In Search of Hope: A Guest Post by Ramona Ausubel

From Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty to Awayland, Ramona Ausubel knows how to tug at our heartstrings. In The Last Animal we all get to fall in love with the star of the show: Pearl, our favorite woolly mammoth. In her exclusive essay below, Ramona takes readers behind the scenes of creating Pearl and the unforgettable family surrounding her. Here’s Ramona, to fill us in on all the woolly secrets.

It was winter in Berkeley and it had been raining for weeks. My newborn daughter was asleep on my chest. She was a tiny, delicate animal who was mine to care for. Milk and skin and love was all she needed then, but I knew the list would transform, that she would transform and so would I. My second novel was about to come out and I had work to do so I opened my laptop and a story popped up about scientists working to “de-extinct” the woolly mammoth by editing Asian elephant genes to give them mammoth traits. There was a picture of that iconic, hairy beast, tusks reaching to the sky, surrounded by snowy tundra.

I thought: humans! Here we are on beautiful planet with millions of creatures and the one we want is the one we don’t have. But to bring something back, rather than to erase—maybe that’s good? Better, certainly, than a lot of darker instincts. Though I had a lot of questions about the wisdom of the project and the trillions of possible unintended consequences, I felt weirdly aligned with those scientists: we were all making animals. Mine had just been born, a six-pound human with spiky brown hair and bright blue eyes; theirs was a still-imaginary extinct pachyderm that might one day roam the Arctic.

The future of both of these creatures was unknown, unknowable. Parenting is like that. Love is like that. Science, too, is like that. I knew then that there was a novel in this knot of complicated truths, in the hubris and hope of trying something with uncontrollable results, in the possibility of a big What If. In loving a creature even if you don’t know how its life will go. And like those fancy scientists, I wanted to hang out with a baby woolly mammoth. To stare into two dark eyes curtained by long lashes, to run my hands through her thick red hair. I didn’t have a big bank account or a shiny genetics lab, but I had a laptop and an hour before the baby woke up.

In the next few years, the novel turned into The Last Animal, and it is as much about being part of a family, of sisterhood and motherhood, as it is about mammoth resurrection. It’s about grief, and the way we are turned wild by loss. It is about being an animal and caring about animals (some of them the human kind). More than anything, it is a novel in search of hope.

That baby is nine-years-old now. She still lies on my chest, with her brother. Scientists are closer and closer to their woolly dream. The world is as heartbreaking and as beautiful as ever. The future, as unknowable. What a wilderness this is, and what magical beasts it is filled with. All our aching, beating hearts.