A ferocious, incandescent memoir about motherhood, liberation, and the natural world—following one woman’s journey to reclaim her wildest self.
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“Full throttle, full immersion, full honesty, all surrender. 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. 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.”—Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
“Amy Irvine’s explorations of the shadow side of Mormon history are a revelatory lantern fearlessly exploring a black hole. Almost Animal is a wondrous read from an author of remarkable strength.”—David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K
“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.”—Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek
“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, Amy 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
“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.”—Deborah Jackson Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender
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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.PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN: 9781966302384
Price: $29.00
On-sale date: 11/10/2026
Weight: 3 lbs.
© Susie Grant
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.