A Brief Biography of Terry Temperst Williams

Terry Tempest Williams writes a beautiful memoir bringing together the unnatural and natural world. Williams claims that cancer found in her family was caused by the atomic and radiation testing where she lived during the 1950s and 1960s, but she came to realize that once one is diagnosed with cancer, its course occurs naturally, and slowly deteriorates one’s body. Terry Tempest Williams describes how cancer affected everyone in her family by detailing how she and her family struggled through the time when her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer to the time after her death. She specifically describes this struggle by incorporating the birds that she studies near her hometown in Utah with the flooding of Great Salt Lake to her mother and other relatives’ journey with fighting cancer. In the first half of the book, Williams often times describes the birds that she studies at the Bird River Migratory Bird Refuge as a means to escape and suppress the hardships that she faces with her family. By the end of book, she learns that suppressing and escaping the cancer and disease that surrounds her family is not the answer, instead, she realizes that it is better to accept it, and learn how to cope with death and the changes it can bring. The relationship between the inescapability of life and death and the uncontrollable elements of nature deliberated in Terry Tempest William’s memoir Refuge make this a poetic, graceful, and telling book.

Metaphor is an underlying element used in this memoir to depict the relationship between family and nature, and the profound understanding of oneself, through the sequence of life and death, and the rebirth that proceeds. Using metaphoric references, Williams explores the continual unpredictab...

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...hole life, and because of this connection, her perception of cancer changed, “It was at this moment that I realized the deceit I had been living under. Children growing up in the American Southwest drinking contaminated breasts of their mothers, my mother-members, years later, of the Clan of One-Breasted Women” (283).

Through the use of narrative and metaphor, Terry Tempest Williams beautifully depicts her life story in a poetic memoir. She describes the daily struggles she faced with change in her family, while her mother battled with cancer that eventually led to her death. She also describes the fluctuating lake levels, and how they affected the birds that migrate in the area. Through her experiences with the birds she learns how to cope and accept her mother’s death. Eventually, she moves on with the birds and learns how to love and not be afraid of death.