When I first picked up Estés’s book, I did so warily. Instagram is overgrown with images of women loping naked through the woods and giving birth in living rooms, tagged #wildwoman or #witch or #laloba, the Spanish feminine for wolf. Accounts of menstruation, childbirth, menopause and gender transition howl through the worlds of theater and television, memoir and art. But “women’s flagging vitality can be restored by extensive ‘psychic-archeological’ digs into the ruins of the female underworld.” It is there that we might reveal “women’s deepest nature” and gain access to “the creative feminine.”Ī generation later, “Women Who Run With the Wolves” has returned to a culture suddenly lush with primal visions of women’s bodies - dripping with blood, coursing with hormones and pulsing with pain and arousal.

She conjures images of a goddess squatting out a baby, of “the pungent odor of iron from the fresh blood of childbirth,” of the “power of the haunches” and “the spiritual placenta.” In her introduction, she explains why: “Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, overbuilt,” she writes. I cracked open a copy and encountered a fecund landscape: folk tales saturated with pollen, cobwebs, plums, petals, gristle, guts, “uncombed cats” and the bodies of human women.Įstés - a psychoanalyst, poet and cantadora, or “keeper of old stories” - draws from Jungian archetypes, hag lore and wildlife observation to build an alternative feminine mythology. Its cover recalls a vintage GeoCities website: black background, underlined gold text, thumbnail-sized etching of a woman and her lupine companion. The book, “Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype,” by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, was first published in 1992.

After that, I saw the book everywhere: in the hands of a tattooed solo diner while she ate a game bird in a Texas restaurant nestled with the new releases on female rage in a Brooklyn bookstore on Lana Del Rey’s Instagram. Soon the book disappeared into a woven bag, her shoulder brushed against mine, and it was as if she had initiated me into a secret club.

I first spied the book last spring, in the lap of a vaguely witchy young woman pinched between two men on the subway.

Clarissa pinkola estes new book