When women were birds Fifty-four variations on voice

Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Each book by ecologist, activist, and writer Williams (Finding Beauty in a Broken World, 2008) is an event, so lucid, caring, spirited, and incantatory is her approach to the matrix of nature, place, culture, family, and sense of self. In Refuge (1991), Williams wrote about losing her mother to cancer, and of the realization that her family's high incidence of the disease was traceable to their being atomic-bomb-test downwinders. At 54, Williams continues to grapple with her mother's death at age 54 in a meditative memoir in 54 parts, each an inquiry into a mysterious and haunting legacy: My mother left me her journals, and all her journals were blank. As Williams performs elegant variations on the meanings of voice and silence, she remembers four generations of women in her Mormon family, especially her smart, bird-loving grandmother, and pays homage to other mentors, including conservationist Mardy Murie and Green Belt Movement leader Wangari Maathai. She considers her writerly beginnings, shares with bracing candor insights into her marriage, and, most mystically, recounts watershed moments of terror, revelation, and conviction during which birds make startling appearances. Williams is transcendent in her piercing, musical, elegiac, and loving reflections on women's lives and wilderness, light and shadow, words expressed and words unspoken and invisible.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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 cliches 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; Helene Cixous; Clarice Lispector; the secret-women's language of China, Nushu; 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. Agent: Carl Brandt, Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An elegiac exploration of nature, creativity and Mormon female family relationships. After her mother's death from cancer, Williams (Finding Beauty in a Broken World, 2008, etc.) discovered that the journals she had left behind did not contain what she expected. This prompted the author to conduct a reflective search. In numbered sections of varying lengths, memories intersperse with mentions of the journals, whose "harmony of silence" haunt her as a poetic refrain. Williams recalls her bird-watching grandmother, Mimi, her mother's originality, and events that would guide her toward becoming a writer and a naturalist. Declaring that "Mormon women write. This is what we do, we write for posterity, noting the daily happenings of our lives," Williams considers the work of, among others, Gustave Courbet, Robert Walser, John Cage and Wangari Maathai ("People like Wangari don't die, that's how irretractable and resilient she was to me"); music and birdsong; poetry; creation myths; birth; personal accounts of marriage and work; and the importance of empowerment both as a woman and as a wildlife advocate. She draws intelligent connections between varied subjects, with emphasis on voice and silence and how the two richly inform one's inner life. Over the course of several decades, the ability "to speak through our vulnerability with strength" became a hard-won realization. A graceful examination of how grief inspires a writer to merge private and public interests.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS (Chapter 1) I AM FIFTY-FOUR YEARS OLD, the age my mother was when she died. This is what I remember: We were lying on her bed with a mohair blanket covering us. I was rubbing her back, feeling each vertebra with my fingers as a rung on a ladder. It was January, and the ruthless clamp of cold bore down on us outside. Yet inside, Mother's tenderness and clarity of mind carried its own warmth. She was dying in thesame way she was living, consciously. "I am leaving you all my journals," she said, facing the shuttered window as I continued rubbing her back. "But you must promise me that you will not look at them until after I am gone." I gave her my word. And then she told me where theywere. I didn't know my mother kept journals. A week later she died. That night, there was a full moon encircled by ice crystals. On the next full moon I found myself alone in the family home. I kept expecting Mother to appear. Her absence became her presence. It was the right time to read her journals. They were exactly where she said they would be: three shelves of beautiful clothbound books; some floral, some paisley, others in solid colors. The spines of each were perfectly aligned against the lip of the shelves. I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It, too, was empty, as was the fourth, the fifth, the sixth--shelf after shelf after shelf, all my mother's journals were blank. WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS Copyright 2012 by Terry Tempest Williams Excerpted from When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice by Terry Tempest Williams All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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