Lara Ehrlich
Author of
Animal Wife (Red Hen Press, 2020)
Bind Me Tighter, Still (Red Hen Press, 2025)
Lara Ehrlich is the author of the award-winning story collection Animal Wife (Red Hen Press, 2020) and the forthcoming novel Bind Me Tighter, Still (Red Hen Press, 2025). She is the host of Writer Mother Monster, a conversation series offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice, and she is the founder and director of the virtual and in-person writing center, Thought Fox Writers Den. Thought Fox builds community and supports writers of all levels with workshops, events, coaching, and more.
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Books BY LARA
Animal Wife (Red Hen Press, 2020)
“In villages where women bore most of the weight of a constricted life, witches flew by night on broomsticks,” said Italo Calvino of the way imagination bridges the gap between everyday existence and an idealized alternative. The fifteen stories of Animal Wife are each about girls and women who cross this threshold seeking liberation from family responsibilities, from societal expectations, from their own minds. A girl born with feathers undertakes a quest for the mother who abandoned her. An indecisive woman drinks Foresight, only to become stymied by the futures branching before her. A proofreader cultivates a cage-fighting alter ego. A woman becomes psychologically trapped in her car. A girl acts on her desire for a childhood friend as a monster draws closer to shore. A widow invites a bear to hibernate in her den.
Animal Wife was selected as the winner of the Red Hen Fiction Award by New York Times bestselling author Ann Hood, who says “From the first sentence Animal Wife grabbed me and never let go. Sensual and intelligent, with gorgeous prose, it made me dizzy with its exploration and illumination of the inner and outer lives of girls and women.”
Bind Me Tighter, Still (Red Hen Press, 2025)
The youngest of three siren sisters, Ceto is tired of an existence driven by hunger, no better than a fish. She trades her tail for life on land, marries the first man she meets, and bears a daughter, only to discover that domesticity is just as mundane as sirenhood. In search of something more, she flees with her daughter Naia to the ocean, where she establishes a mermaid burlesque and recreates herself, performing as a siren in a vast tank built into the limestone cliffs overlooking the sea. She trains more sirens, expanding Sirenland from a roadside attraction to a national sensation she rules without opposition--until Naia, at 15, begins to push back against the world Ceto has created and the role she performs in her mother’s shows. A death at Sirenland threatens Ceto's authority and leads Naia to question whether this women-ruled kingdom is truly as empowering as her mother would have her believe.
With writing that is fluid, lyrical and mesmerizing, Ehrlich delivers a sharp observation of womanhood, female desire and authority. BIND ME TIGHTER, STILL deeply explores power and hunger, but also sacrifice and motherhood. Much like Madeline Miller’s Circe, BIND celebrates the fierceness of female strength in a male-dominated world, and fans of Samantha Hunt’s The Seas will welcome the exploration of impossible love, and the way Ehrlich blurs the lines between reality and fairy tale.