Deep Creek Finding Hope in the High Country
Ratings5
Average rating4.8
15
Ratings5
Average rating4.8
"How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us." On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect. In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how "to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief…to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive."
Reviews with the most likes.
A brutally honest memoir can be very brave and difficult to read, as this one is, but like this one it can also be beautiful and moving. Houston (who narrated the audio version of her book) has succeeded in making me love the corner of Colorado she's called home for many years, as well as the many animals she has co-habited with along the way. I think I would have preferred to read it on the page, in order to better appreciate the gorgeous prose, but I enjoyed hearing it in her voice.
I actually haven't read any of Pam Houston's other books but I picked this one up because this kind of Nature Feelings Memoir is extremely my jam. (I mention this because throughout the book she talks about people telling her how much some of her other books have mean to them.)
Anyway this is a really beautiful memoir if this kind of thing is your jam, like if you want to cry about a woman writing about crying about narwhals, fuckin pick this up already.
