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Summary: Judy Blunt is to be admired both as a writer and as a person
Review: Both of my parents grew up on farms in Montana and both left farming as soon as they could. So I was curious to read this highly acclaimed memoir by Judy Blunt, a third generation homesteader in the eastern part of the state. Judy grew up more than an hour from the town of Malta, population 2,500, the biggest town within a hundred miles of any direction. When she married at age 18, she didn't go far: fifteen miles to a neighboring ranch. Three children and thirteen years later, she left the land she belonged to for good.These are the bare bones of her story, but they don't begin to do it justice. Much of the book concerns the sacrifices and accommodations her parents and grandparents made to the demanding god of self-sufficiency. Clothes were sewn at home, washed against a scrub board, fed through a wringer, worn by one kid, patched and handed down to the next. Vegetables were grown in kitchen gardens and canned or stored in the root cellar. Judy's parents raised cattle and she learned not to get attached to any one of them, because someday you might have to face your friend on the end of a fork. "I made it through meals of fresh liver, of sweetbreads. And heart. In the end, only once did I pull away, mute and nearly choking on the lump in my throat. I could not, would not, eat his tongue." We might expect some of the challenges from our notions of ranching life: outhouses, blizzards, prairie fires and one-room schoolhouses. But other tales in this book are surprising and unique, such as the one about their skinny, strange teacher, Mr. Saxton, a Catholic who introduced Judy and her sister to both God and Cary Grant with an all-day trip to a mission and the movies. Judy held out against womanhood as long as she could, wearing a ratty coat to hide her chest and hiding her bloody rags in the outhouse. And while Ms. Blunt may be critical of the rigid sex roles imposed on the ranch children, she doesn't spare herself when it comes to uncomfortable stories. One in particular stays with me: she and her sister bludgeoning a porcupine to death with sticks. "There was a look in my sister's eyes, something bloody and profane that was mine...It was the moment childhood became no longer possible." All in all, Judy and her siblings worked hard, played hard and grew up fast. When it came time to go to high school at age 14, she boarded in Malta in the same house as her older brother. He offered her no leg up into this unfamiliar world and she expected none. She narrowly escaped what we would now call "date rape." Her willfulness caused her parents some heartache. The older neighbor boy who continued to court her through high school provided them all with an escape valve and, somewhat against her better judgement, she married him the spring after she graduated. Although several chapters deal with the hardships of being a ranch wife, Ms. Blunt draws a respectful curtain around the most personal details of her marriage and breakup. In the foreword, she states, "I want to acknowledge those who might choose a different version of the story than the one I tell...I've long since made my peace with the variety of fiction we call truth." In the end, I admire this book as much for its fairness and discretion as for the evocative, graceful writing. It left me with a great deal of respect for the author as a person, as well as a writer. --- Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman-Nicol
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Summary: Clarification
Review: BREAKING CLEAN is indeed an astonishing debut, but it's not a novel!
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Summary: Painfully honest beautiful memoir - but break is missing
Review: First, let me state that all that keeps this book from being a 5 star is the sudden shift into evasiveness at the end. Until then, we are presented with a great stories about the pain (and pleasure) of growing up isolated on a ranch in Montana. Judy Blunt, living up to her name, writes with an eye to detail that brings to life the difficult times and draws you in - ... BR>Though a natural storyteller, the first few chapters show well-written paragraphs that don't quite hold together, but she quickly hits her stride as she relates her stories with a compellingly clear voice. With economy of words, she writes "Already most of what we knew went unsaid" and in that one sentance we get the silence, the isolation of the family and within the family, the yearning for dialogue she does not find. A growing subtext is her realization that tho she loves the land her family and later her husband work, she will never "own" an acre, never be fully herself there. Aside from the relentless work and isolation is the subservient position of most women on ranches (in fairness to ranchers, her mother seems to have had more power and respect than she later has as a wife). ... Blunt is not afraid to present her own faults to death, which is why the shift away from honesty to evasiveness at the end is all the more disappointing. I did not read this because I wanted to hear an account of her marriage breaking up, but after so much honesty and hundreds of pages of her growing unhappiness, the book skips from being unhappy to being divorced in Missoula. What made her finally leave? What did she think when she had the ranch in her rear view mirror? How did she come to the decision to take the kids and was that part of it - getting them out? Did she leave a man or the land? The memoir could easily suggest the land was at fault as much as the man. In a memoir named Breaking Clean, we need to see that break, not just her unhappiness - the title is like an unfullfilled promise. Perhaps it was respect for others' (her kids, her ex-husband's) privacy - or maybe she just chickened out. But she chose to write the memoir, not a novel. What we expect is a book about breaking away, not just the years that explain why she broke away.
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Summary: A Magnificent Work From One Of The West's Best Writers
Review: From a book review published in the Bozeman Chronicle by Todd Wilkinson Growing up in the Midwest, surrounded by Scandinavian- immigrant -farmer elders,I absorbed homestead tales the way that most young children voraciously come to know their first language.
Grandpa's voyage to America from Sweden in the late 1800s; grandma's family's encounters with Indians. How they worked hard for little economic reward but freedom. How they walked four miles one way every day to a one-room country school.
While such stories are part of my own cultural identity, nothing to me conveys the probable reality-not the romance- of pioneer life more than O. E. Rolvaag's sodbuster classic "Giants In The Earth."
Let's not be overly sanguine, however, about our heritage. For as picturesque and nostalgic as the era might seem in hindsight, to be a prairie woman must have been, on most days, pure hell. Often forgotten in a history written largely by white men, of white men, if ever there was a group of underappreciated heroines, it is the ranchers' and farmers' wives.
Today, if you continue west from Rolvaag's literary provenance, eventually you arrive on the high arid plains of Phillips County, Montana near the Missouri Breaks-the setting for Judy Blunt's fine new memoir, "Breaking Clean."
Like "Giants In The Earth", "Breaking Clean" is brooding, psychologically heavy, and stark, a reflection of the rocky and treeless plains that forms this stretch of cattle country. A third-generation Montanan, Blunt' sees through the weathered eyes of a native. Hers is a modern saga focussed not on defending ranching culture as an extension of one's dream, but of quitting it to find a future.
It is a story that aches with the pain of depopulation now permeating rural America and in many ways it's a universal story about how individuals of small towns must break the bondage of their common mythology before finding their identity.
Revealing one's own version of the truth, particularly to one's own family, requires courage and conviction and inner strength. It means risking alienation from those closest to you and the possibility of never being able to go home again.
While still in high school in the cowboy country outside of Malta, Blunt unconsciously adheres to the path that many ranch girls were taught to follow: After being told her destiny as a woman may lie in homemaking or the secretarial arts, she meets her future husband, John, a young stoic rancher who drives a pick-up truck, who is quiet but well versed in making livestock small talk with Blunt's father, and who obviously enjoys Blunt's companionship but who dismissively expects his woman to dutifully assume the same submissive role as his own mother.
Blunt recalls one evening during her courtship when John and her father jawbone around the kitchen table. "I listened carefully to their talk of [livestock] breeding programs, feed grains and land swaps, hungry for the feeling that comes of knowing every story, yet coming up empty," she writes. "I felt suddenly rootless, invisible in a way I had never known. Grown beyond my child's role in the community, I did not yet fit in the adult world. I held no place of value on my family's ranch and was not yet a part of John's. My options were as frightening as they were simple. I could marry, or I could leave."
At that point, Blunt did not possess the confidence to leave. Instead, she got married, gave birth to three fourth-generation Montana offspring but soon felt trapped. She encountered the stubborn reluctance of patriarchal culture to regard women as equal intellectual and economic partners.
"I was the daughter of a good rancher, wife of another, daughter-in-law on a corporate ranch," she writes. "I could do it all-I could play their game until I dropped-but I would never own a square foot of land, a bushel of oats or a bum calf in my own name."
For Blunt, "Breaking Clean" is a magnificent breakthrough book, a work that elevates her voice into the distinguished company of other writers in the West such as Mary Clearman Blew, Terry Tempest Williams, and Ivan Doig.
In the end, after a divorce and moving to Missoula, she discovers she cannot go forward without again confronting the land and the people she left behind. "Away from the physical presence of my past, I found it easy to argue that what mattered most was the story, the truth of what we [women] tell ourselves, the versions we pass along to our daughters," she writes. "I was again reminded of the enormous power of this prairie, its silence and the whisper I made inside it. I had forgotten how easily one person can be lost here."
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Summary: BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN, HIGHLY INSPIRATIONAL!
Review: Growing up on a cattle ranch in Montana is far different from growing up in a major urban area. Judy Blunt, the main character in this book, grows up with the same insecurities as many young girls. What fascinates me the most about this book is the author's witty sense of humour in the face of all adversities. She is looking for a place where she feels she "fits in" and whatever direction she turns, that special place seems to elude her. Blunt is a strong, courageous, determined lady and she ultimately breaks free from the chains of her past, both her childhood and unhappy marriage, and ventures out on her own. Those who refuse to settle for anything less than they truly want in life, usually find it; those who settle for less, generally never find true contentment. Blunt's story is a classic example of what we can do with life if we truly have the desire to make changes, regardless of financial hardships. Her story is inspirational, beautifully written and worth a universe of stars in the rating. "Breaking Clean" is highly recommended reading material and a book you will remember long after the final page has been read.
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Summary: Breaking clean?
Review: I am always scouring the shelves for books like this--accounts of modern and not so modern ranch life in the American West--especially from a women's perspective. The boldness of the title attracted me. I thought, 'Now, here's something written by a women who's going to get straight to the point, and I can expect some raw and vivid imagery about the western landscape.' The more I read the less I liked it. I gave it 3 stars just because the prose is good--but the account just didn't live up to my expectations of the title and I was confused as to how Blunt really felt. Bitterness seemed to grow as a theme so I didn't get the idea that she really 'broke clean' she just made a temporary but emotionally she's still stuck on it. As the saying goes, you can't judge a book by its cover.
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Summary: So Tired of Elusive Endings
Review: I am so weary of both books and movies that don't seem to offer any ending. Is this the artsy style, to let the reader/viewer decide? Anyway, this book has no ending. Breaking Clean is really a poor title because the author gives no indication of why she finally "broke clean." Yes, she wrote about how hard life was during childhoos and marriage, and all of the inequality, etc, etc, but what happened? Why did she decide to divorce her husband? And how did she manage to get away, being that she had no money, no property, owned nothing? And what about her kids? Didn't her husband care that she was taking his three children away from him and their home? Did her kids want to leave? Perhaps "Life on the Range" might be a better title because we never know what makes the break. We don't need to hear sordid tales of her divorce, but she does need to tell the readers what actually led her to leave her ranch and her husband. Did she actually talk to her husband about her discontent? Did they try to work it out? Did he care that she wanted to leave? The story does leave you high and dry. The writing was good, but I really didn't enjoy it very much. I guess overall, the subject matter just wasn't interesting enough for me to sustain an entire book. If it had been about half and half--half about ranch life which led up to her break, and then about how she made a new life for herself--that would have been more interesting. As it is, how does one go from being a penniless ranch wife to entering the university and ending up with a master's degree? How did she support her children? Did they see their father? Did they want to stay with her or return home? So many questions, no answers. Why bother to write a memoir if you're just going to give half a story?
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Summary: Appreciate your indoor plumbing!
Review: I enjoyed the book but have a warning for other soft, city-bred (like me) potential readers. The author is a rancherwoman and gets very, very, *very* detailed about some of the things done concerning farm animals. If you are weak of the stomach you may not want to read certain chapters before, during, or after eating
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Summary: Don't we all want to grow up to be cowgirls!
Review: I had read a favorable review of this book and wanted to get it for myself when my daughter surprised me and gave it to me as a Christmas present -- not knowing I had wanted it. This is a delightful book -- different from the usual subjects we get nowadays. Ms. Blunt gives us a rare and descriptive insight into the life of a woman growing up on a farm. Though times get rough, Ms. Blunt's tenacity in the face of adversity (so different from the toils of urban life), is both absorbing and inspirational. Her descriptions are so vivid as to be luminous and reveal to us a way of life that is fast disappearing, if not altogether gone. Made me wish I had continued my horseback riding lessons and I realize how constricted and fenced in our "modern" city life and experiences are!
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Summary: Debut novel is amazing effort
Review: I have just finished reading Breaking Clean for the second time. Blunt's use of imagery and humor is compelling- she is an amazing talent. I recommend this novel to anyone who appreciates a very good story.
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