How to Live Together

The unnamed narrator of How to Live Together moves into a house to cat-sit, seeking solitude away from the pressures of having to relate to others – only to discover that the cats present their own challenges of relation. As the narrator begins to filter their life through their changing relationship to the cats, they become foils for the narrator’s failed relations with humans – the erotic obsession with a former student, the colleague whose effortless boyish masculinity the narrator envies. The house and its surroundings are alternately menacing and promising; the flood waters of the Thames rise and fall, sucking the city down into the silt, the natural world becoming uncanny and grotesque. Through a kaleidoscopic prose form, How to Live Together probes the relationship between queerness, nature and a masculine fantasy of self-sufficiency, questioning the human projections and desires bound up in the genre of nature writing, and exploring what an authentic relationship between humans and non-humans – as well as between humans – might be.