Join us for an evening with Helen Jukes, who will be discussing her newest book Mother Animal with the author of Matrescene, Lucy Jones.
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. 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 & expand her notion of what mothering is; what it could be.
At this special Waterstones Gower Street event, Helen Jukes (Mother Animal) will be in discussion with Lucy Jones (Matrescence) to discuss the experience of pregnancy, birth and child-raising, for both human and our more-than-human kin. Bringing in perspectives from evolutionary biology, zoology, ecology and sociology, Helen and Lucy will explore some of the systems of belief underpinning our experience of matrescence, and what lies at the heart of what it means to be a mother in our society today.
'This book is a truly radical and astounding shout for community and care not only within our own species but the entire world. Read it to feel the slow detonation of mind-blowing understanding.’ - Daisy Johnson
‘Magnificent, utterly refreshing, captivating... I was electrified by Jukes' gimlet-eyed telling of her own experience of new motherhood and the stories of parenting and nesting and birthing from our natural world.’ - Lucy Jones
Don't forget to include a copy of Mother Animal with your ticket. There will be a book signing following the discussion. Join us from 18:00 for a welcome drink!
Helen Jukes’ work has appeared in The New York Times, Port Magazine, Aeon and others. Her first book, A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings, received wide critical acclaim, and was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag non-fiction award. Her latest book is Mother Animal, a startlingly new vision of motherhood. Helen has led creative writing workshops for universities, literary organisations, a homelessness charity and a prison; she currently teaches at the University of Oxford, and lives with her daughter on the edge of the Peak District.
Lucy Jones is a writer and journalist based in Hampshire, England. She previously worked at NME and the Daily Telegraph, and her writing on culture, science and nature has been published in GQ, BBC Wildlife, The Sunday Times, the Guardian and the New Statesman. She is the author of Foxes Unearthed, which won the Society of Authors' Roger Deakin Award 2015; Losing Eden, which was long-listed for the Wainwright Prize and named a Times and Telegraph book of the year; and Matrescence, ‘a thrilling examination of what it means to be a mother’ (Observer), which has been longlisted for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Nonfiction.
