Breaking Clean

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.

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.

A Review of Breaking CleanOften 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

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.

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 stor