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Already drawing comparisons to Frank McCourt, Judy Blunt has penned an astonishingly honest memoir, recounting her life on remote cattle and wheat ranches in the Big Sky country of northeastern Montana. Played out against the sweeping panorama of the mythic American West,
Breaking Clean is an extraordinary achievement: the true story of a woman's painful struggle to accept a secondary place in a man's world, and her bid to redefine herself as she comes to terms with the vast terrain she loves.
As a child, Judy watched as the strong women around her shouldered their share of heavy ranch work, only to return home to find more chores -- deemed "women's work" -- awaiting them. Finding a context for her growing feelings of isolation in the nascent women's liberation movement, which had begun to penetrate even small-town Montana, Judy began to explore this new spirit of individuality without a hint of self-pity, enduring the sniggering jokes often sent her way. Her sharply honed survival skills enabled her to endure bouts of loneliness, the seemingly endless succession of seasonal blizzards and prairie fires, and the sudden illness of her infant daughter, which finally fueled her ultimate decision to leave the only place she had ever known as "home."
With moving candor and rare purity of language, Judy Blunt triumphs -- and patiently reminds us of the myriad ways "women can be isolated by circumstances as well as by distance, and how our experiences, though geographically distinct, often translate into the same feelings." (Spring 2002 Selection)
Booklist
The resilient Blunt's chronicle of the hardships, anguish, and stubborn determination of ranch life in wind-scoured Montana. As she looks back at her grueling, sometimes glorious, often terrifying experiences, she dissolves the romantic myths that shroud what is in fact a perpetually embattled way of life, one she both reveres and reviles. Hopefully, Blunt will keep honig her keen and poetic awareness, steely candor, and commanding storytelling skills and continue telling the true story of women in the West.
BookPage
City slickers take heed: here's the real lowdown on the ranching life-from a woman's perspective. Judy Blunt's new memoir Breaking Clean debunks the romance surrounding the American West's most archetypal way of life.
Elle
[An] astonishing literary debut, a dramatic and heartbreaking memoir...honed from difficult circumstances and crackling with energy long pent up...Having prevailed over a life of extreme isolation, Blunt manages to escape with poetry and feeling intact, singularly able to relive, with both aching honesty and occasional joy, a fascinating, ferocious coming of age.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
No biographical sketch of Blunt can convey the depth of this literary achievement. Each of the 13 sections here stands on its own: substantial, powerful segments of writing organized around some larger theme. They read like something out of the late-19th century, particularly those years when only the novel could bridge the disjunctions between society and self. Inheriting the literary territory previously claimed by Ingalls Wilder and Cather, Blunt (who's just been named a Whiting Writer's Award recipient) builds on their accomplishments, yet marks American literature in her own way. To shoehorn this into mere category or classification is to insult its power. Profound, and profoundly moving.
National Geographic Adventure
Breaking Clean lifts you up out of your chair and sets you down on a ranch in the high plains of northeastern Montana. "Sets you down"-no, that's hardly adequate. Blunt slams you down. She writes the way a lion stalks, all might and attention; she grabs you by the back of your neck, shakes you up, makes you feel how she felt. Blunt is, to put it another way, scarily good-so right on, so focused, so in-your-face that you have to take the book slowly to cushion the blow....Blunt has a gift for vividness, a deep understanding of the unrelieved starkness of high-plains life and what it does to people, and a dauntless, relentless determination.....She writes without remorse, without flinching, striking matches off the scuffed soles of her feelings. When a writer can do that-make it real and make it matter-the world comes almost painfully alive.
Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
While she doesn't shy away from writing about hard times, Blunt's attention to detail and dry humor make this debut emboldening. Her writing inspires respect for rural life and its "intimacy born of isolation, rather than blood relation." In this world without TV or books, with mail once a week at best, "a good story rose to the surface of conversation like heavy cream." Blunt's own story is so rich and genuine, readers will clean their plates and ask for seconds.
Time Out New York
Riveting...In its precise, arresting descriptions of a working farm and its careful re-creation of how Blunt ultimately came to break free, this masterful debut is utterly strange, suspenseful and surprising-a story whose threads connecting past and present are as transparent as cobwebs but as strong as barbed wire. [Blunt's] balancing act between the strange and the familiar is impressive, the connections linking them perfectly gauged.
Publishers Weekly
Poet and essayist Blunt grew up on a Montana cattle ranch in the 1950s and 60s, where "indoor plumbing" meant a door on the privy and "running water" was a fast ranch wife with two buckets. A natural tomboy, happiest around animals, Blunt dreaded leaving childhood. The gender rules of ranch life were unyielding: women married and kept to their kitchens, and they didn't own property or make decisions about the ranch. When puberty came, she did her best to hide all evidence of her sex, wearing a big coat and even lancing her growing breasts, the way she'd drain a cow's abscessed jaw. After finishing high school in town she returned to the family ranch, only to find she had no place of value there. So she accepted the inevitable: marriage to a man from a neighboring ranch. For 12 years Blunt lived in self-denial sneaking cigarettes, creeping into the calving shed to do the work she knew better than any man and bearing three children who were all she could call her own when she finally decided to leave. While she doesn't shy away from writing about hard times, Blunt's attention to detail and dry humor make this debut emboldening rather than depressing (e.g., her observation that one-room schoolhouses weren't great, but they afforded unintentional exposure to lessons a few years in advance). Her writing inspires respect for rural life and its "intimacy born of isolation, rather than blood relation." In this world without TV or books, with mail once a week at best, "a good story rose to the surface of conversation like heavy cream." Blunt's own story is so rich and genuine, readers will clean their plates and ask for seconds. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
KLIATT
Reflecting on a period from the late 1950s through the 1990s, Blunt recounts her life as she grew up on an isolated ranch an hour's drive south of Malta, Montana. Her family—she was one of five children—was not dysfunctional, but from an early age she struggled against the expectation that she would marry, have children, and become another ranch wife. While she loved her mother and admired her capabilities as a homemaker and horsewoman, she didn't want to become like her. She missed doing so by a hairbreadth. While Blunt escaped ranching through divorce and built for herself the life she craved, her life on the range of Montana inexorably shaped her. In appealing vignettes, told in vivid descriptive language, readers learn what that life was like. Ranching meant a close relationship with animals, the creatures her family raised lovingly and then sold or ate (chickens, pigs, cattle), the ones that served them in a kind of partnership (cats, dogs, milk cows, horses), and the fauna they encountered in the wild (skunks, rabbits, porcupines, rattlesnakes, deer). Blizzards could come up with little warning, and Blunt recalls one in particular that rattled her family's home, destroyed livestock, and nearly claimed the life of her father. There were few people within her purview—siblings and parents, neighbors, teachers—but those she related to with a fierce intimacy. Medical emergencies were complicated by Montana remoteness and long distances to care centers. Fire brought out exhausting community effort. School began in a one-room country school taught mostly by local women, but eventually Blunt attended high school in Malta and learned about what the world "outside" was like. Her family'sinterest in the outside world related mostly to what directly affected the ranchers—commodity prices, weather, local events—but news about the changes tearing at the social fabric in the 1960s and 1970s eventually made it to Blunt's part of the world, and some of it resonated powerfully with her. Readers will enjoy learning about ranch life through Blunt's stories, but they will also relish a glimpse into the inner life of a remarkable, talented woman. This book will be popular with readers of personal narrative and should show up in the bibliographies of women's studies and writing courses. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, Random House, Vintage, 303p. Map., Boardman
Library Journal
Blunt was raised on a ranch in Montana, miles from the nearest town, and attended a one-room school where she and her siblings made up the majority of the students. On the ranch, she learned how to handle the day-to-day work of farm life and to remain in a subservient role to men. Eventually, after marriage and children, she abandoned ranch life for college and began writing award-winning poetry. In this nonfiction debut, Blunt proves to be a skillful writer, using beautiful prose to describe how she learned to survive in what remains a man's world. Unfortunately, she does not discuss in enough detail how the ranch life shaped her and made her want to "break clean." Thus, though her narrative is enjoyable to read, it carries no social implications. Collections with material on farm life or women in nontraditional careers will want to consider this title. Otherwise, this is not a necessary purchase. Danna Bell-Russel, Library of Congress Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Booknews
In this award-winning memoir of growing up female on Montana ranches (shown on a map), Blunt traces several generations of her family, her early marriage and divorce, and "breaking clean" of myths of rugged individualism to find a place of her own where women can have a voice beyond being capable helpmates. Several chapters were originally published in modified form in literary journals. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
New Yorker
Born in 1954 to poor homesteaders on the Montana prairie, the author inherited a tradition of intense work and fierce isolation. She realized early that she was doomed to a supporting role on the family ranch; although she could work cattle and tractors, she writes, "I also learned to . . . reserve my opinion when the men were talking." This unflinching memoir is framed by Blunt's eventual decision to leave the rancher she had married at the age of eighteen and the only way of life she'd ever known. A sense of mourning underlies her account, and she honors the land that she still loves by making us intimate with its smallest details: after a thirty-six-hour blizzard, cows stand frozen, "eyes sealed tight under an inch of milky ice."
Kirkus Reviews
A memoir of growing up a cattleman's daughter in northeastern Montana in the 1950s and '60s.
