I Am a Stranger Here Myself

Debra Gwartney

Paperback

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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.

Book Details

Publisher: Unm Press
Publish Date: Mar 15th, 2019
Pages: 296
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.50in - 0.90in - 0.95lb
EAN: 9780826360717
Categories: • Essays• General

About the Author

Gwartney, Debra: - Debra Gwartney is the author of Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love and the coeditor of Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape. She teaches in Pacific University's MFA in Writing program and lives in Western Oregon.

Praise for this book

The narratives braid into a meditation on belonging and identity, an exploration of the history that women played in settling the Northwest territories, and an elegy to the places that shape our selves.--The Rumpus

Its strength lies in the author's honest appraisal of her early life as a lonely girl, a misfit who yearns to belong. Complicating her search for herself is a deep attachment to the landscape of home--the mountains, the rivers, the valleys, a place she knows 'about as well as the lines of my face.'--Inlander

Gwartney narrates with such detail, richness in description, and thoughtful reflection.--Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction

I Am A Stranger Here Myself . . . blends history and memoir in a fascinating rumination on western womanhood.--Sue Staats, Stories on Stage Sacramento

An absorbing, skillfully crafted, thoughtful and thought-provoking read.--Midwest Book Review

Gwartney is an empathetic writer. She resurrects Narcissa as a human being, enduring a flood of homesickness, fretting about middle-age weight gain. But Gwartney is unblinking in her assessment of the Whitmans' blunders and what they portended for the history of the American West.--Seattle Times

This prize-winning, beautifully crafted, deeply involving, and astute historical chronicle and anatomy of estrangement pulses with dramatic tales of hubris, risk, and bloodshed, repressed feelings and hard-tested bonds.--Booklist

Award-winning author and writing instructor Debra Gwartney's new memoir, I Am a Stranger Here Myself, is a fascinating examination of her struggle to recognize and accept her identity and role as a woman in the American West.--The Bulletin, Bend, Oregon

Contains a sense of the modern-day ambiguous feeling of loving the West but seeing ourselves as interlopers.--Eugene Weekly