Author Archives: sherewin

The Lazy B by Sandra Day O’Connor and H. Alan Day

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Sandra Day O’Connor is in the news today saying that the Supreme Court should have stayed out of the 2000 Bush/Gore election. So I thought I would take the opportunity to review her book, which I just finished, entitled The Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest. She co-wrote it with her brother Alan.

image from Barnes and Noble

Since I grew up on a cattle ranch, I love reading these kinds of stories. They fill me with nostalgia for my childhood home. Since ranching in the Southwest is very different from ranch in NE Oregon, there really were quite a few differences between her upbringing and mine.

I loved the long descriptions of people who lived and worked on the ranch. I loved the honorable attitude of the farmers. This is something I’ve heard people give lip service to my whole life, but it’s something I’ve grown to appreciate more as I get older and see how it plays out in the real world. The people described in the book were completely honest with their word. In many ways, they selflessly sought the best outcome for each situation. In my world, people are far more self-serving and ambitious to a fault. It was refreshing to see how doing the right thing for the whole group was consistently best for the individual.

Of course, there were politics. O’Connor, like in her time on the Supreme Court, was a good politician in the book, pointing out problems, analyzing them, but never really taking a stance one way or the other. Good politicians and critical thinkers know that it’s usually more complicated than that. It’s usually not “one way or the other.” So I appreciated that nuance.

I would have seen more critical commentary of her father and a deeper portrait of her mother. The father calls the shots and wins every argument to a fault. The brother is cocky and bullheaded–even in adulthood. The mother seems typically suppressed for the time period. Everyone grew up, married, had children, and the lifestyle of the ranch–though beloved–was no longer sustainable because of the changing social and financial landscape. To me it represented a tragedy that could have been explored in more detail.

The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin

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Let me start this way: it’s been a very, very long time since I read a book like Amanda Coplin’s The Orchardist. This kind of plot-driven book felt like a throwback to my junior high and high school days when I picked through the slim reading selection in my small town library in rural Eastern Oregon. The Orchardist is such a great title too! However, as a reader, I was hoping to learn more about the workings of an orchard.

book cover from NPR

In addition to the landscape, The Orchardist is driven by characters too, though. Like in the reading forays of my youth, Coplin’s characters are often completely transparent, irrational, and occasionally infuriating. I wonder if Coplin was ever irritated with her Talmadge character like the reader would be at times.

The following could be considered somewhat of a ******spoiler******:

Much of Talmadge’s behavior can be forgiven because of his traumatic upbringing and the loss of his sister. What cannot be forgiven of Talmadge, nor of Coplin, is the violence enacted upon Jane as she is giving birth. Jane is a woman who has endured incredible abuse. In her deepest moment of vulnerability, when she is in labor, the midwife, Caroline Middey, and Talmadge are both complacent in her violation as they ignore her desire to be left to labor alone. Instead, they struggle with her even as she is on the brink of exhaustion. Talmadge violently grips and presses her thighs until the child is born. Jane indicates over and over that she wants to be left alone physically, but the well-meaning Talmadge and the trustworthy midwife do not abide. When Jane takes irreversible action soon after, the reader knows she wasn’t kidding about wanting to be left alone.

Each character in the novel possessed a combined inability to reach out, communicate, and move beyond the confines of their past and their current circumstances. There is no real character transformation in this book. The product of the story is Angelene, and this character’s welfare is completely unknown by the end of the book. As a reader, I was left wondering what became of Angelene.

In her debut novel, Coplin is a master of creating a gripping plot. However, the first page of the book is a long physical description of the main character that will make you want to put the book down. Those descriptions continue throughout without the book, without adding much if anything to the reader’s understanding of the plot or the characters. That said, Coplin will, no doubt, have a long career as a novelist, and hopefully she’ll learn to rein in those long descriptions.

Even with the long descriptive flourishes, the book will hold your attention and curiosity after the first few pages. In fact, I couldn’t put it down. Beyond her long-winded descriptions, her writing is effortless and entertaining. Some of the character’s insights are truly enlightening. If she writes a sequel about her character Angelene, I will read it. In fact, I’m quite curious to see what Amanda Coplin will write next.

When Women Were Birds by TTW

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When Women Were Birds, the latest book from Terry Tempest Williams (TTW), is a wonderful, painful, poetic, and intensely personal meditation on Williams’ life: her femininity, her spirituality, her relationship with her mother, and more. Her work resonates with me because, like TTW, my family has been affected by cancer–cancer that was likely caused by exposure to radiation. “Clan of the One-Breasted Women” was the first beautiful thing I’d ever read that spoke directly to that experience.

Grandma on her wedding day

My own grandmother died after a painful, decade-long battle with cancer at the age of 54. I gasped as I read that TTW’s mother also died of cancer at 54–an age that becomes painfully young the older I get. My grandmother’s youngest sister was also afflicted with cancer and did not survive childhood. Her siblings, who lived to adulthood, got cancer too. The doctor said the type of cancer indicated that the kids “must have gotten into something.” Indeed, they lived along a river in Northeast Oregon, with an air stream that carried plutonium from Hanford, Washington. Though it was over 100 miles away, the pollution seeped into the atmosphere and even caused green snow one winter. Locals were unaware of it’s toxic nature.

Williams reminds us that silence and secrecy have long plagued the female experience. But within a family, women also navigate the most beautiful and painful experiences together: the loneliness and intimacy of marriage, the pain and power of childbirth, the joy of children, the suffering of disease; death. TTW navigates this territory with raw honesty and vulnerability. In addition to her connection to the women in her family, she reveals her own unique path, her own choices.

Like Williams, I have often felt that I have very few role models. I am a woman who has chosen a somewhat unconventional life. I tend to give less energy to relationships (although, at times, my love for Z has been completely consuming), and I currently have no children. I have not always understood my path, but it is one that has clearly deviated from my peers. My friends from high school have careers, yes, but they have also invested their energy profoundly into their husbands and their children in ways that I have not.

My nearest role models are women in my field, colleagues and former teachers. Even still, I’ve yet to meet one whose relationship to her partner and to her children, or lack thereof, has really reflected my own choices and relationships. This is a theme that TTW explores in When Women Were Birds. In the early years of her marriage, her inclination not to have children (at least not right away) made her different from her peers. And yet, like me, she does not seem to reject or disidentify with her femininity or her capacity and potential as a mother.

In a world where these stories seem too few and far between, her admissions are brave. It is this bravery that allows her to share her fear in enduring a hemangioma in her brain. For a writer, a woman whose world is in her thoughts and creativity, I cannot imagine the trauma, fear, and doubt involved in recovering from such an injury. But she does recover–though changed, perhaps–and the eloquence and insight in her book is a testament to that.

I first discovered TTW sometime during my undergraduate degree. I was struck by the accuracy with which she addressed the themes that most interested me in my own life. She feels like a kindred spirit, and I think that’s the sign of a great artist: she shares her secrets with the reader, and the reader has the same secrets, and then everyone is united in realizing how much we are the same.

After finishing the book, I remembered a bird feeder that was still boxed up in the basement from my recent move. I brought it upstairs, dusted it off, and filled it with fresh sunflower seeds. It now hangs on my front porch, waiting for birds.