When Women Were Birds, by Terry Tempest Williams
In Review
When Women Were Birds
Some things to know about the American writer Terry Tempest Williams: She wrote a masterpiece (Refuge, a brilliant braiding of her mother’s death and the flooding of the Great Salt Lake), which should be in print as long as America is a nation. She has done as much as anyone in America in the last 30 years to conserve and protect and celebrate wild land as a priceless American patrimony, bringing a charismatic eloquence and passion to bear on what is finally a moral decision between theft and reverence. Few writers in our language today have anything close to her astounding gift for listening and witness, as well as singing the grace and courage of other beings.
Yet she has also written books in which her incredible gift for witness is applied almost solely to herself alone; her work verges so close to poetry that when it does not work in service to story it often comes off as mere mannerism; and she says of herself in her newest book that she is “selfish, self-absorbed, overwrought, in denial, broken.”
You see the point. Here is a writer of stunning spiritual and artistic power; there are essays and passages in her work that make your heart sing and your brain shimmer, and her books Refuge, An Unspoken Hunger and The Open Space of Democracy ought to be required reading for citizenship in these United States. But here too is a writer who spends pages and even whole books staring in the mirror, mistaking journal entries for literature, drawn endlessly to herself in the mistaken belief that indulgence is prism. In short, Terry Tempest Williams is an amazing and frustrating paradox. That is surely the story of all writers, and all readers too; it’s also a fair review of When Women Were Birds.
