A Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year and National Bestseller “Wonderful, contemplative, and brimming with revelations, insight, and awe” “—Imperfect Birds author Ann Lamott “I’m leaving you all of my journals, but you have to swear to me that you won’t look at them until after I’m gone.” A week before she passed away, Terry Tempest Williams’ mother, the head of a sizable Mormon clan in northern Utah, told her this. Williams was shocked to learn that her mother had kept journals. However, it was not as shocking as finding out that all three of the journal shelves were empty. Williams explores her own faith, her mother’s memories, and the concepts of presence and absence in art and our world in fifty-four brief chapters. A masterfully constructed kaleidoscope, When Women Were Birds repeatedly asks: What does it mean to have a voice?
Williams embraces the world and all of its contradictions in a Whitmanesque manner. Her voice becomes more and more powerful as the pages add up, eventually developing into a full-fledged aria. “This poetic memoir continues the work Williams began in Refuge,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. In keeping with her mother’s legacy, Williams examines her mother’s identities as a woman, wife, mother, and Mormon. A poetic and asymmetrical reflection on women, the environment, families, and history Williams is the type of writer who gives a reader hope that one day their voice will be heard as well. —The Boston Globe She counteracts loneliness by fostering connections while you read in your chair: with the writer, with other readers, and with your home. Your sense of home is strengthened even though you don’t know how it happened. “In these pages, time, experience, and strange coincidence spiral together,” Susan Salter Reynolds said in The Daily Beast. When Women Were Birds is a unique echo chamber where voice lessons learned from mother to daughter and now to us will resonate in unique ways in each inner ear. ” —The Seattle Times “A beautiful, powerful, important book…. Nothing Ive ever read has done this to me. I wonder if this is how religious people experience prayer. Something that Terry Tempest Williams wrote has changed, validated, and revealed who I am. In sharing her voice, she has summoned mine. —Rebecca Joins Schinsky, Book Riot “When Women Were Birds is something of a mystery-solving detective story in certain aspects. However, it also recognizes that there are frequently no solutions—there is only the here and now. “A lyrical, timeless book that rewards quiet, attentive reading—a rare thing,” according to The Salt Lake Tribune —The Huffington Post “I eventually realized that I was reading every page twice in an attempt to commit every realization and nugget of hard-won wisdom to memory.” Then it occurred to me that I could read it every night on my bedside table. ” —Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted.
The adored Refuge author is back with a work that shocks, explodes, illuminates, and honors Terry Tempest W.