WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS

Terry Tempest Williams' WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS is just out in a trade paperback reprint edition from Picador and in its first week it has landed on 3 indie bestseller lists! March 2013

"So 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. 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 read it again, I could keep it on my bedside table and read it every night."

“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.” Read more...

"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."

“If you are a reader who cares about nature, wilderness, our place in nature, writing and nature, how to choose a course of action when something you care about is threatened, the lifelong search for voice, and what it means to be a woman in this world, you will have crossed paths with the work of Terry Tempest Williams…WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS is in many ways a thank-you letter to a mother who gave her daughter the gift of words, the gift of locating herself in the world with words and the gift of recognizing, describing, and protecting beauty in the world, using words.” Read more...

"The writing of Terry Tempest Williams is brilliant, meditative, full of surprises, wisdom, and wonder. She's one of those writers who changes people's lives by encouraging attention and a slow patient awakening."

“This poetic memoir continues the work Williams began in REFUGE…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.” Read more...

“Time, experience, and uncanny coincidence spiral through these pages….This is fable/memoir/ morality tale sans proscriptions. It is an extraordinary echo chamber in which lessons about voice—passed along from mother, to daughter, and now to us—will reverberate different in each inner ear.” Read more...

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.

"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. Finally, 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."

Williams 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 clichés but apt—on finding a voice and woman’s identity beyond the silenced, selfless existence informed by children and a husband.