Customer Reviews

Breaking Clean

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4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

When Judy Blunt was only 15 she entered the only world she would imagine for herself - that of a farm wife (as her mother and grandmother had done before her). The memoir she wrote after finally breaking free of this life is not sentimental and doesn't ask for pity from the reader. It was the only life she'd known and plenty of people lived this way in Montana, expecting a rough life and bearing up to the hardships that came their way.
But what Blunt does, as few writers can, is open her eyes and really look fully at the world, coming up with vivid, original descriptions of the animals, the land, the people around her. Those familiar with farm life may find their eyes reopened by Blunt's writing and those unfamiliar with it will simply love discovering this book.
But I warn you - it isn't an easy read. There are plenty of farm accidents, bitter weather and descriptions of a community filled with people who don't have time for softness. They're too busy trying to get through each day and simply survive. What is amazing is that one person, Blunt herself, not only survived but ended up being an amazing writer, bringing alive the world she lived in.

A Review of Breaking Clean
Often over the past couple decades, I have marveled at a country that can hold within its boundaries some of the greatest metropolitan areas and some of the most isolated rural communities that exist on the earth. Growing up in rural Montana, I had no concept of this isolation. Somehow I just thought that that was the way things were. And there may be more isolated areas in this country than the Northern Montana Hi-Line that Judy Blunt writes about in Breaking Clean, but I don?t think people live there.
There are several good reasons to read her book, including the fact that it is well written and has won accolades from a couple of the University of Montana?s literary big guns, William Kittredge and James Welch. This alone is no small task.When you finish reading Blunt?s story of her years in Northern Montana, there is no way you can fault her for her honesty. What she writes of was the way it was and is the way it is. Though technology has changed much in the last fifteen years or so, with satellite dishes, more and more ranch families moving to town, and the Internet in places you can?t drive to three months out of the year, you can still see the places, the roads, and the people she describes if you take the hundred-and-fifty mile scenic tour of South Phillips County. When Blunt writes about four-wheel-drive pickups plowing down gumbo roads, you can feel the mud sticking to your tires. And when she writes of the cohesiveness of the rural community in Phillips County, the ranchers driving out to the country road to see their neighbor safely on his way during an emergency trip to the hospital in Malta, you get a feel for the tradition that maintains that one of life?s greatest responsibility is to help your neighbor in the time of need.
In writing her book Breaking Clean, Blunt preserves a sense of the oral tradition. In all families there is a sense of the family story, the story that makes one family different from another, the story told around the supper table, at family gatherings, at children?s bed time. This sense of story is even more apparent in the kind of isolation Blunt describes, where the family history becomes the way children learn to relate to the world, because it is the only history they know first hand. And it is through the pathos in this story that she learns such truths as the patriarchal order. ?Memories of my grandfather?s death were tied to another small death, the day I discovered that as a girl, I would never own my childhood ranch.?
Much of Blunt?s story deals with time. Time doesn?t exist in the middle of the open prairie the same way it exists in the city, and those who live on the prairie must deal more intimately with the natural order of the seasons. The year is segmented into sections such as haying, calving, feeding, and the like. When Blunt writes of the calendar she peruses in the abandoned Andrews homestead, time is measured in eggs, temperature, and gallons of milk, painting as clear a picture of life on the prairie as any carefully written journal.
And Blunt doesn?t leave out a touch of humor, the kind of humor one often finds in the cowboy poetry and western memoirs of the legion of western writers who have gone before her. Her description of the visit to a church in Hayes with her sister and a schoolteacher is especially representative. ?He dipped his finger into a container of water and turned to us. He drew a small cross over my sister?s head, then touched her forehead with his wet thumb. He dipped again for me. We stood quietly until he was done, reading his face for signs that we could move on again. By then he could have dragged a live chicken from his vest and bitten its head off and neither of us would have flinched.?
Understandably, some might be concerned about the publishings of a local writer, for neither writers nor prophets are dealt with kindly in their own country. However, they need not fear. Blunt?s book is not about revealing secrets or settling old scores. Her autobiographical sketches paint an honest, graphic picture of rural Montana life, dealing with the good, the bad, the victories and the defeats of growing up on the plains and building a sense of personal worth. In the settling of the west, many families and many individuals broke with the past to make a new life for themselves, and that is exactly what Blunt writes of in her narrative.
However, in her book, Breaking Clean, Blunt has written more than the story of her own survival. She has written a piece of the story of the survival of all the families who settled this state, lived through its blizzards, sweated in its summer heat, and carved their own names in the windblown dirt of the Montana prairie.

What strikes me about this book more than anything else is the bone deep, rock hard grit of it. The truth of what Blunt lived and managed to distill a sense of self from is told so starkly, so cleanly and without melodrama, that it is at once absolutely believable and fundamentally shocking.

Set in western Montana, where Blunt's parents and their ancestors have somehow managed to wrench a living out of a land that is both inordinately harsh and unforgiving, Breaking Clean tells of the birth and upbringing of a small child called Judy and her 4 siblings. The rules of her childhood home are many and inflexible. The rules are there for a reason - without them, people die. Punishment for breaking the rules is immediate, swift and harsh. There is no time to acknowledge or assuage the hurts of childhood, no tolerance for stepping out of line or wanting something other than what is expected of you. And so Judy and her siblings grow up cut off from some of the deeper, feeling parts of themselves, which in her case take more than 30 years to surface.

As hard as this book is to read at times, it is also worth every cringe, every slap in the face and tear you'll shed, because by the end you realize there is cause to celebrate. The struggle to survive has shaped Blunt into a writer with depth, courage and clarity. This book is a reminder that even the most painful experiences can be transformed by the power of words. Don't miss this book.

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."

Judy Blunt does not waste words in the same way she would not have wasted water when she grew up and lived on a ranch in Montana. Her descriptions of her youth and early marriage are harsh and sad but also beautiful.

Press Review (NYTimes, NPR) seem to have focussed the oppressive nature of her marriage and the sexism inherant in ranching culture. That's certainly present, but this book is definitely not an expose. Go elsewhere if you are looking for gory details. But there is natural drama (the race through flooded roads to the hospital when her daughter is ill) and beauty (her description of the Missouri Breaks). Her story about her relationship with Ajax the bull manages to be tough and tender at the same time.

I am a big fan of well-written (non-celebrity) memoirs, and this is one of the best I have read in a long time. I would put it up there with Oliver Sack's Uncle Tungsten of last year.

"Breaking Clean" combines Sylvia Plath and Susanna Kaysen's wry disillusioned misery caused by oncoming womanhood with an active, tough voice that is Blunt's alone. In fact, the conflicts, silence, and grueling work described by Blunt would have finished off "city women" like Plath and Kaysen.
The descriptions of physical work as a way of life, whether working cattle or raising children, truly stand out here, for they seem intended to shock you with the hardship of the American farmer's life, yet Blunt does not ask for pity. She shows the Montana rancher as someone simply doing what has to be done-- even if love or personal worth must be ignored to make it happen.
Read this book and let Blunt show to you her wonder and dread at the fact that what has nourished her has also nearly ruined her. Her choice in the end is difficult, but we feel as strongly as she does that it is the only one.

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.

Those familiar with the writings of James Joyce already know that suffocation is one of his dominant themes, especially in The Dubliners and even more specifically in "The Dead," one of the short stories included in that volume. I was reminded of that theme as I read Judy Blunt's memoir. (I suggest no other comparisons of her work with Joyce's.) Both writers have a great deal of value to say about those who live lives of "quiet desperation." In this book, Blunt speaks eloquently and sometimes with humor as she brilliantly describes her first 30 years in northeastern Montana, a period during which she worked on her family's ranch, graduated from high school, married, and gave birth to three children. For various reasons she shares in her book, Blunt eventually decided to leave her husband as well as a lifestyle which had by then become unendurable. During succeeding years, she began to organize and record her thoughts about life on a ranch for her and for the other women she knew. It is important to keep in mind that this is a memoir: It provides Blunt's observations and conclusions and from her own point of view. Presumably not everyone who knew her then agrees with everything she has to say.

Indeed, some may view this book as an indictment of the culture in which she lived, worked, struggled, and suffered throughout much of her life. (No doubt her former husband and father-in-law do.) For men as well as women, there was (and is) always so much to do to maintain a ranch. Prolonged periods of isolation within a human community whose population was diminishing. Harsh winters. Droughts. For women, contrary to the national average, a much briefer life span than for men because of inadequate healthcare and death in childbirth, with wives meanwhile required to maintain a workload (in addition to homemaking) which most men would find daunting. Also noteworthy: according to Blunt, women in this culture are wholly subservient to men in terms of any decisions concerning family members, the home, or the ranching business. In a word women were "powerless." It was from such a life that Blunt fled, making as clean a break as she could.

Born and raised in Chicago, and having since lived in several other major cities, I am unable to identify with the way of life Blunt describes. However, over the years, I have frequently encountered men as well as women who also felt trapped in their lives. (Some described themselves as "prisoners.") They expressed feelings of being overworked as well as under appreciated, and (yes) powerless to seek a better life elsewhere. I am certain they and countless others can identify with the experiences Blunt shares in her book. It took courage for her to break away. To her credit, she did. Although it may not have been Blunt's intention, perhaps (just perhaps) her book will help others to find the courage they also need to replace a life of "quiet desperation" with one which offers social freedom and personal fulfillment.

I just finished reading this book and as I was closing it, I realized I had on my hands one of those books that go on my special shelves with the books that I call my favorites, the ones that I know I will want to read again, and maybe even again. I was intrigued and fascinated by her life, by her family's life, and the life of the community that surrounded her growing up. The author wrote with such passion and her style of writing was so perfect, I found myself reading some paragraphs or pages twice before I moved on, just to enjoy the beauty of her writing.
Even though it is really none of my business, I really wished the author had gone more into how she made the break from the life she was living, what gave her the courage, and I also want to know how her life is now. Again, maybe it is not my business, but I wasn't ready to let her go when the book ended.
I think any "city" person, interested in a life far removed from their own, would enjoy this book, and anyone else interested in book that you can wrap around you with writing that is poetic and eloquent, will also enjoy this book. Don't miss this one!

Judy Blunt's memoir of life on Montana ranches is a far cry from Willa Cather's portrayals of frontier Nebraska, but there is something of the same spirit in both writers, each strong-willed, independent-minded, and talented in a world dominated by men. Each maintains a love of the open prairie, but while Alexandra Bergson in "O Pioneers!" is able to hold her own and thrive on the land, Blunt is hemmed in and frustrated at each turn, a ranchwife-in-training through girlhood and finally a ranchwife with children of her own. Physically strong and fearless as any man, she uses hard labor as a way to cope with a life-long belief in the fundamental unfairness of being denied opportunities simply because of her gender. In her thirties, she finally leaves the ranch and starts a new life in Missoula as a divorced mother, university student, and writer.

However, her book is not about the break-up of her marriage or her final decision to leave behind the life she'd been living. It is a carefully remembered recounting of her childhood, youth, and early years as a rancher's wife. It's an often turbulent story, where every passage from one stage of life to the next is marked by resistance, dismay, and a sense of deep loss. The people in the circle of her family are captured in fiercely observed detail -- especially her mother and father, her sister Gail, her husband John, and John's parents. The physical world they inhabit is vividly rendered -- the character of the arid, prairie land, the seasonal changes, the extremes of weather, the isolation, and the difficulty of making a living out here against the odds. She also captures the constraints of the social world they inhabit, and she articulates clearly the limited possibilities for personal growth and independence where gender roles and social norms are rigidly observed.

She provides a realistic portrayal of ranch work for men, women, and their children as long days (and nights during calving season) of routine physical labor, and she describes the neverending work of cooking, gardening, child-rearing, putting up food for the winter, trips to town for supplies, doing ranch chores, and pitching in when the men need an extra hand. Meanwhile, the chapters in her book center around the breaks in the routine -- the unexpected events that become the material for "stories," the makings of family lore, local legend, or gossip (as when her newly-wed husband John is observed welding together the broken frame of their old bed).

Among the breaks in the routine, there is an Indian boy who is a student for a short while in her all-white one-room school, the winter of 1964 which maroons her family during a severe blizzard that wipes out much of their cattle herd, a prairie fire fought by the whole community, an older boy in high school who attempts unsuccessfully to have sex with her, a harrowing 50-mile trip to the nearest hospital as her daughter is burning up with a high fever. Blunt also describes well the cultural clash that occurs when kids born and raised in the country find themselves navigating the town-oriented world of high school, with its very different adolescent mores and values.

Blunt is a fine writer and is able to wring suspense and pathos from her material. Starting as she does with the break-up of her marriage and then backtracking to tell her story from the beginning, she makes of the book a real page-turner. While the book might well appear on a list of feminist literature, such a label is too limiting. The story she has too tell is much broader; it is at home with books about rites of passage and coming of age, the West, rural living, ranching, and nature writing. As a companion to this book, I'd also recommend Linda Hasselstrom's "Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains" and Wallace Stegner's "Wolf Willow," which describes his boyhood on a homestead along the Montana-Saskatchewan border, 50 years earlier and about 100 miles northwest of Blunt's country.