The beloved author of Refuge returns 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 Birds is a kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question “What does it mean to have a��voice?��

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