When Women Were Birds
Fifty-four Variations on Voice
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year
"Brilliant, meditative, and full of surprises, wisdom, and wonder."—Ann Lamott, author of Imperfect Birds
"I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won't look at them until after I'm gone." This is what Terry Tempest Williams's mother, the matriarch of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah, told her a week before she died. It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as it was to discover that the three shelves of journals were all blank. In fifty-four short chapters, Williams recounts memories of her mother, ponders her own faith, and contemplates the notion of absence and presence art and in our world.
When Women Were Birds is a carefully crafted kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question: What does it mean to have a voice?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams, the sensitive author of Refuge, is shocked to discover her deceased mother's unwritten memoirs shelves worth of blank pages. Under such unpromising circumstances commences a kaleidoscopic celebration and palimpsest all metaphorical clich s but apt on finding a voice and woman's identity beyond the silenced, selfless existence informed by children and a husband even a family brimming with love. The empty pages of a journal manifest a hermeneutics of suspicion: the white upon which to project a lifelong journey of self-discovery. In 54 meditations (one for each year of her mother's life, and of Williams's life to date), we learn about an unusual (patriarchal) Mormon background and an upbringing that included a season of homeschooling in Hawaii, encounters with a husband-and-wife team of John Birchers while teaching high school biology , a job at the Museum of Natural History in New York City, and the meeting of her future mate over a discussion of books and birds. Among deep influences are Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmentalist Wangari Maathai; H l ne Cixous; Clarice Lispector; the secret-women's language of China, N shu; and the soaring operas of Richard Strauss. "If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently," Williams declares in her bighearted, deliberative hymn: old themes newly warbled.
