Almost
Animal
A memoir about motherhood, liberation, and the natural world
Growing up in Utah, a descendant of its earliest Mormon inhabitants, Amy Irvine spent her life fighting against the patriarchy that was her inheritance. The one place she felt truly herself was in the natural world. She climbed red rock, skied backcountry powder, and fought wildfires. But after the birth of her daughter, she 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 unearthing her deepest self and finding a more authentic 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 myth-making of the American West.
Amy Irvine is a relentless and fearless truth teller, full of rage and love, bighearted and more than a little feral.
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 — Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country
Almost Animal is an electric work of personal archaeology, a layered reckoning with lineage and landscape, claustrophobia and wilderness, what we receive and what we disrupt—full of vigils, cliff-faces, dreams, vistas, terrors, creatures, and guides. This book is unafraid of darkness; it goes spelunking right into those darkest nights of the soul as caverns full of history and truth. Amy Irvine is clear-eyed in her self-interrogations and full-throated in her love songs. This is a capacious, generous, and genuinely searching book—I'm so grateful that it's here.Leslie Jamison — Splinters and The Empathy Exams
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
With a formidable intellect and gutsy vulnerability, Amy Irvine explores and connects her Mormon lineage to her motherly struggles raising a sick daughter in the American West. Readers will marvel at this tough mountain woman for her tenacious love of her daughter, her intuitive trust of the earth's healing powers, and her ease with animals of all kinds. A raging river of a story, Almost Animal will inspire readers with its wisdom and strong environmental values.Deborah Taffa — Whiskey Tender
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 — Aftershocks
- On Shelves
- November 10th, 2026
- Genre
- Memoir
- Publisher
- Spiegel & Grau