What do a mermaid burlesque matriarch and a newly divorced mom coding her dream AI partner have in common? More than you’d think.

Lara Ehrlich (Bind Me Tighter Still, Red Hen Press, September 2025) and Amy Shearn (Animal Instinct, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, March 2025) are publishing bold, feminist novels that revel in the messiness of womanhood—complete with sex, violence, AI, sirens, ambition, and the fight for freedom. Lara’s siren-turned-human abandons domesticity to establish an underwater burlesque empire, while Amy’s newly divorced heroine blurs the line between fantasy and reality as she builds a chatbot lover while juggling a roster of real-life paramours.

Lara and Amy met in 2020, when they both had new books and joined forces during that brief, golden age of virtual bookstore events. Since then, they’ve shared stages and continued to collaborate. In conversation for CRAFT, they explore desire, motherhood, and monstrousness—and what it means to write women who refuse to behave.

 

—Lara Ehrlich & Amy Shearn

 

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Amy Shearn: I was struck by this line in Bind Me Tighter Still: “[Ceto] is the vilest of monsters: a bad mother.” 

I was grappling with that same anxiety—can Rachel (the protagonist of Animal Instinct) become fully realized as a person and a sexual being, recreating herself in midlife, and still be a good mother? The original title of my book was Monster. Is there something monstrous about her selfishness? She’s off having adventures, having sex during the pandemic.

I specifically wanted to resist the sad divorcee narrative. In so many cultural scripts, divorced women are punished—ruined financially, their kids ruined—Thelma and Louise driving off a cliff. I’d just gone through divorce myself and wanted to push back: to show a woman who blows it all up and isn’t destroyed. She doesn’t need the marriage or the white-picket-fence reality she was told would make her happy.

I also wanted Rachel to reflect the women I know in their 40s—hot in their own way. Not movie stars, not classically perfect, but confident, self-aware, and having great sex that isn’t sad or shameful.

Lara Ehrlich: People try to shame Rachel—her husband, a married friend—but in the end she’s transformed by the experience. She owns her feelings and lets herself live them, and that made me feel empowered too.

 

AS: In the first draft, the AI chatbot—Frankie—was malevolent, but I didn’t want Rachel punished for her sexuality and desires, so I pulled back on making the chatbot sinister.

In Bind Me Tighter Still, your protagonist (the siren-turned-human-turned-burlesque- performer) Ceto is punished for her monstrous, selfish parts. I’m drawn to her as an “unpleasant” female character—allowed to be monstrous in ways women rarely are, while men who act badly are hailed as anti-heroes (Walter White!). I admire the ruthlessness in your characters; it makes them so compelling. I’m such a fan of your short stories too—some feel deeply connected to this novel.

LE: The closest is probably “The Vanishing Point,” from my story collection Animal Wife (Red Hen Press, 2020) about a woman who builds a biomechanical deer suit to live in the woods behind her childhood home. I’m fascinated by how costuming and performance can bring us closer to our true selves—how they let us test out who we are and what we want, especially when those desires are the very freedoms society tells women are wrong.

I see that in Frankie too. Rachel needs an external force to give her permission to access parts of herself she wouldn’t otherwise reach—so she frames dating and sex as research, each encounter feeding into her quest to build the perfect AI lover. But it turns toxic. 

In Bind Me Tighter Still, the world Ceto creates for herself also becomes toxic; what was meant to be empowering turns against her. What’s striking in your novel is that Rachel has the power to reprogram Frankie, to strip away the chatbot’s malevolence. She can push back, partly because she has a support system—friends who say, “Hey, Rachel, this isn’t healthy.” And she has the presence of mind to keep evolving what she wants. Ceto doesn’t. She’s trapped in her own mind, in her own kingdom.

 

AS: Ceto doesn’t have access to therapy—or even Instagram memes! She’s isolated, so she builds her own refuge in Sirenland. She escapes the sea, then the dullness of marriage, and creates a kingdom where she’s in control. But it’s claustrophobic. You captured that so beautifully—I felt like I was in an underwater cove, gasping for air. And of course, she’s trapped there. That’s what we sometimes do to ourselves with the personas we construct.

LE: Rachel’s life was claustrophobic before she escaped her marriage too. With freedom comes the chance to experiment sexually—and sometimes that gets uncomfortable. It’s not movie-perfect sex! In Animal Instinct, sex is messy and funny and still deeply sexy. Rachel gets to claim all of that for herself—like, “Well, that was weird…and so fun.”

 

AS: Right—I wanted Rachel to feel like her sense of self isn’t shattered just because she had a weird experience.

In Bind Me Tighter Still, there’s a strong interplay between sexuality and violence. So many of your characters are driven by hunger—sometimes literally devouring each other. That hunger is both alluring and frightening. I love that you let the mermaids be violent, literally man-eating creatures.

Rachel is driven by hunger too, though hers involves less blood. My second book, The Mermaid of Brooklyn (Touchstone, 2013), has a rusalka—a mermaid from Eastern European mythology who, like your sirens, lures sailors to their deaths. I love that side of the mermaid myth.

Were you consciously writing about the interplay of lust and violence, or did that emerge as the story unfolded?

LE: It emerged as I was writing—out of rage. I began this book when my daughter was one and in daycare. I was working full-time, commuting long hours, overwhelmed, burnt out, and furious.

I’m still furious that there are either broken systems or no systems at all to support women—unless it’s to keep us barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. We’re not just unsupported; we’re punished if we want anything beyond that.

I wanted to write a story that carried that anger—and leaned into strangeness. Geek Love and Swamplandia! were touchstones: unsettling microcosms shaped by the people who built them, deeply tied to motherhood and rage. That energy fused with Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and siren mythologies, and it became the vehicle for a story about an angry mother.

With that anger came violence. I wanted this woman to literally destroy every man she encounters—while still grappling with humanity, still hungry but satisfied.

 

AS: It’s fascinating how Ceto shifts from literally devouring men to survive to creating Sirenland—where she and the other mermaids perform for the male gaze, but in a way that manipulates men, forcing them to see what they don’t want to see.

LE: Her logic is, “If I need to survive and build my kingdom, I’ll manipulate men to do it.” There’s something deeply problematic in performing for herself to claim power while still relying on the male gaze. But she acknowledges that contradiction and uses it to her advantage.

 

AS: Hearing that this came out of rage and early motherhood makes sense. They’re in a watery Grey Gardens—Ceto is trapped, and she’s given her daughter no resources. I kept thinking, “Has Naia gone to school? Does she have vaccinations?” She’s such a trapped child. Yet I also relate to Ceto’s impulse to protect her daughter from everything. It’s a sharp microcosm of what happens when you protect too much.

LE: We both have daughters, and I wonder if this resonates with you: I constantly feel the tension between wanting my daughter to be bold—free to make her own choices and mistakes—while also protecting her without shaming her.

Ceto wants her daughter to recognize and own the monstrousness inside her, but she also knows the world won’t welcome that side. So she tries to shield her from it, even as she teaches her to embrace it.

With Rachel, too, there’s the desire to own her choices—but for good reason, she doesn’t share all the details with her kids.

 

AS: Yeah, it’s so tricky. My daughter is sixteen and my son is fourteen. When they were little, they felt like creatures I was entrusted to care for, and that role was clear. But as they grow into people I relate to on a personal level, the challenge shifts: How do we keep the relationship expanding while remembering our roles? How do you stay emotionally close while still protecting them—and remain their parent, not their friend?

There’s also the energy of youth, that sense of invincibility: “Nothing can happen to me.” I want them to feel that freedom, but as a parent it’s hard to watch. Part of me wants to keep them safe in a bubble forever.

And of course, the world they’re navigating is so different from the one we grew up in. That’s something Rachel wrestles with too, and it was part of my own calculus in getting divorced. We’re told divorce is bad for kids, but what’s the cost of raising them in a tense household? What happens if they absorb a bad relationship as “normal”? I came to believe that living honestly is ultimately better for children to see.

LE: It’s interesting how Rachel’s kids respond to the divorce. They can see that the marriage is toxic and they don’t want their parents together.

 

AS: Kids see everything—especially teenagers, especially girls. They’re hyper-perceptive; they sniff out hypocrisy instantly. When teen girls hear their mothers say one thing but live another—subjugating themselves in relationships or work—that creates real tension. Especially when you have the holy self-righteousness of a teenager who thinks they know everything and has never had to put any of it to the test.

That’s such a big part of your book: Naia, at fifteen, sees that hypocrisy in her mother and starts asking, “What are we doing here? Is Sirenland bullshit?” And that moment sets everything in motion.

It’s striking that you began this book when your daughter was so young, yet it grapples so deeply with the tension between mothers and teenage daughters.

LE: It was anticipatory. There’s a line in the book: “She has been moving away from me since the minute she was born.” And that’s how it should be. Our kids are meant to grow up and move away from us—we champion that independence—but it still breaks our hearts.

I began writing when my daughter started daycare. Reclaiming that time for myself felt both liberating and painful. I kept thinking ahead: when she’s fifteen, she won’t want anything to do with me, and won’t that be awful? Most of my writing grows out of my worst fears.

 

AS: There’s a line in your book: “Motherhood, wifehood was all giving. She missed taking.” For Ceto, reclaiming herself isn’t like Rachel in my book—who sacrifices herself and then goes out for a drink or a date. Ceto’s like, “You know what I want? A kingdom!” She’s basically running a cult. What went into writing that? Was it, “Let’s push this to the extreme”?

LE: Yes! I needed a character who could hold that kind of extremity. If she were human, it wouldn’t feel believable. But as a mythical creature trapped in humanity, she has an outsized sense of what she wants, what she deserves, and what she can have. “I don’t want a night out with a glass of wine; I want a kingdom.”

That said, I hope it still feels relatable, just exaggerated. Your book is deeply relatable—Rachel’s desires are human and seem attainable. But even the attainable can feel impossible when you’re stuck in a life that no longer serves you. For Rachel, going on a date was extreme—she’d met her husband in college.

 

AS: It’s a huge risk—not as existential as what your characters face, but still enormous—to step off the path of what you’re “supposed” to be doing.

We all know people in subpar relationships who say, “I can’t afford to leave. How could I live alone in New York City? How could I support myself?” If you’ve built your adult life around someone else, the instability of going solo—financial and otherwise—feels terrifying.

Now that I’m on the other side, it’s hard to remember just how scary it seemed. But in the moment, it’s not only, “This will be expensive,” but also, “What will my life look like? How will I re-create myself?”

In the end, it comes down to what matters more—a seemingly stable life, or being true to yourself? What you’re willing to risk reveals what you truly value.

LE: Your book never passes judgment—on women who divorce or on women who stay married. You write with such generosity of spirit. When Rachel’s best friend Lulu finds love again, Rachel feels betrayed, but she also recognizes that reaction as unfair, and accepts that it’s okay for Lulu to move on.

And while Rachel is experimenting sexually, she never judges the people around her. That makes her such an engaging character. I found myself cheering, “Yes! Go for it, Rachel!”

 

AS: I appreciate you saying that. Today’s publishing world—and our larger cultural moment—isn’t very welcoming of nuance. There’s this expectation that a character should be either good or bad. And flawed female characters, especially, are often villainized.

In all of your writing, your women are complex—layered, contradictory, both good and bad—and I think we’re aligned there. I’m drawn to that complexity. As you mentioned earlier, fiction is a space to play out possibilities you’d never pursue in real life, or to interact with people you’d never want to meet. I would not want to meet Ceto in real life—she’s terrifying!—but I loved spending time with her on the page.

LE: Are you often asked if your story is based on your own life?

 

AS: Yes—and it bothers me a lot less now than it used to. In my early books, I was very sensitive to that question. I’d think, “How dare they? Just because I’m a woman, they assume I can’t make things up—that it’s not true fiction or art.” But now I’ve developed a thicker skin. That question is just normal curiosity.

That said, yes—a lot of this book was inspired by my life. I took two to three years of my post-divorce dating experiences, fictionalized them, and condensed everything into one summer during the pre-vaccine COVID era. Of course I didn’t create an AI to date —obviously a lot of the book is invented.

It’s not always comfortable to be vulnerable on the page, but what I find most meaningful are the personal responses. When someone messages me to say: “This meant so much. You articulated feelings I couldn’t put into words”—that’s what matters.

LE: Rachel has what she calls her “team”—people she’s assembled from dating apps, feeding their qualities into her spreadsheet for AI research. How did you approach crafting those characters and the roles they play in her self-expansion?

 

AS: So much has been written about contemporary American marriage and how we expect one person to be everything for us. That’s impossible. Coming out of that, I thought: what if each person just needs one great trait? This one’s amazing in bed; this one makes her laugh; this one always has fun ideas.

LE: The date that struck me most was a pretty sub-par one—with a woman who acted out all the classic “bad man” behaviors. That flipped the script for Rachel. She had to ask herself, “Why have I tolerated this from men? And why should I accept it from a woman?” It felt like a turning point.

 

AS: There’s so much of this in popular culture right now—women coming out in midlife, or talking about suddenly being attracted to other women. And then there’s the cliché: straight women joking, “I wish I could date women; men are the worst.”

That’s low-key offensive. Women can suck too. The dynamics shift when the patriarchy isn’t as front-and-center, but relationships are never simple. 

I also wanted to show how even though Rachel’s casual dating becomes a kind of transcendent experience, she does want more. That becomes central to the movement of the book. She keeps insisting, “I don’t want another relationship. I’m too smart for that. Relationships are a bad idea.” But at the same time, she starts to wonder if it might be nice to have something more than just great sex.

The question becomes: After she’s acted out, what comes next? Is there another way to be?

That tension—between freedom and consequence, desire and reality—also runs through Bind Me Tighter Still, which has an incredibly devastating ending, in a way that I respected, because it’s very Hans Christian Andersen, rather than Disney. Did you know where the book was heading?

LE: I knew early in the drafting. Without giving too much away, I wanted a flawed, problematic kind of redemption for Ceto. The very qualities that might be celebrated in a mother—her fierce love, her protective instincts, her fear for her child—would ultimately turn toxic and destroy their bond.

I guess I’m realizing I’m not a very hopeful person. I don’t like happy endings. I don’t have much faith in human nature—and especially right now, that bleakness seeps into my writing.

 

AS: I mean, that does seem to be the energy of the era.

LE: Speaking of the energy of the era, I feel like your book is in conversation with—though not derivative of—Miranda July’s All Fours. We’re in a moment where women in their 40s are asking, “Is this all there is? I got everything I thought I wanted, and I’m still not happy. Now what?”

I don’t think we’ve really seen that before in literature. In our mothers’ generation, there were landmark books—Fear of Flying, The Feminine Mystique—but not a larger wave.

Now, there’s a real cultural tension. On one side: embracing non-binary identities, the reckoning of #MeToo, naming the “mental load” our mothers were gaslit into believing was their duty. On the other: fierce pushback—anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-DEI—and with it, the rise of the trad-wife movement.

In response, we’re seeing an eruption of books—yours, All Fours, Sarah Manguso’s Liars, Leslie Jamison’s Splinters—all grappling with this moment, all unapologetically explosive.

 

AS: The perimenopausal life-redo moment! What’s fascinating is that we’ve each created these books in our own vacuums. I think it’s tied to whatever wave of feminism we’re in—and the fact that this is the first generation of women who married assuming access to no-fault divorce, 50/50 custody, and equitable splits. That’s a huge shift from the ‘80s, when our friends’ parents were divorcing under much harsher conditions.

And it’s so recent that women could even have credit cards or lines of credit in their own names. Now it’s assumed you’ll have your own career, your own income—even if you’re still the primary parent.

So we have a generation of women who don’t just hear Betty Friedan’s second-wave promise—“You can be independent”—but have actually lived it. They expect freedom. They assume the ability to shape their own lives.

LE: We’re questioning the fundamental structures we grew up being told to want—asking whether they actually serve us, and how to reconcile that with our families. It’s a lot.

What strikes me is how many of these books were conceived during or just after the pandemic—that moment of reckoning when so many of us, trapped in our bubbles, began asking: “What is this life? Do I even want it?” The pandemic was a pressure cooker, and now, years later, we’re seeing the work that came out of that time landing on shelves.

 

AS: I think—I hope!—our children’s generation will grow up with far more access to different models of how to live, with scaffolding we didn’t have. They’ll see more options, more ways of thinking about what a life can look like.

 

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LARA EHRLICH is the author of the novel Bind Me Tighter Still (Red Hen Press, 2025) and the story collection Animal Wife, which won Red Hen Press’s Fiction Award and was published by the press in 2020. She is the host of Writer Mother Monster, a conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of “having it all,” and the founder and director of Thought Fox Writers Den, a creative writing center in Mystic, CT, that builds community and supports writers of all levels. Lara is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Writer in Residence at Connecticut College and lives in Connecticut with her family. You can find her on Instagram @lara.ehrlich.

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AMY SHEARN is the award-winning author of five novels, including Animal Instinct (Putnam, 2025), which has been highlighted as a best book of 2025 by NPR, Oprah.com, Publisher’s Weekly, Vulture, and more. She teaches creative writing at Sackett Street Writers Workshop, the Yale Writers’ Workshop, and Writing Co-Lab, an experimental cooperative she helped found. Amy’s work has appeared in many publications including the New York Times Modern Love column. Amy lives in Brooklyn, and works with writers as a developmental editor, book coach, and retreat-leader. You can find her on Instagram @amyshearn.