How should a French bulldog be? This question preoccupies The Oldest Bitch Alive, the absurd, oddly wise debut novel by Morgan Day. Bizarrely funny and philosophical, the novel’s unlikely protagonists take on grandiose questions of form, materiality, and what we’re all doing here. 

The novel follows Gelsomina, an aging French bulldog whose florid name perfectly suits her precious lifestyle. She lives in a glass house with Zampanò, a younger dog of the same breed, and their owners: two retired designers who left New York for a quasi-rural, highly curated existence. Gelsomina’s life is cloistered and controlled, spent passively observing the surrounding natural landscape from behind the glass without ever venturing too far beyond its bounds. After lapping up an orb of parasitic worms from a nearby body of water, she is radically altered by the new inhabitants of her body. 

Here, the novel kicks off prismatically: Gelsomina experiences a newfound depth of consciousness upon ingesting the parasites, and turns to meditating on life, death, and longings beyond her sheltered domestic experience. We are then introduced to the very worms sloshing around in poor Gelsomina’s swollen belly—a pair plagued by their own contemplations, metaphysical theories, and interpersonal dramas. Kaleidoscopically weird yet stylish and clever, The Oldest Bitch Alive reveals how being alive in an unsettling, unknowable universe is enough to cause anyone existential anguish—even if they’re microscopic. 

Morgan and I spoke online a few days before the book’s debut, where my dog shared his own insights by barking. Our conversation touched on the seesawing profundity and absurdity of the novel, form as its foundation, and finding the French bulldog’s voice.  

—Elizabeth Polanco

 

EP: This book first began as a short story in Worms Magazine. What pulled you to make it a full novel? 

MD: Even that version was farther along than where I started the book. There was a full family living in the house, and they all had a backstory. As a writer, it felt uninteresting to work on, because it didn’t feel new to me. So I just kept tunneling and tunneling into the dog’s experience and shedding all of the other characters, who became sort of extraneous and unnecessary. 

I felt I had a lot to say about her experience. The French bulldog is viewed and understood as this lap dog that’s a little bit silly, and has trouble existing. The breed has all of these health issues when they’re not bred correctly. I wanted to understand and take very seriously what Gelsomina’s existence is like, and as someone who had French bulldogs, what it was like for my dogs. So, I think it took the whole novel for me to do that. 

 

EP: When you enter Gelsomina’s voice, it’s very stream of consciousness. What was it like to find her voice? 

MD: It took me a long time to get there. I wrote several iterations of her voice, but they were all within the realm of a voice that was slightly disjointed and focused on her physical and sensorial experience. It took several iterations, and it was really slow. All of those pieces from her perspective in the book took me so long to write. Each sentence was like pulling teeth, honestly. 

But when I reached her voice, I was really excited about it because it was something I wanted to keep doing. And now it’s hers. It’s just her voice. I can’t replicate it. 

I am hopeful as I start new projects that all of the writing, rewriting, expanding, and scrapping that took place in this book had to do with it being my first novel… but I’m starting to realize it might be my process. It’s a little bit frustrating, but also interesting, because whatever I start with, I know that a year or so down the line it could look completely different. 

 

EP: Besides Gelsomina, you lend interiority and consciousness to the worms inside of her, and they have very distinct perspectives on who they are, why they’re there, what their purpose is. What made you want to grant perspective to the worms and include them in the story in this way? 

MD: I was curious about what it would be like to enter a space that is totally unknown, which I guess is what all living beings experience. I was very interested in how these creatures are expected to naturally reproduce in this new environment and adapt to it, and it’s really dark and unfamiliar. I wanted to understand that. 

I also was interested in exploring the role of parasites, where there’s one that wants to just exist within the body that it’s been given, and there’s another looking for the control that parasites can exert over bodies. Even in human bodies, there are parasites that can change your behavior and actions and how you relate to other people in the world. I wanted to give one of the worms some of that power. 

What’s been interesting for me is the reaction to the worms. Maybe I was doing this as I was writing, but people have automatically assumed they are a couple, and projected that human relationship onto their world. 

 

EP: What kinds of roles have people been assuming? 

MD: I’ve noticed people will assign a husband and wife to the pair. 

 

EP: The worms are having very existential disagreements, and they’re acting out or reacting to one another’s behaviors. One worm performs a kind of funeral for its dead peers. Did you intentionally set out to balance the absurdity of this little worm microcosm with humor? 

MD: Everything is sort of profound and ridiculous at the same time. You can have these intense experiences in nature or with art, but then through how we exist and interact with each other, they’re undercut with humor—both ends of the spectrum of natural life, outside of the human realm. I wanted to encapsulate that with the worms, and the dogs as well.

 

EP: I was really attracted to this novel as someone who loves books with animals as protagonists like Open Throat by Henry Hoke or Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis. I find these books so effective at refracting humanity and the burden of consciousness and being alive back to readers. Did that interest you while writing the book? 

MD: I had never set out necessarily to write from an animal’s perspective, and it felt new to me. Now I’m much more curious about it, because it is such an interesting process, and you’re making a big assumption about what that experience is like for an animal. It’s fascinating what comes out—I also love Open Throat, and with The Oldest Bitch Alive, there are shared linguistic patterns even if the books are totally different. I included a passage in the novel from Donna Haraway where she says there’s an inclination to cut the language in certain ways, when writing from a dog’s perspective.

I felt this tension, because dogs operate outside of the human realm, but they’re in our domestic spaces, not really part of “capital N” nature. A French bulldog cannot exist in the natural world on its own. Another tension point was me as a person writing an animal. It created difficulty, but through the sensorial effect of the language, there’s Gelsomina experiencing and thinking. That was what I was trying to get across: the human perspective, and her perspective, side by side. 

 

EP: One of the worms said, “My pair is perturbed that we can contemplate ourselves, but I think our forms are the first step to comprehending our place here.” The book feels so profoundly interested in form and materiality and metaphysics. Can you tell me what intrigues you about these ideas? Did you reach any new conclusions while writing? 

MD: There were two entrances into form. One of them was personal—a feeling, I guess, of being perturbed about the human body, being in this form and having an inside and an outside. It’s something that has always interested and bothered and disgusted me in different ways. What it feels like to have a body and interact with the world and with other bodies has been something that I’ve been preoccupied and uncomfortable with, and I have tried to work through that in writing. 

The other side comes from my background in architecture. The people I’ve worked with were constantly questioning the conventions of form, and how every single project or typology—whether it’s a museum, a school, or a skyscraper—has pushed our conceptions of what that form is, what it can do, how it can be improvised in its use, in its aesthetic experience.

As a person trying to write novels, I thought it was incredible that you have people creating and writing for so many different people, with different uses, trying to flip our standards on their heads. There’s the narrative of form, and how the body interacts with form, and then looking at the novel, you have no constraints. All you have to do is write on the page. What boundaries do you put on yourself, and which are inherently there? You can really do anything you want. 

I was thinking of architects who have an unbelievable amount of constraints—climate, natural disaster, basic use, value, expectation. And then the novel, which has no expectations, and all of the pressure is unnecessary. The novel form, the architectural form, and the physical form—and the way in which each informs the other—became preoccupations of the novel. What could be learned from the porousness of building an environment, and language and its effects, and the porousness of the body. They were all interacting in a way.

 

EP: In the novel, you mention artists like Donald Judd and Roni Horn, along with architects such as Mies van der Rohe. Was it important to you that art and architecture were a clear part of the book and how the couple engages with their space? 

MD: I wanted to create the sensation of a space that is not supposed to be used in full. We think of art as an aesthetic object we are not allowed to touch, but have to feel the essence of it, and move around it, and glean what we can from it. I wanted to create a house that had that same experience, and explore the role of these designers who are choosing this space that is beautiful and has all of these restraints in its daily use. 

What would it be like for an animal who’s removed from the design? I was curious about what that creates, when you’re living in a space where the aesthetic effect is maximized but your experience as a user is minimized. 

 

EP: The glass house to me was such a fascinating function of the novel, because it’s like a Russian nesting doll. It holds the structure for many of the chapters, like “House Hog” and “House Trained,” and as the setting, it contains Gelsomina and her owners, and the worms inside of Gelsomina.

I felt like the house was such a great tool to examine form—you’re seeing right to the core of the text because nothing is hidden, it’s all exposed. Why did you choose it as a setting for the novel?

MD: Exactly what you said. Central to the book are these theories of materialism and ecocriticism, which look at how everything in our environment is affecting us, and we’re also affecting our environment. Maybe it feels a bit obvious to us now, considering things like microplastics, that are just within us.

I felt like the glass house was maybe the perfect setting for the book to be able to explore that. There are moments where the dogs are seeing creatures on the outside, and the creatures are seeing them, and there is an exchange, but it’s not substantial. They’re not touching each other or speaking, it’s blocked by a transparent barrier. I wanted to explore the vulnerability of the domestic realm and the structures we live in, and have that sense of longing in Gelsomina for what is out there.

 

EP: I felt sad for Gelsomina because not only does the space restrict her, but also she’s not allowed to engage with it the same way, to use the furniture like her owners. There’s this desire for intimacy throughout the book where she wants to be close to objects in the home, whether it’s a rug or a toy, and the younger French bulldog in the house wants to connect with her, and then the worm is also longing for intimacy with its pair. Was that sense of distance also something you were thematically interested in?

MD: It was. Someone told me the book is very lonely, and it wasn’t at the front of my mind while I was writing it, but that’s something that I was hoping to get across. In a dog’s experience, they’re constantly being told that what they’re interacting with is incorrect. Gelsomina’s not allowed to touch certain furniture, but she is allowed to touch other pieces; she’s allowed to jump on this, but not that. I wanted that feeling of “being incorrect” in the novel.

I also wanted to explore that incorrectness through her, as an animal that is not reproducing, and with the worms, too. I think that was coming from my own experience—having a body that can reproduce, but not wanting to. What sort of feelings does that create, like longing and loneliness, that clash with other wants and needs? What is that like beyond a human experience?

 

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MORGAN DAY is a fiction and architecture writer. Her first novel, The Oldest Bitch Alive, was published in 2026 by Astra House in the US and Akoya Publishing in the UK. The Oldest Bitch Alive was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by The Millions, Literary Hub, Our Culture, The Maris Review, and Debutiful. It was reviewed by The Sunday Times (“Sigmund Freud would love this book”), Financial Times (“If there’s a more original novel published this year, I’ll be amazed”), The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Worms Magazine, Ecotone, Literary Hub, The Southampton Review, and Gulf Coast. She is currently at work on her second novel.

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ELIZABETH POLANCO is a Toronto-based writer and the Interviews Editor of The Ex-Puritan, a Canadian literary magazine. Her work can be found in the LA Review of Books, Electric Literature, Public Books, Asymptote, Mildew, and elsewhere.