Cat Bohannon ’01 may or may not be joking when she’s asked what life is like now that she’s written a New York Times bestseller.
“Well, it’s paying for all of the additional therapy that requires,” the author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution says, smiling. “I don’t know how to process this.”
OK. We’ll ask an easier question: How did this future New York Times bestselling author get her start?
Like this: Her parents divorced when she was 5 and she moved to Indianapolis to live with her father, now-retired Butler Psychology Professor Neil Bohannon, when she was in high school. At Butler, “I was alternately a great and terrible student depending on the day and the subject and my mood,” she says. “I was a very moody person.”
She finished with a Literature degree, but not before trying out a bunch of secondary majors—Philosophy, Electronic Music, “anything that interested me.” But her time writing poetry and participating in Butler’s Visiting Writers Series made a lasting impression.
“The caliber of writers coming through Butler in the late ’90s was like, we had better people than Harvard, dude,” she says.
She remembers being part of student welcome groups that took poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti to a jazz bar and went salsa dancing with poet Martín Espada. English Professor Susan Neville gave some of Bohannon’s poems to poet Yusef Komunyakaa when he visited campus, and they sat together as he suggested edits.
“It was an incredible thing,” she says. “I mean, he read my freaking poems! That’s crazy. If not for Butler, I don’t think I would have understood that these literary luminaries, the writers that I was so in awe of as a teenager, were, in fact, people who did things like have dinner and go out with students and have drinks and age in their bodies. The wonderful workshops I had as a young writer and also the Visiting Writers Series were very much what made me understand that being a working artist is simply being a person in the world making art.”
Neville says that as an undergrad, Bohannon was “fiery, fierce, funny, incredibly smart, creative, and an immensely talented poet and musician. She was, even then, the real thing.”
After Bohannon finished her Butler career abroad at the University of East Anglia in England, she lived in Europe for a while. Toured with a band. Earned an MFA at the University of Arizona. “Play-acting at pseudo adulthood.”
In 2012, she got the book deal for what would turn out to be Eve, which The New York Times says “presents nothing less than a new history of the species by examining human evolution through the lens of womankind. It’s a provocative corrective that will answer dozens of questions you’ve always had—and even more you never thought to ask.”
The subject matter is a bit off the beaten path, especially for a bestseller, Bohannon acknowledges. But “51 percent of the world has a female body, turns out,” she says. “And there’s a lot in my book that’s relevant for male bodies too. I think there was a desire, a need, to be able to speak about our bodies frankly, but also have the science behind it be understandable and not have it be patronizing or elite or incomprehensible.”
She’s in the process of writing her next book, which deals with the health of women and girls around the world. In the meantime, Bohannon, who received her doctorate PhD from Columbia University in 2022, continues to bask in the acclaim Eve has received.
Butler’s English Department, certainly, is justifiably proud.
“While so many of our alums go on to vivid and meaningful careers, there is something extra gratifying in seeing one of our own receive national media recognition on this scale,” English Professor Andy Levy says. “But that’s all tribute to Cat’s own intellectual and creative vision, energy, and perseverance. It’s a brilliant book by a brilliant person.”