When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice

"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." --San Francisco Chronicle

"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." --The Boston Globe

"Williams is the kind of writer who makes a reader feel that [her] voice might also, one day, be heard....She cancels out isolation: Connections are woven as you sit in your chair reading---between you and the place you live, between you and other readers, you and the writer. Without knowing how it happened, your sense of home is deepened." --Susan Salter Reynolds, The Daily Beast

"Time, experience, and uncanny coincidence spiral through these pages....When Women Were Birds is an extraordinary echo chamber in which lessons about voice--passed along from mother, to daughter, and now to us--will reverberate differently in each inner ear." --The Seattle Times

"A beautiful, powerful, important book....Nothing I've ever read has done this to me. Is this what religious people feel when they pray, I wonder? ...Terry Tempest Williams has written something that has revealed me and affirmed me and changed me. In sharing her voice, she has summoned mine." --Rebecca Joines Schinsky, Book Riot

"In some ways When Women Were Birds functions as a detective story, an attempt to solve a mystery. But it's also a realization that often there are no answers...there's only the present." --The Salt Lake Tribune

"A lyrical, timeless book that rewards quiet, attentive reading--a rare thing." --The Huffington Post

"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 keep it on my bedside table and read it every night." --Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted