When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice [Paperback]

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
AKansas City StarBest Book of the Year

Brilliant, meditative, and full of surprises, wisdom, and wonder. Ann Lamott, author ofImperfect 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 Birdsis a carefully crafted kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question: What does it mean to have a voice?

Williams displays a Whitmanesque embrace of the world and its contradictions....As the pages accumulate, her voice grows in majesty and power until it become a full-fledged aria. San Francisco Chronicle

This poetic memoir continues the work Williams began inRefuge....Williams explores her mother's identity--woman, wife, mother, and Mormon--as she continues to honor her memory....A lyrical and elliptical meditation on women, nature, family, and history. The Boston Globe

Williams is the kind of writer who makes a reader feel that [her] voice might also, one day, be heard&.She cancels out isolation: Connections are woven as you sit in your chair reading---between you and the place you live, between you and other readers, you and the writer. Without knowing hol£ã