Judy Blunt

Well, I actually live on a prairie ranch 50 miles from the closest town, so Judy Blunt’s memoir certainly resonates with me. Her insights are written with an almost poetic prose and her voice conveys great strength. I envy her ability to articulate with such clarity the complex web of human relations that are so hardly shaped by the prairie environment and history. The struggle – and pain - to conform to gender roles; the isolation of long winters and muddy spring roads; the distrust of show more anything new and urban are all still too real in the communities around me. I think I will suggest this book to my bookclub, as an outsider – anyone with a foreign accent will forever be an outsider around here – I am curious to hear what the “locals” will say about this memoir. show less

I kept trying to find something to criticize about this book, but everything I found centered around the fact that I wanted to know more -- about the author, her life, her family, what inspired them. And yet, after reading this tale of growing up in a very hardscrabble, even mean, isolated environment where "nonsupportive" governs everything, I still felt I had been deeply involved and given understanding. A really well written, illustrative view of a way of life that, while modern, seems show more timeless and certainly not to be envied. Would recommend to anyone. show less

Judy Blunt’s memoir Breaking Clean is a crisp, sharp, enjoyable read. Blunt carries her reader through a wide range of emotions as she travels through her youth in Montana. Her writing is engaging in its simplicity. Her subject matter, in many ways, familiar.
Though few of us have experienced Big Sky country and all of the harsh realities that go with that life, especially as a child, we have all experienced isolation, disappointment, parental abandonment, and rebellions in one way or show more another. We have all experienced a sense of different-ness in our worlds, a sense of being disconnected from those to whom we should feel most connected. Or at least I did. Blunt captures the emotion of her turbulent youth eloquently.
Blunt carries her readers through the experience of her youth and while one is given the impression that the author has had to distance herself from this lifestyle it is deeply ingrained in who she is. Her rural youth defined her adult life. The life she lives today seems to always be seen through the lens of where she came from. In her discussion of feminism, and she sees herself as a feminist, Blunt writes of the women of her youth, whom she does not view as feminists, “I grew up admiring a community of women whose strength and capacity for work I have yet to see equaled, true partners in the labor of farming and ranching.” (153). She goes on in the next passages to flesh out these women as able to endure anything, in silence. While Blunt refuses to be silent she endeavors to carry forward the ideal of enduring.
In the end, this is a lifestyle from which she fled, it is clear that it is this lifestyle that has shaped her views. The text is a vivid reminder of how we come to be who we are, by facing and owning who we were and from whence we came. show less

I could experience nearly everything she described, vividly laid out with frank and clear prose. Even though I'm technically a city girl, this tugged at my country heart.