Terry Tempest-Williams is an author best known for her explorations of environmentalism, humanitarianism and unapologetic expressions of politics. Her memoir When Women Were Birds: 54 Variations on Voice explores hard-hitting topics such as grief, abortion and finding your voice as a woman. 

“The title came to me in a dream. That simple, that profound. I cannot tell you what it means, only that I trust it. Birds, for me, are mediators between heaven and earth,” Tempest-Williams said in an interview with the Minnesota Women’s Press in 2013.

In the beginning of the book, after her mother’s death from breast cancer, Tempest-Williams gathers her mother’s journals, which were left for her. She hopes for wisdom, advice or an anecdote to tell her how to handle issues she faces daily. Instead, she is met with blank pages, shattering her expectations and defying her hopes. The loneliness this leaves her with is one of the issues she grapples with throughout the text. 

“When Women Were Birds” is a book full of paradoxes. My mother left me her journals and all of her journals were blank. Mormon women write. We are asked to do two things: keep a journal and bear children. My mother did both, but she did it on her terms,” Tempest-Williams said. 

The book’s portrayal of the lives of Tempest-Williams and her mother produces a theme of feminism. Tempest-Williams discusses her marriage, career, children and experiences with grief in ways which show her personal and individual empowerment. In every aspect of her life, Tempest practices personal control and power through speaking out and keeping her silence. 

“The legacies of the women in my family are legacies of strength, legacies of intellect, legacies of pain, legacies of silence and a legacy of voice-alongside a deep legacy of a love of the land. I also think they left me a legacy of service and of giving. That was a really important ethic of my mother and grandmothers. They were great listeners. They gave me the gift of listening and paying attention,” Tempest-Williams said. 

Along with addressing her own pain, she addresses the pain which she may have caused other women by remaining silent about issues. She speaks of this problem as a learned behavior, which many women in the current day struggle with.

“I think about the violence and abuse that I have caused other women by not speaking. For example, I never told anyone about the experience when a man in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho tried to murder me with a double-edged axe. I did not want to harm his character. I thought maybe it was my fault. When one woman refuses to speak about that kind of violence, other women get hurt. There are many nights I wake up and think, ‘I wonder what other women were harmed because I refused to tell the truth by not telling my story?’” Tempest-Williams said. 

When Women Were Birds is a memoir on resilience, pain, feminism, power and finding your voice. This book is a great option for anyone interested in reflecting on their individual life, their family and their community’s culture. For anyone longing to find themself, this book is a great spot to begin. 

“I think that as writers we are always exposing ourselves. I wrote this book about my mother, again, about my grandmother, again, but from a very different point of view. It’s a kaleidoscope that we just keep turning. What I have learned as I have read from this book is that the audiences are not thinking about my mother, my voice; they are thinking about their relationship to their mother and to their grandmothers and their voice. This is the alchemy of writing,” Tempest-Williams said.