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Set us as preferred On the Shelf I Can't Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex By Lisa HanawaltDrawn and Quarterly: 250 pages, $25If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.While growing up in Palo Alto, it was not uncommon for animator Lisa Hanawalt to pretend she was a horse.This game of make-believe was a way for Hanawalt to escape her “burdensome and awkward” body, as she writes in her candid new illustrated memoir, “I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses And Sex.” “But when I was a horse, I was powerful, graceful, and gorgeous.”Although Hanawalt might be an unapologetic horse girl, she really hates a horse pun.
So when it came time to choose a title for the book, she decided to keep it literal.“This is just the most true version of what this book actually is,” Hanawalt says about the utterly confessional nature of her book’s title, which groups two seemingly unrelated subjects that her mind wanders to when she’s bored.
“They’re the two most mentally engaging things I can imagine,” she writes as a self-described “anixous lil freak.”Sitting in her Los Angeles home, the designer of such adult animated touchstones as Netflix’s “BoJack Horseman,” “Long Story Short,” and her personal creation “Tuca & Bertie” is drinking from a mug of tea as we chat over Zoom.When I ask what people’s responses have been so far to her book’s cheeky title, she says, “They just laugh.
A lot of them are just like, ‘Well, I have to read that.’”In many ways, “I Can’t Stop” represents a culmination of Hanawalt’s shtick for truth-telling via colorful anthropomorphized characters.The 43-year-old’s sketches are famously loose, bright and unrefined.
Topics like weird body stuff, sex and horniness are nev...