Almost Animal - by Amy Irvine (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"A starting place for healing our upended selves, families, culture, world."--CRAIG CHILDS, AUTHOR OF THE ANIMAL DIALOGUES

A ferocious, incandescent memoir about motherhood, liberation, and the natural world--following one woman's journey to reclaim her wildest self.

A descendant of Utah's earliest Mormon inhabitants, Amy Irvine spent her young adulthood rebelling against the patriarchy that was her inheritance. She sought adventure outdoors, climbing granite walls, skiing backcountry powder, and fighting wildfires. She tested every limit imposed on her. But after the birth of her daughter, Irvine found herself in a situation uncannily similar to those of her pioneer forebears: isolated on a remote Colorado mesa, with a husband who was often gone, a child who was frequently and mysteriously ill, and a once remarkable life that was growing smaller and smaller.

After a case of postpartum depression so intense it resembled zoochosis, the madness of a trapped animal, Irvine began the process of coming back to the world and unearthing a deeper connection with her child. Over the years that followed, encounters with animals--wild and domestic, predator and prey--led her forward, from a horseback showdown with a mountain lion to a more intimate run-in with the misunderstood black widow. And searching for guidance, she looked to the women who came before her: the tough, complicated ancestors whose lives, Irvine learned, are a testament to the freedom, loneliness, and mythmaking of the American West.

Gloriously written and fiercely felt, Almost Animal places Amy Irvine among our greatest writers on the bonds between the human and natural worlds--including Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, and Wendell Berry--as well as contemporary chroniclers of the American West, from Cheryl Strayed to Tara Westover.

Review Quotes

"Amy Irvine's explorations of the shadow side of Mormon history are a revelatory lantern fearlessly exploring a black hole. Yet her stories are also freighted with happy surprises, like a care dog who helps heal an ailing child, the incredible horseback skills of women in today's American West, and above all Irvine's relentless determination to triumph against formidable odds and bring her odyssey to a satisfying close. Almost Animal is a wondrous read from an author of remarkable strength."--David James Duncan, author of Sun House and The Brothers K

"If we have any hope of surviving this time of terror and greed, we need to begin telling the truth, about our own wildness, about the catastrophe of motherhood, about the ways we have failed to protect this spectacular planet whose bounty gave us life. Amy Irvine is a relentless and fearless truth teller, full of rage and love, bighearted and more than a little feral. Her beautifully forged, ferociously rendered story of fracture and reassemblage will stop your heart, will make you want to ride the war horses into battle on behalf of every Earthly creature, be it child, mountain lion, or snake. I'll be there too, flanked on all sides by a battalion of wild women, Mormon and Pagan, ancestral and alive, with little left to lose and everything to save."--Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

"Amy Irvine's voice runs at a hot, wild pitch, masterful and steeped in ghosts. In Almost Animal, she's written a starting place for healing our upended selves, families, culture, world. If anyone can forge a way through these crazy twists and turns, through fractured desert and the beasts and dreams that dwell there, it's her."--Craig Childs, author of The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

"In Almost Animal, Amy Irvine is a mother on horseback, fiercely and intimately navigating the destructive myths of the American West that obscure both profound violence and indispensable lessons for survival. Whether reckoning with her own inheritance as a descendant of early Mormon settlers, wildly galloping to the edges of maternal love and terror, or contemplating the joyful resilience of ravens, Irvine's prose is as trenchant as it is luminous. This is an astonishing, unforgettable memoir--a must-read for all who are contending with how historical trauma lives within us."--Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks

Praise for Trespass

"A singularly elegiac and astringent memoir of dissent."--Chicago Tribune

"It's hard to imagine a personal history more transporting than this one."--Los Angeles Times

"Fierce . . . The most vivid ground-level report from this war zone that I have ever read."--The Washington Post

"Trespass is a flare shot up amid troubling forces and asks us not to imagine a new West, but instead to re-envision ourselves as its inhabitants."--Robert Redford

"A harrowing and angry book that ultimately wins us over by sheer, naked honesty . . . Irvine eloquently presents her defense of the Western landscape and the integrality of her own life."--Jim Harrison

"Bold and original in her thinking, candid and lyrical in expression, Irvine launches a penetrating critique of Mormon sovereignty, the persistent oppression of women, the longing to belong versus the need to be one's self, and the environmental havoc wrought by cattle ranching, 'extreme recreationists' and the federally sanctioned, post-9/11 rush to extract fossil fuels from protected public lands. . . . [She] joins red-rock heroes Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams in breaking ranks and speaking up for the living world."--Booklist (starred review)

About the Author

Amy Irvine is a sixth-generation Utahn who descends from the first Mormons to occupy the West. Her memoir Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land received the Orion Book Award and the Colorado Book Award. Her second book, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, is a feminist response to Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, and during lockdown, Pam Houston and Irvine coauthored the epistolary Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place. Irvine's essays have appeared in both The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Food Writing, as well as Orion, Outside, High Country News, Lit Hub, and Backpacker. She lives and writes on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado.