undignified conditions; and second, their children and grandchildren, many of whom are trapped in minimum-wage jobs at places like the fictionalized Boston Market-style restaurant Vuong renders with verisimilitude.
The novel pairs beautifully with Human/Animal. Both books illuminate the people and experiences often invisibilized by Connecticut’s projected self-image as a bucolic land of Gilmore Girls and golf courses. Both books, in exposing what wants to hide, do not make us paranoid or wary of our neighbors; rather, they empower us to name what terrorizes us and instead embrace gentleness. As Reilly puts it, “There are so many ways to write about violence.”
Our conversation has been edited for length & clarity.
Emma Staffaroni: How do you think living through this experience––and writing this book––has changed your perspective on Connecticut as a place?
Amie Souza Reilly: Well, I grew up here––I haven’t left. When I tell people that I’m from CT, they assume that I’m from somewhere like what they’ve seen on TV … but I grew up in what is called the Valley, which, when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, was very working class. I was the first person in my family to go to college. My parents are working-class. I didn’t realize CT was a wealthy state until I left my hometown.
The majority of Connecticut is not what is portrayed on Gilmore Girls. Most of Connecticut is different from what is expected. So while it is a wealthy state and a blue state, it’s a complicated place, misunderstood for its wealth or as a place you drive through to get from New York to Boston. But this book is about Connecticut and colonialism––Connecticut as one of the original thirteen colonies.
ES: Yes, and what drove me through your book, other than the suspense of wanting to know what would happen, were these burning American questions about boundaries, surveillance, property, and privacy. I remember the scene where you’re having your fence put in [to keep Wes out] and you have this line about how “privacy is expensive.” I’d love for you to talk more about land, privacy, and safety. I never saw these as quintessentially Connecticut themes, but of course they are; of course it’s a place of Levittowns and fences…
ASR: Putting the fence up was an attempt to give us privacy, but it also closed us out. I am still thinking about the cost of privacy, what it means when it’s invaded––how the word “invaded” is such a violent, war-like word. And it feels like we’re invading each other’s privacy all the time. Everybody’s looking all the time, in real life with Ring cameras and smartphones, and online in all of the ways we can dig into others’ lives.
ES: Has that shifted even since the pandemic?
ASR: It felt that way for me. I think we needed to be so isolated to stay safe, but in that isolation we lost community. This, coupled with the way precautions were so quickly dismissed, the needs of our most vulnerable populations disregarded, I think increased that feeling of being untethered. Surveillance makes people feel safe, but also removes the safety privacy allows. I never thought that I would have to get a security camera [like we had to do during the time period of the book]. We had to install it ourselves, we had to drill a hole from the outside to the inside of the house. The walls are supposed to protect us––but now we were intentionally putting a hole in it to look out. It felt wrong. The fence is still there. What does it mean to knock it down––what does it mean for the birds? We used to get migrating turkeys, but they don’t come anymore because of the fence. The fox doesn’t come by anymore. In all of this act of trying to protect my family, I definitely messed with nature. I was immediately culpable.
ES: That was such a powerful metaphor throughout the book––that as your personal sense of safety was encroached upon, you yourself had to become someone else. You were forced to give up some of your own values. You would rather not have a fence, rather have the animals roaming… you even changed your diet to vegetarian because of how this experience was living in your body. Those fences and boundaries between us and the world get destroyed from both sides, and we have to adapt. Do you see that having changed, over the course of your life in Connecticut––the feeling that you have to adapt to a certain culture around boundaries?
ASR: I’m constantly worried about how much space I take up. I thought that would change as I got older. I know this is a deeply female thing––there is a constant adapting to space. But not everybody is conscious of it, in ways that we definitely should be. The way people drive, for example: I have to take the Merritt Parkway every day, and I see the way people push their giant cars so close––these machines that could kill us very quickly. I have a theory that the reason this has become so aggressive is because cars look meaner than they used to, they just have mean faces! There’s this me-first mentality. We’ve stopped thinking about how space relates to safety.
ES: Going back to nature for a minute, and the book itself––it doesn’t stay within the boundaries of genre. You wrote a nature book about something that is not nature. I felt like having the animals present in the book was this relief from the acutely terrifying moments you were describing. It felt like I was experiencing the healing that can come from nature in those moments. How would you characterize your relationship to nature?
ASR: I was an artist before I was a writer, and there’s something very in my body about drawing that isn’t the same as writing––writing is all in my head, and it’s easy to forget that I have a body. Drawing is a body thing. But in writing and in drawing, I am always drawn to animals. When I was a kid, I was always pulling near-dead birds out of my cat’s mouth, convinced I was going to save their little lives and then everything was going to be OK. I was never successful at saving them, and when they inevitably died, I would bury them, and make these little gravestones. I think every kid wants to be a vet when they grow up, but I wanted it in my guts–– and then I failed Botany in college. But I don’t know if my desire to be that close to animals was an escape, or a desire to be near something other than myself, other than a person. There just seemed to be so much I didn't know about how the world works, and animals seemed to possibly hold the answers.
I think I was remembering all of that when I drew the animals for Human/Animal. I did them all in three weeks, and it felt amazing. It felt good to return to something that reconnected me to childhood and wonder. I was looking for something gentle in the middle of writing violence, and it appeared in studying the face of a tiny baby badger.
ES: That was a major insight in the book, about gentleness––when you experience violence, that’s the thing you might crave most. It was so dehumanizing what you went through, but then in the book when you’re comparing Wes and Jim to animals, you actually aren’t dehumanizing them. We have this temptation to dehumanize back the people who dehumanize us. But what you did was just so dignified, which felt paradoxical to me. The more the animals were present in the text, the more human it all felt.
ASR: I was worried that was going to feel irresponsible. These are deeply flawed, horrible horrible people, but I was worried if I rendered them as human as possible then I was being dismissive of other victims. I’m glad that didn’t come across. In the end, I think if Jim hadn’t died, I wouldn’t have been able to see them with as much dignity. But Jim died––and that reminded me they’re just as soft as we are, as I am. It’s almost sad, to live a life full of that much anger and hostility and violence. It made me realize: what is my role in this? What is my role as an artist to turn this situation into art? I think that’s maybe the driving force. It’s no longer about me, but something bigger.
ES: Wes and Jim feel very archetypal. There’s this archetype that has emerged in the Trump era, but it’s old––it’s that white male cowboy-colonizer, but it’s a new flavor of it that wears a red hat, that feels emboldened by certain kinds of rhetoric. Maybe they’ve been like this all throughout history, but there’s this unique personality to it now. Do you see a political microcosm in your book? How did the brothers change your perspective on Trumpism?
ASR: I absolutely see a political microcosm, and see those brothers as emblematic of the larger, harder to describe, Trumpism you mention. When I see someone waving a huge flag or decorating their lawn or car with lots of signs and slogans, there’s an understanding of the possibility of danger, there’s a clear statement about the flag-holder’s disregard for human rights. Others have written about those symbols as threats, as hate speech, and I see that, too. Living next to the brothers (who lined their property with small American flags) had that same hum, that same vibration of violence, or willingness to breach social codes, to take up so much space and assert dominance.
ES: My experience with the internet these days feels like your book. You can't just exist on the internet and feel safe. Your physical body, but also your virtual self, and your bank account, and all these precious things that keep you tethered to life––it feels like these people in red hats are going to take them from you. We are all just one unlucky neighbor situation away from that danger.
ASR: It is all so precarious, the danger crawls around just under the skin of everything. Or maybe less under the skin, as we watch everything from healthcare to climate protections to arts funding to weather warnings collapse. But I don’t want to end this call in a totally hopeless place…
ES: Let’s talk about words. Etymology, and the history of words that you give us, even when those words have ugly histories––it’s really empowering to know more about the words and the journeys they’ve taken. What is your relationship with words in this project and in general?
ASR: Words are connection. If I can find a word that connects to another one, then I feel like I’ve made something. I just think it’s cool that the words that we use now, their meanings and contexts and connotations are constantly shifting.There’s hope in that. If our words can change over time, that means people are changing, too.
*****
Buy Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays here and support my local Roslindale book co-op! And if you read The Emperor of Gladness and Human/Animal together, I invite you to email me with your thoughts!
