Name: When Women Were Birds
ISBN: 9781250024114

Terry Tempest Williams

The author of the memoir Refuge offers a meditation on the meaning of a strange legacy that her mother left her--three shelves of the elder woman's "journals," all discovered by the author after her mother's death to be empty.

Fifty-four Variations on Voice

When Women Were Birds

The beloved author of Refuge returns with a work that explodes and startles, illuminates and celebrates Terry Tempest Williams’s mother told her: “I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won’t look at them until after I’m gone.” Readers of Williams’s iconic and unconventional memoir, Refuge, well remember that mother. She was one of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah who developed cancer as a result of the nuclear testing in nearby Nevada. It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as what she found when the time came to read them. “They were exactly where she said they would be: three shelves of beautiful cloth-bound books . . . I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It too was empty . . . Shelf after shelf after shelf, all of my mother’s journals were blank.” What did Williams’s mother mean by that? In fifty-four chapters that unfold like a series of yoga poses, each with its own logic and beauty, Williams creates a lyrical and caring meditation of the mystery of her mother's journals. When Women Were Birds is a kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question “What does it mean to have a voice?”

This books reminds me to look at the beauty and poetry in every day life. It sometimes verges on slam poetry/spoken word isms that don’t work for me, but the ideas expressed and the ways it made me reflect outweigh those aspects. 

Erin

Katie Ravenwood

A painfully beautiful book full of lovely, evocative prose. In fact, at times it's so ethereal that it can be hard to push through sometimes if you're on a reading binge, which is why I started and stopped over and over. This is a book to be read slowly and savored, and I made the mistake of bingeing on it today. My fault, probably, but I have a feeling I'll revisit it soon and take more time.

When Women Were Birds Fifty-four Variations on Voice

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