"Refuge is not a place outside myself" - or so Williams concludes, towards the end of a book where refuge has been that very thing. When her mother's cancer returns, and it becomes clear that she is dying, Williams copes with the long, painful decline of a parent by seeking solace in the Great Salt Lake, a wetland habitat near Salt Lake City in Utah. The lake is something that I'd only vaguely heard of before, but it sounds fascinating and has immediately gone on my bucket list, being a haven for birds in particular, and possessing a shoreline that rises and falls periodically, and often drastically. Williams, who has since childhood experiences with her grandmother been a dedicated bird watcher, describes the lake environment with such passion, and such clear knowledge - born of a lifetime's experience in the lake environment - that it becomes clear that the lake and its avian inhabitants have become central not just to her way of coping with her mother's death, but to her experience of life in general - an external representation of internal beliefs.

That "life in general" exists under challenging circumstances. In a relatively short space of time, Williams loses both her mother and her grandmother to breast cancer. Six aunts and another grandmother have all undergone mastectomies as well, and of these nine women, seven have died. Williams herself has had multiple biopsies and a "borderline malignant" tumour. It turns out if you lived in the right part (the wrong part) of Utah during the second half of the twentieth century, you got hit with a whole lot of fall out from American nuclear testing. The near-destruction of entire female lines is a likely result of this. Williams, a dedicated Mormon, has trouble reconciling being raised to respect religious authority, and authority in general, when women and the environment are both so ill-served by it.

I find it surprisingly non-difficult to sympathise with her religious beliefs, which are intertwined with a lot of this memoir. I'm an inveterate atheist myself, with very little time for religion overall, and honestly Mormonism seems particularly, uncritically credulous, but it's clear that Williams finds beauty and comfort in some of her beliefs and that sense of consolation does come across. I can feel glad that she and her mother were able to find peace through their religion even as I can't understand why they do, exactly. (Do I need to understand it? Perhaps not. My understanding is not the important thing here.) Anyway, this is a beautifully written piece of nature writing, a panegyric of sorts to the Great Salt Lake.

I am enormously pleased to have read it.