The Pisces by Melissa Broder

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INITIAL THOUGHTS

I picked up The Pisces by Melissa Broder for book club and went in curious. My mood was moody-girl-at-the-beach who wants a weird, thought provoking read. I expected millennial malaise, a messy breakup, and some surreal vibes. I did not expect to slam the book shut and say out loud, what the fuck did I just read.

The first pages were a litmus test for my stomach. The prose is vivid and bodily. The narration is an unfiltered stream of Lucy’s obsessive mind. Sometimes I underlined lines because they were sharp and uncomfortable in a way that felt true. Other times I recoiled.

I am the kind of reader who can handle unlikeable narrators, but I need a reason to root for them, or at least a moment of grounded humanity. I kept hoping for that pivot. Instead I got a spiraling love and sex addiction story, a centuries old merman, and choices that cross lines I cannot look past. I finished it in a single day because it moves, but my face was in a permanent wince.

WHAT IT IS ABOUT

The Pisces follows Lucy, a PhD candidate in Arizona who has been not finishing a Sappho dissertation for years. After a breakup with her emotionally withholding boyfriend Jamie, Lucy hits bottom, racks up consequences, and retreats to Venice, California to housesit for her sister Annika.

The plan is simple. Walk the diabetic foxhound, attend court ordered therapy, heal your heart, and write. Lucy instead slides deeper into compulsive sex and love patterns. She goes to a love addiction group, meets fellow addicts she both mocks and mirrors, and starts swiping.

One night on the rocks at the beach, she meets Theo, a beautiful swimmer who is not a swimmer at all. He is a merman. Lucy becomes consumed by Theo and what he represents, which is both fantasy and oblivion. Her daily life shrinks to sex, secrets, and a willingness to erase everything that gets in the way of her fix.

The novel sits in that space where obsession feels like salvation and then shows the wreckage obsession leaves behind.

MY REVIEW

Writing Style

Melissa Broder writes like she is dragging a live wire across the page. The sentences crackle with anxiety, lust, and disgust. The voice is intimate and confessional, full of sharp one liners, and it refuses to look away from bodily realities. I can see why readers who love transgressive literary fiction praise this book. The style is a dare. If you can stomach the opening paragraph’s combination of rancid dog breath, poop bags, and misplaced tenderness, you will probably be okay with the rest. If you cannot, you should tap out early. I was impressed by the control in the chaos. There are images that snap. There are metaphors that made me whisper, rude, but effective. There are also long stretches of interior monologue that felt like being trapped in the bathroom mirror with someone spiraling. That is the point, I know, yet it is still exhausting.

Broder has said she wanted to explore “love as a drug,” and you can feel that intention in the rhythm of the chapters. The book mimics a bender. It cycles through craving, soothing, shame, and the next hit. Lucy’s voice is compelling because she can be brutally honest about her own emptiness. Then she pivots to rationalizing the next bad decision. The sentences lean into bluntness. There is very little sentimentality. When Lucy pauses long enough to feel grief, the language briefly softens. Then we are back underwater, literally and emotionally.

There are brief quotes that encapsulate the project. Early on Lucy thinks, “This is the proper use of my love,” a line that cuts both ways, because she consistently misuses it. In interviews Broder talks about “the urge to annihilate oneself in euphoria.” The prose bears that out. It is horny, hungry, nihilistic, and occasionally very funny in a way that made me feel complicit for laughing. If you want a dreamy, lyrical, redemptive tone, this is not that. If you want an audacious, bodily, black comedic tone, this is exactly that.

Themes & Messages

The central theme is limerence, the high-voltage infatuation buzz that can feel like destiny and function like a drug. Lucy chases limerence the way an addict chases a remembered first high. Theo the merman is the perfect vessel for that metaphor. He is literally out of reach unless she risks everything. He cannot meet her fully on land, and she cannot survive fully in his world. He promises transcendence and offers oblivion. That dynamic makes the book’s magical realism feel less like whimsy and more like allegory. The Siren myth is gender flipped here, and the result underlines how easy it is to mistake annihilation for intimacy when your nervous system is wired for chaos.

Another thread is the tension between self awareness and self sabotage. Lucy can diagnose her patterns. She riffs on therapy speak, mocks the group’s mantras, and still chooses the most harmful option. That is realistic for addiction. Awareness does not equal recovery. The book also pokes at wellness culture. There are crystals, E.E. Cummings quotes, new age platitudes, and LA self help rituals that Lucy can see through and still cannot resist trying. Broder is good at showing how people can both long for healing and resent what healing might require.

Grief hums under everything. Lucy’s fixation on Sappho, a poet we mostly know through fragments, mirrors Lucy’s missing mother and her fear of not being whole. The Sappho material hints at a lineage of female desire, worship, and power that Lucy cannot access directly. Instead she looks for it in places that harm her. When the book explores that connection, it is thoughtful. When it leans into shock value, the thoughtfulness gets drowned out.

I want to name a hard topic clearly. The book contains animal neglect and cruelty, including the death of Annika’s dog, Dominic. That choice is a thematic sledgehammer about the collateral damage of addiction and the way fantasy can outweigh responsibility. It is also, for many readers, a line that changes the reading experience completely. It did for me. I understand the literary argument for showing it. I still hated it. Themes of accountability, consequence, and whether survival counts as growth are all in play by the end. The book gestures at the possibility of change without offering comfort.

Characters

Lucy is an overthinking, sex and love addicted narrator with a biting sense of humor and a bottomless need. She is selfish, obsessive, and often cruel. The narration is her mind on full blast, so your tolerance for Lucy will determine your tolerance for the book. I do not need to like a character to be fascinated by them. I do need a reason to follow them into the dark. Lucy gives flashes of vulnerability, then doubles down on harm. Her arc asks you to witness compulsion rather than celebrate transformation.

Annika, Lucy’s half sister, is the novel’s most sympathetic figure. She invites Lucy to California, offers structure, and trusts her with Dominic. The house Annika shares with her husband Steve is a glass box above Venice, which is a perfect symbol for how visible and fragile their lives are. When Lucy breaks that trust, Annika’s grief is gutting. Steve’s line about Lucy bringing destruction whenever she visits lands with the weight of truth the book has earned.

Theo, the merman, reads like a teenage boy’s fantasy object combined with ancient menace. On land he is helpless, which lets Lucy feel powerful for once. In the water he is elemental, which tempts her to give up everything. He is not a partner. He is a mirror for Lucy’s emptiness and a current strong enough to pull her under.

Claire and Dianne from group therapy function as funhouse reflections. Claire is chaotic and seductive. Dianne is hungry for youth. Their presence underscores that Lucy is not uniquely monstrous. She is one of many people trying to fill a hole with sex, attention, and drama. Dr. Judy is the boundary setter, and Lucy treats those boundaries like hurdles to leap. Jamie, the ex, is a sketch of emotional unavailability that sets this all in motion.

Vibes, Settings, and Tropes

The vibe is sweaty, salty, and sunblind. Venice Beach is more than a backdrop. The beach rocks are a threshold between reality and fantasy. The glass house looks like wealth and safety, but it cannot contain the chaos Lucy invites in. The ocean is maternal and devouring. There are love addiction meetings that feel like confessionals. There are Tinder dates that feel like dares. There is a pantry that becomes a jail for a dog and a symbol for how Lucy boxes up anything that interferes with her fix.

Tropes and touchpoints: the unhinged female narrator, the toxic relationship framed as fate, magical realism that edges into horror, therapy satire, and what I would call neurotica, erotic content that is more about compulsion than romance. If you enjoy books that make you squirm on purpose and test your empathy on purpose, you will recognize the lineage here. If your readerly happy place is cozy, hopeful, and restorative, this will feel like a panic attack in paperback.

Favorite Quotes

“How dare he not give a fuck? What a luxury, the luxury of a man. The luxury of someone who looked at the ravages of time and went, “Eh.”

“I felt silly asking to enjoy my life. I wondered if this was more than any human being should ask. Did anyone ever say that life was to be enjoyed and not suffered?”

“But I felt afraid of death, or at least, afraid of dying. Was there something that wasn’t death but wasn’t here either?”

What Worked For Me

Subjectively speaking, the craft is undeniable. Broder’s commitment to the bit is total. The Venice setting is specific and cinematic. The magical realism is used as metaphor rather than decoration. I appreciated the frank depiction of limerence and the way the narrative refuses to confuse compulsion for love. When Lucy recognizes she is using other people’s eyes to draw a border around herself, the insight lands. The book also skewers our contemporary self help language with precision. Lines about inner child work, crystals, and group clichés made me smirk because the satire is earned.

I also think the gender flip of the Siren story is smart. Women are often written as the peril and men as the fool who jumps overboard. Making Lucy the person who risks everything to be consumed, and making the alluring impossibility male, shifts the myth in a way that invites fresh questions. There are moments when the Sappho thread hums, and I could feel a different version of this book where Lucy’s scholarship gives her a rope back to shore.

Lastly, the author’s own articulation of her themes in interviews helped me contextualize what I was reading. When Broder talks about “the urge to annihilate oneself in euphoria,” the novel’s extremity clicks. I may not like the journey, but I cannot pretend the craft is not there.

What Didn’t Work For Me

Also subjectively speaking, I was repelled by several choices that overshadowed what the novel does well. The most significant is the treatment of Dominic, the dog. Animal neglect and poisoning are my personal hard stops. I understand the moral math the book is working with. I still think it leans on a shock that many readers will never forgive. That choice made it impossible for me to feel generous toward Lucy’s later decisions.

The sex is explicit and relentless, which is not a problem in itself. The issue is that the sex is not erotic so much as symptomatic. It is intentionally gross and risky, which suits the theme, but the repetition wears thin. I felt less like I was watching a character discover herself and more like I was watching someone hurt herself in circles while insisting it was transcendence. The interior monologue contributes to that loop. Lucy is self aware, but the book keeps her spinning so long that the awareness stops meaning anything. If you need a glimmer of accountability to keep reading, you might struggle here.

I also found the university subplot unbelievable. A paid, nine-plus year Sappho dissertation with no meaningful progress strains credibility. I was excited for the Sappho material to braid with the present day plot in a deeper way. The connection remains mostly symbolic. The period-on-the-white-couch scene and the refusal to clean it or take responsibility felt less like character truth and more like a dare to the reader. One or two dares can be galvanizing. A whole book of dares can feel numbing.

Finally, the ending flirts with romanticized self annihilation. There is an almost-suicide that follows the logic of the myth. Lucy backs away only when she realizes she is not unique. I can see the bleak humor in that, but it left me cold. The final return to Annika and Steve is a survival move, not a step toward restitution. I wanted at least a seed of repair. The book is not obligated to give me that, but the absence matters to my recommendation.

Final Thoughts

Would I recommend The Pisces? Not to most readers in my circle. For me it is a one star experience because of the specific lines it crosses. I do not regret reading it. I do not want to reread it. If you love transgressive literary fiction, if you seek out unlikable narrators and are interested in addiction narratives that refuse to soften their edges, you might admire it. If you are drawn to Venice Beach atmosphere, if magical realism that tilts toward horror intrigues you, and if you want a book that makes you argue with yourself, this belongs on your radar. If animal harm is a no for you, skip it. If you want romance or redemption, skip it. If you do read it, come back and tell me where you landed because this is a book that begs for a post mortem.

Let’s Talk

If you read The Pisces, did the merman work for you as metaphor, monster, or love interest? Where is your personal line for an unlikable narrator, and did Lucy cross it? Do you think the novel earns its ending, or does it stop short of accountability?