A frank, and funny, work about the female body

Cat Bohannon wrote her best-selling non-fiction debut Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years Of Human Evolution (2023) while also having two children, completing a doctorate and surviving the Covid-19 pandemic.

- Ong Sor Fern

Over a video call from Seattle in the United States, where she is based, Bohannon says: “Most women are used to doing hard things.”

Her dry sense of humour emerges as she adds: “The process of writing the book, I had all the authority of doing it for the first time. Motherhood’s a lot like that, isn’t it? And the PhD too. I just decided to do all three crazy things in my life at the same time.”

The 45-year-old is a featured speaker at the Singapore Writers Festival 2024. She will deliver a festival keynote on Nov 16, and participate in a panel on female empowerment in modern literature on Nov 17.

Given all that she was juggling, a decade seems a reasonable amount of time to dedicate to researching and writing a book that challenges the male norm in scientific research.

The idea for the book was not born at a bar, as reported in some media outlets. But alcohol was involved in its conception.

Bohannon was hanging out with friends on the empty top floor of a then-new institute at New York’s Columbia University, where she did her doctoral thesis. She says: “It had a great view of the city, huge windows.”

Her friend, who was pursuing neuroscience studies and had a Nobel Prize-winning scientist as his supervisor, was talking about his experiments. What intrigued him about the results of his experiments was the sex differences, but his supervisor dismissed the data.