Gail Caldwell - A Strong West Wind: A Memoir

Table of Contents

For my mother and sister,
and in memory of my father
19142003

Praise for A Strong West Wind

Lyrical and generous... Caldwell applies the same intellectual rigor that has distinguished her critical work to this dissection of her life.... What [she] has conjured up is that rarest of creatures, the virtually selfless memoir.... [We] can only hope fervently that we have a sequel to look forward to.

Chicago Tribune

Engrossing, brimming with warmth and bittersweet yearning... What defines A Strong West Windis Caldwells eloquent voice and tender regard for her family, past and home.... Theres an appealing universality to Caldwells story.... By sharing what she calls this stupid, lovely chaos Caldwell enriches us all."

The Miami Herald

Deeply felt... A Strong West Windis as much about the times and places Caldwell lived in as it is about herself and her family. It is also about the books she read and the way they helped shape her sense of herself and her world.... What gives her book such depth and power is the fine blend of real narrativethe lived lifewith the written or interior narrative of memory, thought and feeling."

San Francisco Chronicle

For those of us who are daughters and sons of the so-called Greatest Generation, this is a story of our times, told with style and good humor."

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Its refreshing to read a memoir composed of real introspection and insight, a grown-ups mature perspective on a family and an era.... Here is this smart writers answer to the question of identity."

The Washington Post Book World

This is a memoir to be grateful for. Its crafted without postmodern tricks and without fakery.... A Strong West Windis brave, generous, and eloquent, touching andI feel quite sure of thistrue."

Baltimore Sun

I loved A Strong West Wind. Caldwell writes of her adventures in the sixties and seventies, and the quest for truth in California, with the authentic voice of the children who once made life hell for the Greatest Generation and in the process turned out pretty great themselves."

RUSSELL BAKER

[A] great American memoir... moving and magicalit transports the reader in time and space, allowing us to join Caldwell on her journey, feel her pleasures and her pains, and taste a huge slice of her life."

Elle

An elegant memoir. Gail Caldwell performs something like alchemy taking the base metals of the Texas Panhandle badlands and turning them into pure gold."

WARD JUST

Candid, philosophical... [Caldwell] eloquently articulates how geographical place and historical moment influence feelings, opinions, and identities.... Gracefully discursive and aphoristic.... [S]he is open-handed with beliefs and feelings."

The Boston Globe

An instant classic of the states literature... as intense as the early autobiographical essays of Joan Didion."

Austin American-Statesman

Readers wanting to revisit the kaleidoscopic events and societal unraveling of [the] time will enjoy Caldwells remembrances. [Her descriptions] are vivid and believable and help shape the authors (and the readers) understanding of her own future.... A Strong West Windworks as one more authentic reflection of a time that was fraught with confusion, yet ultimately revolutionary and rewardingmuch in the same way Caldwells life came to be."

Rocky Mountain News

Gail Caldwells book measures the sweep of one life against literature, history, legends of Texas, and the infallible truth of real feeling. This is a brave and moving work."

JAMES CARROLL

[A] moving love song to the people who made her... Caldwell writes with uncanny perception.... In [her] capable hands, posterity is assured."

Houston Chronicle

Lyrical... vivid... a collage of beautifully rendered snapshots from a life... Caldwell writes from the heart about fathers and daughters.... This book will appeal to many readers.... An engaging, thought-provoking read."

Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star

This is a coming-of-age memoir by a prize-winning book critic of the Boston Globewho writes, consciously and romantically, as a surviving member of her generation.... Wonderfully smart, moving, and sympathetic... Caldwell comes through as a wise and winning woman... and she emerges from A Strong West Wind a memorable narrator."

Publishers Weekly

Gorgeously written ... [a] metaphor-rich, beautifully structured reminiscence."

Booklist (starred review)

Gail Caldwells quiet, burnished memoir is a story of a lifes affections for her Texas parents, for the sere landscape of the panhandle, and for the road paved with book upon precious book that runs in both directions: far away and home again."

RICHARD FORD

So the LORD shifted the wind to a very strong west wind
which took up the locusts and drove them into the Red Sea;
not one locust was left in all the territory of Egypt.

But the LORD hardened Pharaohs heart, and he
did not let the sons of Israel go.

EXODUS 10:1920

HOW DO WE BECOME who we are? The question belongs not just to genes or geography or the idea of destiny, but to the entire symphony of culture and its magisterial marchto Prousts madeleines and Citizen Kanes Rosebud" and anyones dreams of being someplace, anyplace, else. I was a girl whose father had taken such pride in her all her life, even when it was masked as rage, that he had lit a fire in me that would stay warm forever. I was the daughter of a woman who, on a farm in east Texas in the 1920s, had crept away from her five younger siblings so that she could sit on a hillside and reada mother whose subterranean wish, long unrevealed, was that I might become who she could not. Each of us has these cloisters where the old discarded dreams are stored, innocuous as toys in the attic. The real beauty of the questionhow do we become who we are?is that by the time we are old enough to ask it, to understand its infinite breadth, it is too late to do much about it. That is not the sorrow of hindsight, but its music: That is what grants us a bearable past.

PROLOGUE

FOR A LONG TIME, my want for Texas was so veiled in guilt and ambiguity that I couldnt claim it for the sadness it was. I missed the people and the land and the skymy God I missed the sky but most of all I missed the sense of placid mystery the place evoked, endemic there as heat is to thunder. You can be gone for years from Texas, I now believe, and still be felled by such memories: Some moment on a silent afternoona cast of light, some gesture by a strangercan fill you with a longing that, by the laws of desire, will always remain unmet.

The truth was that I had been glad to go: that when I drove across the Tennessee River Bridge, I had wept with a kind of wild relief. The morning I left Austin was on a hot Friday in June, and my old Volvo overheated eighty miles north of town; my response was to pull the thermostat, throw four gallons of water in the backseat, and keep going. I drove through remote little east Texas towns named Daingerfield and New Boston, certain that such places divined what I was leaving and what I was going toward. The trunk of the car held an Oriental rug, a beat-up German typewriter, and a quart of Jack Daniels, and I racked up five hundred miles a day pointed north by northeast, listening to Springsteen and Little Feat. At night, exhausted, I checked in to cheap hotels along the highway, where I collapsed with a glass of bourbon and