Mother Animal

When Helen Jukes falls pregnant, she does what anyone else would do, searching 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, passionate proponents of one birthing approach or another, feels oppressive.

So she widens her frame of reference, looking beyond humans to ask what motherhood looks like in other species. Here begins a queerer, wilder process of enquiry – one in which 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. Revealing the deceits inherent in the vision of the ‘natural’ mother – the muted nursery walls of Instagram and the airbrushed images designed to sell her things – she becomes increasingly compelled to explore where her own animality begins and ends, and to fathom how the stuff of human industry has come to influence life even from its very beginnings.

A passionate, visceral and radical account of a body changed, Mother Animal combines personal memoir with fresh insights from evolutionary biology, zoology and toxicology to reach through to questions that lie at the heart of what it means to be alive – and a mother – today.