When Women Were Birds Fifty-four Variations on Voice

by Williams, Terry Tempest

• ISBN13: 9780374288976
• ISBN10: 0374288976
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-04-10
• Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books

Summary

The beloved author of Refugereturns 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 Birdsis a kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question "What does it mean to have a voice?"

Author Biography

Terry Tempest Williams is the award-winning author of fourteen books, including Leap, An Unspoken Hunger, Refuge, and, most recently, Finding Beauty in a Broken World. She divides her time between Castle Valley, Utah, and Moose, Wyoming.

Table of Contents

“The writing of Terry Tempest Williams is brilliant, meditative, and full of surprises, wisdom, and wonder. She’s one of those writers who changes peoples’ lives by encouraging attention and a slow, patient awakening.” —Anne Lamott, author of Imperfect Birds

“Much more than a brave and luminous memoir, When Women Were Birds is a set of blueprints for building one of America’s most impassioned and audacious writers, as well as a transcript of the moment when she stepped determinedly into the full power of her own voice. In Terry’s magical equation, rage + confusion + grief + accountability = love. At some point I realized I was reading every page twice trying to memorize each insight, each bit of hard-won wisdom. Then I realized I could keep it on my bedside table and read it every night.” —Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted

“Somehow, miraculously, Terry Tempest Williams has done it again: written a book that no one else could have, that tells the truth about our lives. If you want to understand how a writer finds her voice, read this gorgeous book.” —Sue Halpern, author of Can’t Remember What I Forgot

“When Women Were Birds is a wise and beautiful and intelligent book, written for the women, men, and children of our times. It vibrates with the earned honesty of a great soul. It is a gift, passed on to readers with the same spirit of love and generosity with which it was first given to the author by her mother. A remarkable journey, a remarkable story.” —Rick Bass, author of The Wild Marsh

Excerpts

I

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 the same 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 they were. 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 fl oral, 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.

 

 

II

 

I do not know why my mother bought journal after journal, year after year, and never wrote in one of them and passed them on to me.

 

I will never know.

 

The blow of her blank journals became a second death.

 

My Mother’s Journals are paper tombstones.

 

I am fifty- four years old, the age my mother was when she died. Th e questions I hold now could not have been comprehended when I was a woman in my twenties. I didn’t realize how young she was, but isn’t that the conceit of mothers—that we conceal our youth and exist only for our children? It is the province of mothers to preserve the myth that we are unburdened with our own problems. Placed in a circle of immunity, we carry only the crises of those we love. We mask our needs as the needs of others. If ever there was a story without a shadow, it would be this: that we as women exist in direct sunlight only.

 

When women were birds, we knew otherwise. We knew our greatest freedom was in taking flight at night, when we could steal the heavenly darkness for ourselves, navigating through the intelligence of stars and the constellations of our own making in the delight and terror of our uncertainty.

 

What my mother wanted to do and what she was able to do remains her secret.

 

We all have our secrets. I hold mine. To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.

 

I was aware of the silences within my mother. They were her places of strength, inviolable. Tillie Olsen studied such silence. She writes,

 

Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences— what Keats calledagonie ennuyeuse(the tedious agony)—that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.

 

We hold these silences as a personal crucifix.

 

What is voice?

 

I will say it is so: The first voice I heard belonged to my mother. It was her voice I listened to from the womb; from the moment my head emerged into this world; from the moment I was pushed out then placed on her belly before the umbilicus was cut; from the moment when she cradled me in her arms. My mother spoke to me: “Hello, little one. You are here, I am here.”

 

I will say it is so: My mother’s voice is a lullaby in my cells. When I am still, my body feels her breathing.