Part history, part memoir, I Am a Stranger Here Myself taps dimensions of human yearning: the need to belong, the snarl of family history, and embracing womanhood in the patriarchal American West. Gwartney becomes fascinated with the missionary Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, the first Caucasian woman to cross the Rocky Mountains and one of fourteen people killed at the Whitman Mission in 1847 by … Cayuse Indians. Whitman’s role as a white woman drawn in to “settle” the West reflects the tough-as-nails women in Gwartney’s own family. Arranged in four sections as a series of interlocking explorations and ruminations, Gwartney uses Whitman as a touchstone to spin a tightly woven narrative about identity, the power of womanhood, and coming to peace with one’s most cherished place.
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I Am a Stranger Here Myself is meant for all who seek a deeper relationship with their ancestry, their community, and themselves.
The story opens with the narrator’s road trip to her grandfather’s funeral in Salmon, Idaho, the small town where she and several generations of family before her were born and raised. On the way, she’s tailgated by an impatient Idaho stranger in a big pick up—tailgated all her life by her family’s expectations of who she should be and what she should do with her life. But then she says, “There was no missing the stifle of having your future handed to you like a plate of cold leftovers.”
It was an honor to follow this narrator, this twenty-first-century pioneer, with her distinctive, matter-of-fact voice in her relentless, honest exploration of her identity–especially in a patriarchal world that edges us all towards conformity. We learn of the narrator’s life, the lives of her ancestors, and the lives of those who pioneered the west long ago, most notably, the aspiring missionary and early Idahoan settler, Narcissa Whitman. All these characters came alive along with the times and places they lived, as if lowered like a stage and reenacted before my eyes. Their stories are interwoven seamlessly as the past and present collapse together into a single tense and into a singular woman’s quest to find her place in the world.
In the telling, author, Debra Gwartney, creates masterpiece that subtends many generations and walks of life, this book that defies any single genre—defies any and all that would attempt to tell her story better than she could herself.
Spellbound, I’ve gone back to read it for the second time.
I thoroughly enjoyed this intertwined story, part historical biography about some of the earliest Oregon Trail settlers and the tragedy of the Whitman massacre, and part reflections of a modern day woman and the Idaho families that she grew up with. A fascinating book.
Debra Gwartney’s book is what memoir strives to be—questioning, curious, exploratory and deeply reflective. The writing is fabulous—phrases roll off the page as the author explores what it means to inhabit the West. Braiding her story with that of Narcissa Whitman, an early American missionary who raised the ire of the Native population she was trying to “save,” Gwartney questions both hers and Narcissa’s innermost insecurities, motives, failures and success.
I finished the last page of I Am A Stranger Here Myself and decided to just start it all over again. I loved it so much. As a student of creative nonfiction, I would describe the writing as impeccable. I’m taking about word choice, phrase construction, transitions, asides and how the author crafts suspense. As someone who is learning to write well, it was a thrill to read this book—each page had something to teach me about memoir, story, voice, scene, description, imagery, gestures, humor, character . . .
Here’s what I’m talking about. On page 224:
“My father was there, too, along with his third wife, four years younger than me. We were the graveyard’s only visitors, surrounded by scrawny pine trees, tossed-about plastic flowers, and thigh-high granite headstones poking out of the crusty snow. Up on the hill the wind squirmed under our jackets and past the cuff of our mittens and, because he’d worn his old cowboy hat rather than a knit cap like the rest of us, around the edges of my father’s bright-pink ears.”
While taking notes in the margins, I starred the second half of that paragraph then underlined two verbs and circled an adjective. I paused after reading it the first time because, really, that detail about the wind squirming around the edges of the father’s bright pink ears because he wore a cowboy hat instead of cap. I mean, come on, that is fantastic.
Or how about this part (page 208):
“Hinman was the first in line when Marcus offered a day of river baptisms in the fall of 1844. No Cayuse takers again (eight years running), but there was Alonson, eager for the dunk. Save his soul, dry the man off, give him a teaching job.”
This is so fun to read. So satisfying. And funny. And I love this feeling as a reader that we (the narrator and I) are in agreement and can approach with a subtle irreverent tone and enjoy the misguided but earnest efforts of these missionaries. Their contradictions are rapid and fierce. But it’s as if the narrator reminds us not to judge and then, as if in a whisper, she seems to say Well, at least don’t judge TOO MUCH. I loved it.
And if there is a line I wish to ingrain, I’ll credit the character of Grandpa Bob: “If the man isn’t a son of a bitch, he’ll do until one comes along.”
Here’s one more passage that I felt incapsulated not only I Am A Stranger Here Myself but the story of all humanity. It came on the last page as the narrator confronts a buck who escapes his confinement and seems to take with him the narrator and Narcissa’s bursting, complex, unresolved tension “into the trees and across streams and up rocky cliffs and far from human confusion. Away from questions and histories and sorrow.” That’s the triptych of the human experience, right? I think it’s what all our stories are about. I, for one, felt my heart expand an extra notch when I read that part.