How to Be a Living Thing Book Summary - How to Be a Living Thing Book explained in key points

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How to Be a Living Thing summary

Name: How to Be a Living Thing
Rating: 4.4 (15 reviews)
Author: Mari Andrew

Mari Andrew

Meditations on Creatures and Being Human in the World

4.4 (15 ratings)

23 mins

Brief summary

How to Be a Living Thing by Mari Andrew guides us through the emotional landscape of modern life, offering reflections, illustrations, and insights on vulnerability, resilience, and finding beauty in our everyday experiences.

Topics

Animals Happy Mindful Loving Nature vs. Nurture Mindful Work Self-Help

Table of Contents

How to Be a Living Thing
Summary of 6 key ideas

Audio & text in the Blinkist app

Key idea 1 of 6

What’s in it for me? Learn how animals can teach you to live more fully.

Sunny startles at small noises yet stalks a fruit fly with laser focus. She ignores calls and cuddles, then – on her terms – offers a brief brush against a leg or a soft meow that feels earned. She’ll vault onto a shelf, scatter objects, and carry on as if that’s simply what a cat does.

Watching Sunny this closely has led the author Mari Andrew to reflect on her own species. If a cat is allowed to be inconsistent and self-protective, then people deserve the same permission to be imperfect. She presents “human-ing” as a key concept. It means living with missteps, confusion, and intense feeling as part of a normal human range. She blends biology, history, and imagination – not to form a final verdict, but to begin an open-ended inquiry – inviting us to see humans as simply animals among animals.

Although Mari discusses several other animals in How to Be a Living Thing, in this Blink, we’ll cover five – well, six if you include humans “being living things,” which we’ll cover in our last section. But let’s start with orcas.

How orcas show us the gift of striving

As a child, the author Mari played an imaginative game she called Town. She drew streets and houses, filled them with bakers, doctors, and shopkeepers, and imagined a steady rhythm of errands and obligations. To her, that busyness looked like the essence of adulthood. Life, she thought, meant striving.

Years later, in the stillness of the first COVID-19 lockdown, striving disappeared – restaurants delivered, orchestras streamed, and museums went virtual. At first, Mari felt that the conveniences were like gifts. But soon the smoothness grated. She longed to be annoyed by someone blocking her view at an exhibit or squeezed against strangers on a train. What she craved wasn’t ease, but friction.

That longing sharpened when she read scientist Lori Marino’s essay on orcas in captivity. Trainers at marine parks had long claimed the whales lived better in pools than in the sea: constant food, no predators, no danger. Yet tanks stripped them of what they’d evolved to do – hunt, roam vast waters, and navigate shifting pod dynamics. Deprived of challenge, some injured themselves against the tank walls. An easy life, it turned out, was agony for them.

For Mari, the echo with human life was unmistakable. She saw it in her friend Ada, who’d spent years yearning for a soulmate. After marrying the man she’d longed for, Ada was startled by a dull sadness. She missed the spark of searching, the thrill of possibility. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had a name for this – “objet petit a”, which translates to “object little a,” and represents the perpetual pursuit of desire, that sustains us more than the satisfaction of fulfillment.

Mari sees the same dynamic in her own work. The grumbling, the obstacles, the uncertainty – those moments feel most alive. The finished product brings only a fleeting smile. Striving itself, she’s realized, is the point.

What gorillas can teach us about the language of grief

When National Geographic ran a cover photo of Koko the gorilla gently cradling a kitten, the image transfixed its readers. The 280-pound western lowland gorilla had learned sign language as a youngster and astonished observers by inventing word combinations, telling jokes, and making requests. Given the choice between a stuffed toy and a living companion, she asked for a kitten. She named the cat All Ball and doted on her as if she were her own child.

The tenderness between gorilla and cat fascinated the public. But it was loss that revealed something deeper. When All Ball was killed by a car, Koko understood immediately. She signed “Bad, sad, bad” and later cried through the night, hooting and pounding the walls of her cage. Some critics suggested she was mimicking her handlers, but her raw sobs spoke louder than any signs. Words can be slippery; but grief’s sound is unmistakable.

How chickens reveal the hidden language of belonging

Once, at a retreat center filled with animals, Mari only wanted to spend time with the donkeys. But before she could reach them, a farmhand named Gary stopped her to introduce the flock of chickens that had gathered in her path. Stroking a black hen called Edna with surprising tenderness, he described their personalities as if introducing old friends. One hen was sweet, another acted like a dog, and soon Mari found herself with a bird perched on her lap, listening to gentle clucks and chirps that sounded less like barnyard clichés and more like soft conversation.

Gary explained that these sounds were meaningful: warnings, reminders of social hierarchy, signals of joy or fear. To him, the flock was talking. When Mari returned the next day, dozens of chickens hurried toward her, peeping and squealing as if gossiping among themselves. She couldn’t shake the question: If this isn’t language, then what is it?

Why oysters remind us to trust unseen knowledge

When biologist Frank Brown moved oysters from a Connecticut shore to a lab near Chicago, he expected them to lose touch with the tides. At first, they kept eating on New Haven time. But gradually, their schedule shifted until it aligned with when high tide would have occurred in Illinois. In total darkness, with no cues from the outside world, the oysters had still tracked the moon. Brown concluded that life pulses in rhythms beyond human senses – a claim that earned him ridicule, but also showed how narrow our definitions of knowledge can be.

For Mari, Brown’s discovery echoes in her own life. In dance class, movement gives her a way to express emotions that resist neat explanations – grief, survivor’s guilt, small bursts of joy. When a neurologist turned up to a class to observe, hoping to prove dance’s therapeutic benefits, the need for evidence felt almost absurd. Mari already knew it in her body. She calls it transrational knowledge: truth that exceeds reason but still feels undeniable.

How rats expose our fear of others

When an autoimmune attack on Mari’s nerves left her partially paralyzed, the wheelchair she received felt like liberation. She could move again – go outside, visit a café, ride a bus. At that time her legs felt impossibly heavy, but thankfully, the paralysis wasn’t permanent.

Reflecting on that time, it was how others reacted that struck her most, rather than her regained mobility. People looked away or overcompensated with awkward smiles. Later, a hairdresser with a disabled daughter put it bluntly: “No one wants to see disabled people.” The words rang true. Society prefers to keep disability, aging, or homelessness out of sight, because these realities force us to face our own fragility.

How humans should remember our sacred place in nature

In 1349, plague swept through Norwich, the largest city in provincial England. Among its survivors was a child named Julian, who had once spent her days chasing cats through alleyways, stealing pretzels, and weaving fairy homes under blackthorn trees. The joyful midsummer festivals she knew – bonfires, songs, and barefoot games – were replaced by empty stalls, body carts, and the bell cry of “Bring out your dead.”

By adulthood, she’d endured repeated outbreaks, likely losing family and neighbors, until grief itself seemed to hollow her. On what she thought was her deathbed, Julian broke open into visions that reimagined God not as punisher but as loving mother. She began to write of our natural bodies not as fallen or shameful but as beautiful, inseparable from soul, part of the goodness of creation.

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What is How to Be a Living Thing about?

How to Be a Living Thing (2025) explores what animals can teach us about being human. It blends personal reflection with stories of creatures from orcas to oysters, showing how their instincts and behaviors mirror our own struggles and joys. It invites you to see connection, resilience, and wonder as part of your everyday life.

Who should read How to Be a Living Thing?

Animal lovers seeking deeper meaning in human life
Anyone interested in philosophy, spirituality, and self discovery
People exploring empathy, disability, and social awareness

About the Author

Mari Andrew is an American writer and illustrator who first gained attention by sharing her drawings online. She is the New York Times best-selling author of Am I There Yet?, Getting There, and My Inner Sky. Her work has also been adapted for television by Amazon Studios.

Categories with How to Be a Living Thing

Nature & the Environment Mindfulness & Happiness Personal Development

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