Mother Animal
By: Helen Jukes
MOTHER ANIMAL: A STARTLINGLY NEW VISION OF MOTHERHOOD from the author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings
‘Magnificent. I was electrified by Jukes’ gimlet-eyed telling of stories of parenting and nesting and birthing from our natural world.’ LUCY JONES, author of Matrescence
When Helen Jukes falls pregnant, she does what anyone else would do. She searches for information to help make sense of the changes underway inside her. But as the months pass and her body becomes increasingly strange, the pregnancy guides seem insufficient; even the advice of her friends feels oppressive.
So she widens her frame of reference, looking beyond humans to ask what motherhood looks like in other species. Here she begins a process of wilder enquiry, in which stories of spiders, polar bears, bonobos and burying beetles (among others) begin to unsettle and expand her notion of what mothering is; what it could be.
As she enters the sleeplessness, chaos and intimate discoveries of life with a newborn, these animal stories become Helen’s companions and guides. They allow her to explore where her own animality begins and ends and how the polluted stuff of human industry has come to influence life, even from its very beginnings.
A passionate, visceral and intimate account of a body changed, Mother Animal combines personal memoir with fresh insights from evolutionary biology, zoology and toxicology to ask the big questions that lie at the heart of what it means to be alive – and a mother – today.
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‘Magnificent, utterly refreshing, captivating… I was electrified by Jukes’ gimlet-eyed telling of her own experience of new motherhood and the stories of parenting and nesting and birthing from our natural world … So vital, tender, and alive.’
- LUCY JONES, author of Matrescence -
‘This book is a truly radical and astounding shout for community and care not only within our own species but the entire world. Read it to feel a slow detonation of mind-blowing understanding.’
- DAISY JOHNSON, author of Sisters -
‘Mother Animal wrests motherhood from the clutches of the patriarchy and gently places it back into the hands of birthing bodies, human and non-human.’
- SALLY HUBAND, author of Seabean -
‘A deeply thoughtful interrogation of motherhood and the way it ties us to our natural (and not-so-natural) environment.’
- LEAH HAZARD, author of Womb -
‘With her startlingly clear prose Helen Jukes has created a tense masterpiece that blows societal ideas about parenthood wide open. To better understand ourselves as the animals that we are, we all need to read this book.’
- MARCHELLE FARRELL, author of Uprooting -
‘A tale of the turning-of-the-world told from the nesting home of a new mother, spanning from subterranean burrowing beetles, up into the trees, into the air and through oceans. So human and so vulnerable, tender, terrified and brave.’
- HANNAH STOWE, author of Move Like Water -
‘You simply must hear what [Helen Jukes] has to say. It will change you.’
- CHARLES FOSTER, author of Cry of the Wild