For much of her life, Catherine Raven felt worthless. Then she befriended a fox.
After growing up in an abusive home where she felt unwanted, Raven moved out at 15, and never quite felt comfortable around other people. In 2003, she was living in a cottage in a remote valley in Montana, working as a field guide, when a fox showed up one afternoon.
He returned day after day. Sometimes he brought her dead mice as presents; sometimes they played a game of chicken, with him inching closer until she backed down. He listened as she read him “The Little Prince.” If Raven wasn’t outside, the fox would peer into her windows, looking for her.
One night he brought his kits to her porch, then fell asleep, leaving her to babysit several rambunctious young foxes. The show of trust changed Raven’s life.
“That was a turning point in how I felt about myself,” Raven told me during a phone call from her home in southwest Montana. “I felt like, wow, I am somebody that a fox trusts.”
Raven recounts the story of their relationship in her 2021 memoir, “Fox and I.” An instant best seller, the book belongs to a booming subgenre of autobiography: memoirs about the surprising bonds between humans and wild animals.
Books about writers’ dogs and cats have long been a literary staple, with popular and critical hits like John Grogan’s best seller about his unruly Labrador, “Marley and Me,” and Caleb Carr’s love letter to his cat, “My Beloved Monster.” In recent years, the pet memoir category has expanded to include an array of other domesticated species — including chickens, goats, pigs, alpacas and donkeys, which feature in a surprising number of autobiographies.
As a lifelong animal lover, I’ve lately been absorbed by a popular and growing subset of animal memoirs — stories that explore what it means to connect with an untamed creature, and why such relationships can be so exhilarating and transformative.
Unlike sweeping nature narratives about an entire species, ecosystem or part of the planet, these memoirs focus on individual animals and paint them as fully formed characters with complex personalities and their own quirks. Animals are typically the protagonists, with humans serving as narrators. Often, the animals arrive unexpectedly in the writers’ lives and lead them on a path of self-discovery.
In a new addition to the canon, “Raising Hare,” Chloe Dalton details how her life took an unexpected turn after a chance encounter with a baby hare led to a profound and lasting relationship. Other recent classics of the genre include “H Is for Hawk,” Helen Macdonald’s moving story about coping with grief through training a goshawk named Mabel, “Alfie and Me,” the ecologist Carl Safina’s memoir about finding a sickly baby screech owl and raising it, and “George,” Frieda Hughes’s book about living with a mischievous magpie.
An older but widely beloved memoir — and a rare example of one starring a mollusk — is Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating,” which recounts how she took comfort in the presence of a snail that occupied a plant on her night stand while she was bedridden with a debilitating illness.
While the nature of the relationships vary — some animals become the writers’ housemates, others remain truly wild — these memoirs share common threads. Often, the authors are wrestling with grief, trauma or loss, and find solace in the company of an animal who isn’t forced to be their companion, and doesn’t pity or judge them. Many of the writers describe how forming a connection with another creature, one that wasn’t burdened by ownership, changed their understanding of themselves and their humanity, and broadened their capacity for compassion and empathy.
“One of the things that living with animals has done for me is it’s allowed me to see the world through other eyes, it’s made the world bigger to me,” said Macdonald, whose memoir “H Is for Hawk” has sold more than 500,000 copies in the United States. “There is a human hunger for a much more intimate close contact with animals.”
As someone who grew up with an abundance of pets thanks to an indulgent, animal-loving father, I’m enchanted by the nonhuman protagonists in these memoirs, which remind me of the joyful, unpredictable chaos of living with animals.
Our menagerie included the usual dogs, cats, rabbits, budgies, canaries, finches, guinea pigs and hamsters, but also a tortoise, a frog, a crawfish and a rotating cast of rescued doves and sparrows that we raised and released. For a while, we kept a baby parrot my father found struggling on the ground. The tiny featherless bird blossomed into a big, squawking, fruit pulp-spewing diva named Sally who frequently defaced our kitchen, and some of us were relieved when she flew off one day. (Our mother drew the line at jerboas — jumping rodents with oversize ears and long spindly legs — which my father, in his bachelor days, kept in a giant sand-filled aquarium in his bedroom.)
Still, even with enough animals at home to fill a petting zoo, I wanted to be near wilder ones. I occasionally got to, while snorkeling around coral reefs (a pilot fish I named Herman once followed me all the way to shore) or during family excursions to the desert, which was host to fascinating creatures — dung beetles, locusts, geckos, camel spiders, the elusive jerboas. But more often I had to settle for secondhand experiences through books like “White Fang” and “Island of the Blue Dolphins.”
The recent cluster of memoirs about wild creatures has granted me a window into the daily lives, behaviors and personalities of animals that most of us are unlikely to ever encounter at close range. Wild places across the planet are shrinking; most of us are cut off from the natural world and its inhabitants.
Our collective longing to connect with animals is evident in the viral popularity of animal celebrities on social media — who can resist Pesto the chubby baby king penguin, Hua Hua the panda or Moo Deng, the ornery baby pygmy hippo? It’s also captured in films like the documentary “My Octopus Teacher” and the feature film “The Penguin Lessons,” which was adapted from Tom Michell’s memoir about rescuing an oil-slicked penguin he found on a beach in Uruguay.
“It’s a very old yearning that our kind has,” said the naturalist Sy Montgomery, who has written dozens of books about animals, including “How to Be a Good Creature,” which chronicles her relationships with 13 animals, among them an octopus named Octavia.
As children, most of us feel an instinctive connection with other creatures. And some of the oldest forms of human art and literature — cave paintings, myths, fables — center on animals.
“It has helped us survive,” Montgomery said of this connection. “Until 10 minutes ago we were all hunter gatherers, and if you didn’t pay attention to the natural world a smilodon came and ate you.”
In her recently released best seller, “Raising Hare,” Dalton describes how the rhythm of her life and her sense of self changed when she brought home a baby hare.
Before the leveret came into her life, Dalton’s existence revolved around work. An international political consultant, she ran on adrenaline, traveling the globe in response to geopolitical crises. During the pandemic, Dalton retreated to her home in the English countryside, where, walking in a field one afternoon, she found a tiny hare that had been chased by a dog. Dalton brought the leveret home, bottle fed it and eventually gave it the run of her house and garden, imagining it would one day return to the wild.
Once mature, the hare began venturing outside of the garden walls, disappearing for stretches, sometimes weeks at a time. But to Dalton’s astonishment, she always returned, waiting patiently by the door to be let in.
Her quiet presence had a profound effect on Dalton.
“Her behavior stilled me and calmed me and made me feel differently about my life,” Dalton said in an interview.
Portraying wild creatures as willing companions to humans carries risk. Biologists and naturalists caution against interacting with wildlife, for the safety of animals and humans, and some narratives about human and animal friendships might leave readers thinking that animals want to be our cuddly sidekicks.
Another critique of some animal memoirs is that authors stray into anthropomorphism, assigning human traits to their nonhuman subjects. But writers who have spent time with members of other species say it’s foolish to assume that we’re so very different.
“For the longest time, it was in vogue to say, oh that’s anthropomorphism, and that is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Montgomery said. “It implies that emotions, individuality, personality are all human characteristics.”
Part of the narrative tension in memoirs about wild animals comes from how tenuous and fleeting the relationships feel. In “H Is for Hawk,” Macdonald constantly worries that when Mabel flies freely to hunt, she might never return. Dalton feels a pang when the hare bounds past the garden wall. “Each time she leaves it could be the last time,” Dalton told me.
Frieda Hughes, a poet and artist who is the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, always knew her relationship with a magpie would end, but didn’t anticipate how sharply she would feel the loss.
Hughes found George in the garden of her home in Wales after a storm blew down his nest. She didn’t expect the tiny bird to survive. Instead, he thrived and grew into a wily prankster, an evolution she details in her 2023 book “George: A Magpie Memoir.”
George stole peas off Hughes’s plate and stuffed them in her back pocket. He grabbed her pencil and fled as she chased him around the garden. Once he could fly, Hughes left the kitchen window open so George could come and go. She later learned during a visit to her local pub that he was flying around to see her neighbors.
“Everyone knew George,” she said. “George had more of a social life than I did.”
Hughes reordered her life around the bird. Every night at dusk, she whistled for him, and he came barreling through the window. One evening, she whistled and George didn’t come home, and she knew the magical era was over.
“I knew that at some point, the happy ending was for him to leave,” said Hughes, who continued to take in injured and unwanted birds after George left, and currently lives with 11 owls. “When he did, I was so bereft.”
After more than three years, Catherine Raven’s relationship with the fox ended abruptly when a forest fire devastated the area around her home in Montana. She never saw the fox again. But his impact on her life has only grown in the years since, she said.
When “Fox and I” was released, Raven found herself interacting with people more, and to her surprise, enjoying it. It was Fox, as she calls him, who taught her how to connect with others, Raven said.
“Fox gave me self-esteem,” she said. “I am way more like Fox now.”
