When Helen Jukes fell pregnant, she does what anyone else would do, searched for information to help make sense of the changes underway inside her. But as the months pass and her body becames increasingly strange, the pregnancy guides seem insufficient; even the advice of her friends, passionate proponents of one birthing approach or another, felt oppressive.
So she widened her frame of reference, looking beyond humans to ask what motherhood looks like in other species. Here began a wilder process of enquiry – in which spiders, polar bears, bonobos and burying beetles (among others) begin to unsettle & expand her notion of what mothering is; what it could be.

As she entered the sleeplessness, chaos and intimate discoveries of life with a newborn, these animal stories became Helen’s companions and guides. Revealing the deceits inherent in the vision of the ‘natural’ mother  she began  to explore where her own animality begins and ends.

Her book 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 a mother – today.

HELEN JUKES’ writing has appeared in The New York Times, Port Magazine, Aeon and others. Her first book, A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings, was listed as a Book of the Year by Slate magazine, Book of the Month by BBC Countryfile and Book of the Week at the London Review of Books. It was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag non-fiction award.

When Helen was at the bookshop reading from her earlier book, she did a trial run of a reading from this one… we immediately asked her to return when Mother Animal came out. Yes, it was good.

Refreshments included