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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“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
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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.
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.
Amy Irvine is a sixth-generation Utahn and long-time public lands activist. Her work has appeared in Orion, The Pacific Standard, Climbing, High Desert Journal, Triquarterly, Rock & Ice, Columbia Journal and more. Her memoir, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, received the Orion Book Award, the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, and Colorado Book Award. Her essay “Spectral Light,” which appeared in Orion Magazine and The Best Science & Nature Writing series, was a finalist for the Pen Award in Journalism, and her recent essay in The Pacific Standard, “Conflagrations: Motherhood, Madness and a Planet on Fire,” appeared among the 2017 Best American Essays’ list of Notables.