Small Creatures Such as We

Fatima Bhutto discusses her new memoir, which investigates an abusive human relationship and a sustaining nonhuman one.

By Cara BensonMarch 17, 2026

• Memoir & Essay

A DESCENDANT OF ONE of Pakistan’s most prominent political families, Fatima Bhutto has lived her life in the public eye. She was 14 when her father was assassinated by police outside the family home in Karachi during his sister Benazir Bhutto’s second term as prime minister. Bhutto’s previous memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword (2010), is her account of the event and of the political corruption that led to his murder. It is a bold book—in it, she takes aim at her aunt Benazir and her aunt’s widower Asif Ali Zardari as, at a minimum, complicit in her father’s death—but in emotional terms, it is not her riskiest.

The Hour Of The Wolf, Bhutto’s new memoir, is a far more personal book. In fact, she has said that it’s not the book she wanted to write but the one she needed to write. Typically a headstrong person, Bhutto fell prey to a coercive, if charismatic, man for whom she repressed herself in the hope that one day they would marry and she would become a mother, something she deeply desired.

Throughout her years with the manipulative and emotionally abusive man, Bhutto also developed a relationship with her little dog Coco, a sprightly Jack Russell terrier. In contemplating both relationships, and comparing the human with the more-than-human connection, she began to write a new story for herself—a story that, hopefully, is about how we might move forward as a species.

I spoke with Bhutto over the internet. This is an edited and condensed version of our conversation (during which, to my delight, I also met Coco, who was curled up on mama’s lap).

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CARA BENSON: It feels appropriate to begin with the Brecht line you reference in the book. “What kind of times are these,” he asked in a poem written right before World War II, “when / To talk about trees is almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors?” I think that can also include talking about oneself, especially in your case, when such personal information (about being in an abusive relationship, about your desire to become a mother, about your relationship with this little dog) can feel like a crime in these times. Did that concern play on you at all during the writing?

FATIMA BHUTTO: It played on me in a few different ways. Number one, I felt a lot of shame when I was writing the book. And I wrote the book because I felt shame. Because that shame was something that kept me silent. Normally, I’m quite a disobedient person, but the shame made me a little more obedient than I would have liked to have been. I thought that the only way to confront it was to really confront it, and I couldn’t do that only in my head. I had to write. I had to write it out to see things clearly for myself.

When I was writing, I thought, If I feel this kind of shame at being in this manipulated state, what do other women feel? And I thought, Well, we all must feel the same thing; it’s just that none of us are saying it. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could say it? To remove one obstacle for ourselves.

So that was one layer of it, but the second is that, coming from a public sphere, you do feel an extra gaze on you more than you would like. This book is unlike anything I’ve ever written. I wrote a book about my father’s life and assassination, which I never thought of as a memoir because it was not really about me. It was about my father, and it was about me looking for things about my father, but I felt I had a safe distance from the reader.

This book feels to me like the first time I’ve put myself in the center. In a novel, no one knows but you. In narrative nonfiction, which I love, you’re only necessary insofar as you have to go out to get the information, and then that’s it. So the notion that to talk about the personal might feel like a crime was playing on me on multiple fronts. One of the benefits of being older is that I would not have been able to do this if I were 10 years younger or even five years younger. There is some sort of feeling of liberation in getting older, because you notice those things but they don’t weigh you down as much.

You write about the individual and the pack in regard to wolves and dogs, bringing in the Kipling line that “the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.” But you also examine humans through this lens. You write: “To many of us, there is nothing on earth greater or grander or more sophisticated than the self, than ourselves. This is our great failure as a species.” As someone who was a loner, I wondered if writing this book put you more firmly in the collective in any way?

I had always tried to train myself to be independent or to be self-sufficient. Part of that was a response to growing up in a place where I had to do that. Because of security reasons, I couldn’t do things that kids my age could do in high school, or even afterward, even in my twenties. If I wanted to go out in Karachi and Pakistan, I couldn’t just get into a car and go. People had to come with me. I always felt this discomfort of being inside a place and having other people outside waiting for me.

That, plus always being a reader and a writer, drew me to a place of isolation. But until this coercive relationship, that had always been my choice. I could go out with all the fuss, and get on with it, and have a nice time. But it was my choice to say if it didn’t feel right to me, so I’d stay in, and I’d read, and I’d write, and I found that very fulfilling.

But during the course of this relationship, it wasn’t my choice. I suddenly now had to be alone. Or had to be available, which meant staying inside. I didn’t like that; it made me uncomfortable in another way. It propelled me to a period of incredible loneliness at a time when I craved a community. Part of that was because of my loneliness, and part of it was also because of the times we lived in. Not just COVID-19, but surviving this world is rough, you know? It’s often rough, and alienating, and uncomfortable. We survive it because of each other. We survive together. I think when you’re a person on your own, you really learn to look for that kind of loneliness in other people.

There’s an anecdote that I wrote about a delivery man who has a miscommunication with me. People are away from their families, they’re displaced by globalization, they’re displaced by immigration. They are afraid, and they are having to survive in environments that are not nurturing or caring. It makes us seek out other people, and I wanted that. And the more I wanted it, somehow, the further I was kept from it. So writing this book was kind of a howl for it, in a sense.

Much of The Hour of the Wolf is an examination of the human-animal relationship. You write about Frans de Waal’s “linguistic castration,” the way scientists typically speak about the animal world. On the other hand, many caution about the risk of anthropomorphizing animals and projecting onto them. What is the real relationship there to be had?

I feel there is a real divide between the Western world and the rest of the world. I found myself going back to these stories in Islam and in the Qur’an because it seemed very powerful to me that Muslims believe that animals will be called to testify on Judgment Day as to how you treated them. The East was always a lot more fluid in how it classified life. We didn’t really have classification until modernity and colonialism. We had a much more fluid system that was far more inclusive and far more open and accepting of what we would now consider totally mad things to group together.

When I say East, I don’t just mean Islam—I mean Buddhism, East Asia, Indigenous cultures. I don’t know why we left this behind. We’ve put industrial modernity on this pedestal, a system that is just cruel and savage and transactional, a system that sees an animal as a mode of efficiency, a vehicle. Whereas I come from this culture that didn’t work like that. It worked on this idea of something much deeper. Something unbreakable by time.

As someone who’s studied in the West and has lived in the West, I was a bit fed up, to be honest, with just accepting, without pushing back on, this supposed superiority of the West, which, as far as I could tell, was destroying the natural world, was intent on burning the forests, polluting the seas, sending ash into the sky, slaughtering as much life as they could for nothing. Barry Lopez struck me so profoundly. Why did they kill the wolves? There is a cruelty in how we deal with life that’s not our own. That has to come from this industrial version of ourselves that kills because it can.

When I wrote this book, I wasn’t thinking of things like [the current assault on] Gaza, because it predates that. But to me, that is the same thing. We’ve spent every single day of two-and-a-half years watching slaughter because it can be done. No other reason. I wanted to refuse that. That is cultural, but I also have learned so much from animals about love and care. So I think it’s much more dangerous to dehumanize than to anthropomorphize.

You write that you “didn’t expect to learn this much about love or God or grace” from caring for Coco and her puppies. You “didn’t expect to be so moved by the simple act of care.” What is it that you learned?

There is a tenderness to the love we share. Our bonds with animals are very hard to replicate. They love us with a purity that’s hard to find in human relationships. They love us at our worst; they love us at our most disconnected. They love us without condition. I don’t know if most of us are lucky to have been loved without condition. I think that’s what we’re all hungry for, that’s what we are all seeking. It’s something that animals do so freely, and they do it with such ease, and it really puts us to shame.

I feel like all of life is just a constant boast of humans that’s so misplaced. I feel a kind of cold dread when I read about AI and dangerous individuals who are building these portals to the future. They’re so pleased with themselves, so pleased with cutting us off from each other. They’re so pleased at disconnecting human beings from the effects of their abilities. And there you have animals, who can trust again and again, no matter how many times their trust has been betrayed. Who can love, who can care, who can be loyal, who can surrender with an incredible grace.

I love that sentence when you talk about this secret language between human and animal. It’s a nonsymbolic or unmediated language. It’s much more primal.

It’s so primal, and all of modernity is designed to disconnect us from what’s primal and to break down everything as though it can be classified. Some things can’t be classified.

To come full circle to the Brecht line we opened with, moments after I finished my notes for our conversation, I received an email from a local family farm. They ended their newsletter referencing “these dark times” that we’re in. Then they signed off with the very Carl Sagan quote you invoke in your book: “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” I got goosebumps! And I started thinking more about it. If you had to rewrite this line, is there a different adjective you might use than “bearable”?

It’s an interesting question, because I’m not sure I would swap it out. Part of the wonder and the bewilderment of living is how little we know. On the right morning, you can feel a sort of childlike curiosity and awe at how little we know. An excitement about what there is to find out every single moment of the day.

But in a more fearful time, it’s really unbearable to think about how much we don’t know and how little we can prepare for anything. Not just for the future, but also for today, an hour from now. The experience of being and living.

Part of what makes animals so important for us is that there is a dignity in their not knowing. They live with a certain kind of nobility that I think we can learn from. There’s something quite extraordinary about having a moment of connection or communion with an animal, because it feels like transcending all that not-knowingness. It feels like crossing a divide that’s otherworldly.

So, I wouldn’t revise it. I would double down on it, actually, if I had to do anything.

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Fatima Bhutto is the author of the acclaimed memoir The Hour of the Wolf (2026). Her other books include The Runaways (2019), The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (2013), and Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir (2010). Bhutto’s journalism and essays have appeared in Granta, Zeteo, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Bhutto was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and grew up between Syria and Pakistan.

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Featured image: Photo of Fatima Bhutto by Pankaj Mishra.