~by Randon Billings Noble

Sarah Crichton Books
(an imprint of FSG)
Hardcover $23.00/Paperback $15.00
265 pages

My mother left me her journals, and all her journals were blank.

This is the refrain that runs through Terry Tempest Williams’ When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice.   The blank journals become other things to Williams over the course of the book: an obsession, an act of defiance, a tease, a palindrome, an awakening, salt, clouds, myth.  But they are always stubbornly and irrefutably blank.

I’m glad I read Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place first.  Otherwise Williams’ mother would have been as blank as her journals, and I would have filled in a very different person based on what I know about mothers, Mormons and legacy.  But perhaps that is part of Williams’ aim.  After this shocking blankness, the blanketing silence her mother leaves behind, Diane Dixon Tempest is revealed to us through memory, letters, and story as a deeply loving yet somewhat elusive woman, wife and mother, as well as a catalyst for Williams’ thinking about self-expression.

I get hooked into this unfolding story of the blank journals, stunned by its vast, silent impact.  So when the narrative swerves into Williams’ grandmother’s field guides and the sighting of an albino robin I am jarred a bit, but then I remember the book’s subtitle: Fifty-four Variations on Voice, and everything that felt like a vagary becomes vital: the humiliations and triumphs of Williams’ speech therapy, the unheard testimony she gives to Congress, the voices of women she meets in prison, the high cost of keeping silent against a potentially fatal violent act. Continue reading →