In a June interview with Hazlitt, Melissa Broder claimed she hasn’t seen the Guillermo del Toro film The Shape of Water. She admits she skipped through it on a plane, but gave up when she couldn’t find any sex scenes. The Shape of Water isn’t all that similar to Broder’s novel The Pisces, but it’s unlikely the two artworks will escape comparison: Both contain a romance between a woman and a fish-man.
“My agent was like, ‘No, it’s good,’” Broder says in the interview. “‘People will be prime[d] for fish sex.’” Unlike The Shape of Water, Broder’s novel has sexual situations and interactions that feel alarmingly realistic. There’s no romanticism. Instead there’s only delusion and inevitable embarrassment. Thumbing through it, I realized I was anxiously grinding my teeth, but also thinking, “Yeah, that’s Tinder all right.”
