Bird Cloud: A Memoir

by Annie Proulx

Part autobiography, part natural history, Bird Cloud is the glorious story of Annie Proulx’s piece of the Wyoming landscape and her home there.

“Bird Cloud” is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it—a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen.

Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house—with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor, and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region—inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho, and Shoshone Indians—and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers.

Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Nature, Biography, Biography Memoir, Natural History, Birds

Audiobook

First published January 4, 2011

About the author

Edna Annie Proulx (Chinese:安妮 普鲁) is an American journalist and author. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1994. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning major motion picture released in 2005. Brokeback Mountain received massive critical acclaim and went on to be nominated for a leading eight Academy Awards, winning three of them. (However, the movie did not win Best Picture, a situation with which Proulx made public her disappointment.) She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards.

She has written most of her stories and books simply as Annie Proulx, but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.

Reviews

[Snotchocheez · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some professional actors whose work I totally admire, yet I'd care not a whit to spend two minutes together with them in "the real world" to get to know them. Their art and talent can stay ensconced on the big screen, their real life personae can stay forever cloaked behind their Beverly Hills mansions or Aspen megalithic chalets. After reading "Bird Cloud", Proulx' "memoir" revolving around her acquisition of 640 acres of land in Wyoming and her experiences in building a house on that land, I can probably add Ms. Proulx to the list of people I'd NEVER want to meet in person.

I gave this "memoir" (which is hardly a memoir, it's more of a well-worded rant session) 2 stars not because of my feelings for her as a person, but that it's simply a totally disappointing read. The first half of the book is simply awful and is comprised of a really badly-constructed family tree, ostensibly to provide enough background information to explain Proulx' wanderlust, but really (to me) serves more as an arm's length distancer then actually explaining who she is. The other component of the first half is her grousing and moaning over her experiences in buying the the land, then constructing a house on it. (Um...Ms. Proulx? You CHOSE to buy 640 acres in the middle of nowhere in the the middle of the least populated state in the United States. You're not going to find a Frank Gehry or a Maya Lin or an IM Pei or a Frank Lloyd Wright to design your architectural paean to bird watching within 1000 miles of you. Okay, you've got beaucoup bucks from selling the rights of "Brokeback Mountain". We get it. We don't, however, understand why you feel so entitled to get what you want that you have to grouse about it in book form. (and charge the public $26.00 for the privilege to read about it)) I suppose there is a certain amount of comedic value in superimposing Ms. Proulx's snarling jacket photo image ("Take the f***ing picture already" she seems to say in it) onto a barren Platte River locale and gripe and complain about the cost overruns and the 30-below-zero winters and the concrete floor not at all working with the acid stain applied or that your planner and your builder and your assorted lackeys can't seem to agree on anything.

The last half of the book is the only redeeming part, when she talks about the archaeolgy and history of the site. (And if you're into bird watching (which I certainly am not) there's at least 25 pages devoted to her bird-watching diary. Fun!) The only thing I got from this "memoir" is that Ms. Proulx seems to hate almost everyone and wishes to sequester herself with the birds and wildlife and nature (and then bitch about them). Stick with your art, Ms. Proulx..."memoirs" don't "become" you.

[Petra X · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Well do I know my own character negatives," she writes, "bossy, impatient, reclusively shy, short-tempered, single-minded." Says Annie Proulx. What she didn't add was that she was downright stupid when it came to checking important details.

The book is about Annie looking for the perfect place to build the home of her dreams, the one she looks forward to living in for the rest of her life. She finds the site in a wild place in Wyoming, far from any town or neighbours with only the cries of eagles and the whistling wind for company. It is described at length especially the wildlife including an amusing incident (the only one, she does not write in a humorous vein) of cows jumping over an electric fence as the grass seemed so much greener on her side. She spends vasts sums of money on an architect, builders, fencers, heavy equipment, even a Japanese tub and shoji screens and several years getting this house built. At the end of it, her other house sold, moved in, builders problems put right, she finds she cannot live in it.

The road the house is on is impassible to wheeled vehicles for the entire winter. She would be just entirely snowed in. You might have thought she would check this and so she did. She was assured, verbally, more than once that the city council kept it open all year. That's it. Nothing in writing. And this from a lady who wouldn't deal with the builders on a handshake but insisted on proper contracts.

Stupid is as stupid does and so she stubbornly lived there for one entire year and then kept it as a summer retreat. Lucky she's rich, isn't it?

[Diane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Proulx may be a Pulitzer-prize winning fiction writer, but this autobiographical work won't win any prizes from me. First of all, it is boring. Deathly boring. Autobiographies, of course, use the first person a lot, but Proulx writes as if every detail is precious. Every floor tile as she builds her house. Every mistake she made in choosing other houses. Then she launches into the natural settings of her swamp area home with a textbook-like analysis of the lodgepole pines. Proulx is not a nature writer, and cannot handle the deliverance of nature's beauty with the savoir-fare of Sue Hubbell in A Country Year. On the whole, Bird Cloud isn't smooth, it isn't informative, it isn't engaging, but there are parts which catch the attention. A method of journaling is to write everything that is on your mind when you first wake. This takes away all the busy thoughts, the worries, the distractions, the negatives, like skimming the foam from a pot of soup. Afterwards a writer may more easily get to the real thoughts and the creativity. Bird Cloud reminds me of a morning journal, all the foam, worries, busy-mindedness and negativity, sandwiched together with some research about the area of her home.

[Abby Powell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don't bother reading this book!

I love Annie Proulx's other books and have always enjoyed her writing. When I saw this memoir and it's subject, I thought I might be in for a treat. However, I was met by a long ramble about building a very expensive and particular house in a beautiful area surrounded by nature.

Much of the tone of the book is whining about contractors, architects, etc. all the while going into excruciating detail that quite frankly most people wouldn't care about unless it was their own house.

Second, she waxes eloquently about the natural world at her property at the same time talking about all the building/roads/utilities/fences she needs to be happy at her new home. She denigrates The Natural Conservancy as she builds her multimillion dollar home.

Finally, when it all ends, she says she cannot live there. ARG! I ended up being pissed off at the author and feeling ripped off that I likely got sucked into paying for a book that was written simply for her to pay the bills incurred by her extravagant living expenses.

[Nathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

In which a wealthy woman complains about imperfections in her luxury home on the Wyoming range.

[TheGirlBytheSeaofCortez · Rating 3 out of 5]

American author Annie Proulx is best known for her 1993 novel, The Shipping News, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and her 1997 short story, “Brokeback Mountain,” about forbidden cowboy love, which was made into a critically acclaimed movie. Her latest book, a work of non-fiction titled Bird Cloud is subtitled A Memoir, though once the reader really gets into it, he or she wonders if “memoir” is the right word to use.

Most readers associate a memoir with deep personal revelations about the author. In Bird Cloud, Proulx, always rather secretive and reclusive, doesn’t reveal much about herself and her family. When she writes of books, they are the books of others, not her own. Her three marriages, all of which ended in divorce, and her four children (three sons and one daughter) are mentioned only in passing. In fact, Bird Cloud, named for the house Proulx had built from 2004 to 2007 on 640 acres of rough land along Wyoming’s North Platte River, is about almost everything but Annie Proulx.

The book encompasses archaeology, topography, meteorology, genealogy, ethnography, botany, zoology, and perhaps most of all, the history of Wyoming, itself. There’s bound to be something in it for everyone, just as there are bound to be parts of it that some readers won’t be interested in at all.

Proulx does give us bits and pieces of personal information. The beginning of the book deals with her French Canadian father, who, in his quest to better himself, moved around frequently. By the time Proulx was fifteen, she has lived in twenty different houses, including a log cabin and what had once been a gas station. “We Franco-Americans are a ‘rootless people,’” Proulx writes, “who really have no national identity, who really belong nowhere in the United States.” "Bird Cloud,” it seems, was meant to encompass everything Proulx had loved about some of her former homes as well as excluding everything she disliked.

Proulx also tantalizes us with the revelation of finding, with her cousin, a stack of old letters written between her mother and her aunt, both of whom suffered from a rare, progressive lung disease.

Two sick sisters. The sense of the hopelessly brave front, the running jokes, the closest sisterly bond, a hatred for stupid and condescending doctors — of all the things two people suffering the same illness can say to each other that no one else could understand — overwhelmed us. I can now barely open the box that holds those letters because all the disappointed dreams of these two hungry-for-love women fly in my face.

The reader desperately wants to know more. Sadly, Proulx denies us that knowledge.

Most of the book revolves around Proulx’s efforts to build “Bird Cloud,” efforts that trigger discourses on the history of Wyoming, the native flora and fauna, the topography of the land, etc., the loveliest of which is a paean to the eagles and other birds that nest in the trees and cliffs immediately surrounding her home.

At the time of the building “Bird Cloud,” Proulx was no stranger to Wyoming. She lived in Centennial in 1995, in a house that, she says, was all wrong for her. The kitchen was too small, the windows were not situated properly, in winter the driveway became a forbidding sheet of ice that didn’t melt until late in the spring. Proulx, however, was still in love with Wyoming.

One day, driving west from Laramie she saw that “the sky was filled with stretched-out laminar wave clouds” and over one piece of property in particular she “saw to the west…one cloud in the shape of an immense bird, the head and beak, the breast looming over the Rockies. I took it as a sign that I would get the property and thought ‘Bird Cloud’ should be the new name.”

Of course, Proulx does get the property, and she hires eminent Colorado architect Harry Teague to design her a home she thought would be the last home she ever lived in or wanted to live in. But, as many people know, houses that look good on paper are often notoriously difficult to translate into “the real thing,” and so it was with “Bird Cloud.” Proulx describes – in detail – all the expected obstacles as well as the unexpected ones, e.g., the laying of the concrete foundation, which had to be delayed due to the presence of a gaping hole in the Rawlins penitentiary; the kitchen floor, a lovely terracotta, which, for some reason, took on the color of raw liver; the window frames that snapped during the night with such ferocity that Proulx thought she was being burgled. And, since this is Wyoming, of course, there was the snow. And more snow. And more snow.

The building or renovating of a house can be interesting, as anyone who’s read Peter Mayle or Frances Mayes knows. However, while Proulx is no doubt a superior writer to both Mayle and Mayes, she doesn’t possess their whimsy, especially Mayle’s, when describing the building of “Bird Cloud.” When it comes to the building of “Bird Cloud,” the book suffers from “information overload.” The following paragraph is the norm, not a diversion:

Although the cold snap let go and the weather warmed up, the roof engineer and the truss company were still not in agreement. Dave was trying to track down sources and prices for Alaskan yellow cedar to use in the upstairs floors, stair treads, trim, doors. The truss company was still waiting for the roof engineer “to send detail on Section 3 where hip line hits trusses.

I’m not even sure I know what a “truss” is, and since I’m not going into the construction business, I don’t really care. While things like this can be amusing when handled by someone like the above-mentioned Peter Mayle, it becomes difficult to sympathize with Proulx’s troubles in getting her Japanese soaking tub installed, her tatami-mat exercise area built, or her Mexican talavera sink and handcrafted deer antler drawer pulls installed “just so.”

And then there’s the frustration of not really letting the reader get to know the people who are building this spectacular home for Proulx. Rather than referring to them by name, Proulx has the maddening habit of concocting strange nicknames for almost all of them: Uphill Bob, Mr. Busybody, the James Gang, Mr. Floorfix, Catfish, Mr. Solar, etc. The result is that they seem more like cartoon characters than real people.

The drifting from subject to subject didn’t bother me in the slightest in this book, however, there were some subjects that I really didn’t find too interesting. Although I certainly care about the injustices done to the Native Americans, I’m not too keen on learning their history, and Proulx gives us a heavy dose of it in Bird Cloud. If you’re familiar with Proulx’s work, outside of The Shipping News, you’ll know that she is fascinated with the “Old West” and outraged at the injustices done to the Native Americans by the invading Europeans. At one point she writes:

Running through everything these people [Indians] thought or knew, like the vast root systems of grasses that extend deep beneath the surface…were spiritual filaments that guided behavior and nourished rich mythologies. We today can barely comprehend the interconnectedness of their observations of the natural world, their ideas and lives.

I wonder if Proulx, whose writing I generally admire, realizes that the statement above is false. Of course we can comprehend the “interconnectedness of their observations of the natural world, their ideas and lives” and many of us do. One person who certainly does is Louise Erdrich, whose books are filled with a deep understanding of the Native American and Native American lore.

I realize there will be many readers out there who will love the parts of Bird Cloud that deal with Native American history, just as there will be readers who dislike Proulx’s long odes to nature, the parts of the book I found most fascinating. To me, these were lyrical and beautiful and poetic. I don’t know how anyone “in love” with language could fail to appreciate the passages like the following:

The river at sunset became mottled green and peach in patterns that recalled the marbled end pages of old books. Quickly the evening dusk filled with darting swallows, their dark bodies gradually absorbed by the intensifying gloom. The great horned owl called from the island and everything fell silent except the murmuring river and a more distant owl. In this place there was so much to know.

Proulx has always been near-to-unmatched when describing the natural world, and this lyricism is abundant in Bird Cloud. One doesn’t soon forget her descriptions of spring days when “the air was stitched with hundreds and hundreds of swallows.” However, to her credit, Proulx also gives us a vibrant picture of the not-so-pretty side of life in Wyoming:

Winds of seventy miles an hour are not uncommon in winter and blasts over a hundred miles an hour occur a few times each season, the source of the old joke that Wyoming snow does not melt, it just wears out.

The sagebrush seems nearly black and beaten low by the ceaseless wind. Why would anyone live here, I think. I live here.

Other passages, though, make you wonder if the writer of such poetic lyricism has been replaced with another writer, one much less skilled:

I like a colorful, handily cluttered kitchen and Bird Cloud’s cabinets and drawers in red, violet, aquamarine, burnt orange, cobalt, lime, brick, John Deere green and skipjack blue inspires stir-fries, osso buco, grilled prawns, Argentinean salads of butterhead lettuce, tomato, sweet onion, roast lamb with Greek cucumber and dill sauce, frittatas, rhubarb sauce with glasses of dry Riesling for the cook. You bet.

It staggers the imagination.

When winter descends, Proulx’s idyll becomes a prison. The mercury falls to at least fifteen below zero; the road, which the real estate agent assured Proulx was plowed, is not, and it becomes totally impassible. The “hero sun came our for a quarter hour, then fell as thought wounded.” It’s the snow that finally drives Proulx out:

So ended the first and only full year I was to spend at Bird Cloud. I returned in March and for several more years came in early spring and stayed until the road-choking snow drove me out, but I had to face the fact that no matter how much I loved the place, it was not, and never could be, the final home of which I had dreamed.

Wyoming has always been notoriously difficult on its inhabitants. It takes a strong and resilient person to live in a climate that’s so harsh for six months every year, and even the tough Proulx is no match for Wyoming in the winter.

There’s no denying the fact that Annie Proulx is, and has been, one of America’s foremost writers. But Bird Cloud, though a strange and beautiful book, is also an uneven one. It’s difficult to describe, difficult to review, and, though it often soars, it’s also sometimes difficult to read.

Despite the fact that Proulx couldn’t live at "Bird Cloud," the book, as a whole, still seems to celebrate the theme of finding one’s true home, one’s place in life. For even though Wyoming’s harsh winters drove Proulx to seek refuge in New Mexico, Wyoming in the summer did seem to be the place where she belonged. It is with nostalgia and regret that we read Proulx’s characteristically unsentimental pronouncement on the entire – and very costly – adventure. “Years later,” she writes, “I still wonder if I should have cut my losses.”

3/5

Recommended: It was very difficult to rate this book due to its unevenness. Parts of it are definitely five-star, while others, such as the passage in which Proulx describes her multi-colored kitchen, are only deserving of a two. Still, fans of Proulx and Wyoming might like the book. Others will probably find it frustrating, especially if you’re not into Native American history, home construction or wildlife.

Note: A quick search on the Internet will reveal that “Bird Cloud” is now for sale for an asking price of $3.7 million. If you’ve got that kind of cash, and you have a hankering for Wyoming, you can experience firsthand all the highs and lows that Proulx writes about in this book. Let us know about your experiences if you buy the ranch, and good luck in getting that road plowed.

Read my book reviews and tips for writers at literarycornercafe.blogspot.com

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Annie Proulx's writing and I also love books about the West and meditative works on the natural world. Add these likes with my passion for HGTV and this book seemed like a natural fit for me. Ms Proulx is a wonderful writer but I was not as enthralled with this book as I had expected. I would have liked more information on the process and decisions that led to the design of this massive house. I felt that much of the design for the house was based on snap decisions and not environmentally well thought out. I perhaps should be heartened that such a careful writer can be human when it comes to building a dream house. The book begins with a short genealogical discussion of the author's family. I wasn't taken with this part of the book. The real strength of the book is in the chapters where Ms Proulx observes and comments on the comings and goings of the avian population around Bird Cloud. Here the writing is compelling. The portion of the book dealing with the history and mismanagement of the cattle industry and the terrible toll recreational hunting took on the wildlife of the West during the early part of the Twentieth Century is also quite interesting. I didn't feel connected to the portions of the book where the author discusses construction mistakes and costly delays. Somehow I couldn't feel the author's connection to the actual home.

[Sharon Huether · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author takes the reader on a first hand tour of the construction of he beautiful home in the wilds of Wyoming. Reading about it was like listening to a home and garden show, longer in length than most.

She really did her research on the acreage around her property. Who owned the acreage past and present.
The birds and wildlife were important to her too.

Very interesting book.

[Renee Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In reviewing Annie Proulx’s BIRD CLOUD, I couldn’t decide whether to give it three stars, or four; it wasn’t a five-star read – that, I’ve reserved for BAD DIRT, her collection of fine short stories – but three stars seemed stingy and rude. Besides, I enjoyed it more than that. But to be honest, I was bored on occasion with the discussion of history and archaeology of the region, preferring Proulx’s description of landscape and antics of the birds (she’s an amateur naturalist and an avid and knowledgeable bird watcher).

Proulx’s publisher, Scribner, has positioned the book as a memoir, claiming she “turns her lens on herself in this writing,” but readers expecting a traditional memoir will be disappointed. While we learn a great deal about the years (not to mention the money) she spent building what we believe is likely her dream house, we’re never shown the heartbreak or the relief she must have felt when she had to let it go (extreme wind and cold, and so much snow from December through March that the road to the house was inaccessible). Always, she keeps us at a distance, never revealing the heart of the woman – the character – that is Annie Proulx.

Still, the book has its moments – enough of them, in fact, to keep the pages turning. There is this excerpt near the end that is both poignant and fun, and why, when it’s said and done, BIRD CLOUD deserves four stars:

"It was a lovely evening until we noticed something ridiculous that made us laugh. The James Gang had installed underground water sprinklers and dotted around in the grass were small valve covers, about four inches across, each with a nickel-size hole in the top. As my friend and I sat in the moonlight we watched one little head after another pop out of the holes in the valve covers – mice! A wee head would show, a mouse would emerge as if it were a sewer worker coming up through a manhole, and the rodent would scamper to the edge of the deck and dive under, followed by another and another. We counted ten mice coming out from one valve cover. The James Gang was not amused to hear this and stopped up the holes in the covers with wine corks."

[Judith Hannan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The second star in this rating is out of respect for Proulx. This book is such a disappointment from a wonderful author. Using the experience of building a house in Wyoming, Bird Cloud reads not much differently than a high school textbook--part family lineage, part geological survey, part Native American history, and part a dissertation on the characters that hunted, farmed, and stripped Wyoming of its natural attributes. The greatest problem is that Bird Cloud tells no story, or it starts a story and never weaves it into something larger. There are moments when you feel a little suspense, that something is about to happen, but the something is parochial in nature, of more interest to the writer than reader. Learning about the color of the floorboards or trying to get a cement slab a certain tone felt like being shown pictures of someone's baby. The first few are cute but, after that, it becomes all about the one showing the pictures. Even the chapter about the birds was less interesting than it could have been, feeling more a list of "... and then this bird did this and that bird did that..." But what made the book most disappointing for me is that Proulx tells very little about herself. By the end, when she admits that Bird Cloud is in fact not the house of her dreams, I didn't really care. Even if I could see the view from her window, her soaking tub, or the debacle that was her floor in the kitchen, I couldn't see her.

[Glenn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings about this book, which is NOT a memoir, but a chronicle of Proulx's quest for what she hoped would be her dream home in the Wyoming backcountry, named Bird Cloud. Proulx is a master of prose, and her descriptions of Wyoming nature are lyrical. No argument there. But as noted by other readers, Proulx fails to flesh out the people in her story, especially the brothers who built the home and allowed her survive in a land that would otherwise have overwhelmed her limited practical skills. More generally, however, Proulx came across as difficult, opinionated, impatient, snobbish, and not a little hypocritical for being so monetarily indulgent on her large house (complete with lawn sprinklers) while simultaneously preaching environmentalism. For a woman so in love with the outdoors and Wyoming wildlife, the fact that her house eventually proved unsuitable for year-round residency suggests Proulx's wisdom about nature — and her place in it — is not as profound as she would have us believe.

[Suzy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a complicated relationship with Annie Proulx's writing. I loved The Shipping News, tried hard to get into Accordion Crimes but in the end had to admit defeat, hated the movie Brokeback Mountain (and all of its hype) so much that I never tried the book from which it was drawn … When Bird Cloud came up while I was searching bird books for kids on LinkCat it sounded interesting enough. I enjoy nature writing and memoir. Bird Cloud is both -- a chronicle of the purchase and restoration of a piece of land in a remote Wyoming valley, and then of the building Proulx's dream house on the land. Proulx and her son purchased the land from the Nature Conservancy, naming it "Bird Cloud" after spotting a bird-shaped cloud over the cliff that is a prominent feature of the property, and taking it as a sign. She does not have kind words for the Nature Conservancy, who she said were in the pockets of local ranchers whose cattle continually decimated the native flora. The first order of business -- an enormous task never quite finished -- was fencing off the property to keep out the cows. Proulx writes in beautiful detail about the land and its inhabitants. I bogged down when she applied the same amount of detail to writing about the house -- its design, the quest for reliable contractors and perfect building materials -- and was annoyed (and probably jealous) of her apparent financial stability when she talked of selling stocks because she was $200,000 over budget in the building or her many side trips to Santa Fe, Ireland, Newfoundland, etc. As I glanced back at the book to write this review though, I noted her dedication of the book to the architect, builders, and an archaeologist who was mentioned frequently, and all of those long chapters take on deeper meaning. It wasn't just the house and the building materials, but the relationships she formed with these individual people, and more importantly, the relationship that they also formed with this very special place. My favorite parts were the early chapters where she shares her family history, the second-to-the-last chapter where she talks about the history of that part of Wyoming, from prehistoric times through the shameful period of European expansion and decimation of native populations, and the final chapter which is an ode to the bird life at Bird Cloud. There were times when the going was slow reading this book, when I opted for a cookbook or knitting magazine instead of Bird Cloud for bedtime reading, but in the end I am really glad that I stuck with it.

[Renee Mcgrath · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've been listening to Annie Proulx's Bird Cloud: A Memoir, on CD (read by the author and Joan Allen). Proulx is the author of the short story which became the movie Brokeback Mountain, which I read recently and enjoyed. I also loved her Shipping News: A Novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award after its publication in 1993. So I guess I had high hopes for her latest work, which sadly disappointed.

The first few chapters of this book provide a cursory background to Proulx's life before launching in to the saga of her purchase of remote land in Wyoming and attempt to build the house of her dreams on that spot.

While I have enjoyed stories about building houses, such as Richard Manning's A Good House: Building a Life on the Land, this account is more like a long complaint from a spoiled child. The site that Proulx selects to build her house is inaccessible for half of the year due to heavy snows and blowing winds. The architect disappoints in many ways, as do many of the builders (although there is a certain group of contractors who can seem to do no wrong). The author takes every inevitable error personally and bemoans her fate during the weeks that she spends on the ranch when she isn't jetting off to New Mexico, or Paris, or Bali.

Once the house is finally built, she sets to recounting all of the types of birds that live on the property, and describing their activities in detail. While it is, undeniably, thrilling to see a bald eagle pull a fish out of a pond, it is not quite so thrilling to read about it. On the whole, there is little of beauty in this account of a privileged woman building an extravagant home in a pristine wilderness area. What a waste of possibility.

[Bookmarks Magazine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part memoir, part nature journal, part history, and part construction journal, Bird Cloud is, as the Boston Globe sums up, "a strange, disjointed, often beautiful book." The first point many critics commented on was its curious timing given the foreclosure crisis. "There is a whiff of unexamined privilege" throughout, notes the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and most did not disagree. Yet whether in good taste or bad, that wasn't the main point of contention. Reviewers generally agreed that Proulx is a master of capturing place, and her descriptions of the wild landscape held even naysayers' interest. However, many thought the writing unrestrained and circuitous, with no sense of unifying story. In the end, Bird Cloud may offer the most for design lovers -- and those with $3.7 million to spend, as the property is now up for sale. This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[Erik Tanouye · Rating 1 out of 5]

Got this at BookOff for $1. May have overpaid.

[Jenny Shank · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/01/...

Annie Proulx tells of her vivid life on a 'Cloud'
Posted Thursday, Jan. 27, 2011 0 Comments Print Share Share Reprints

By Jenny Shank

Special to the Star-Telegram

If there's any writer with a life and mind intriguing enough to merit a memoir, it's Annie Proulx, who didn't publish her first book of fiction until she was in her 50s, then quickly won just about every award available to an American writer. Proulx's geographical-chameleon nature is unusual for a writer whose work is so linked to landscape -- she grew up in New England, spent her early adulthood there and set the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning novel The Shipping News in Newfoundland. Later, she moved to Wyoming, where she set three quirky and often breathtaking short-story collections, filled with details and observations that seem like they'd only occur to a lifelong Westerner.

Readers will come to Bird Cloud, Proulx's first book of autobiographical nonfiction, hoping to glean some insights about what makes this exceptional writer tick, and they'll find some answers, but so will they be left with perhaps more questions from this beautifully written but somewhat frustrating book. Bird Cloud encompasses a bit of introspection and family history, an account of the trials of building Proulx's dream house in Wyoming, notes on wildlife, and a discussion of human and natural history of the area.

The story opens in March 2005, with Proulx's reflections on the geographical features of the 640 acres of Wyoming land she had recently purchased from the Nature Conservancy, a tract she named Bird Cloud. The extraordinary beauty of this spot drew Proulx in; it features a dramatic, 400-foot cliff, under which the North Platte River flows, attracting a riot of bird activity. She hopes to build a house where she can live alone with nature and her beloved library of history and science books. She finds out that Bird Cloud is not ideally suited to human habitation, especially in the winter, but she plunges ahead with the project.

"Well do I know my own character negatives," she writes, "bossy, impatient, reclusively shy, short-tempered, single-minded. The good parts are harder to see, but I suppose a fair dose of sympathy and even compassion is there, a by-product of the writer's imagination. I can and do put myself in others' shoes constantly. Observational skills, quick decisions (not a few bad ones), and a tendency to overreach, to stretch comprehension and try difficult things are part of who I am."

Bird Cloud next skips to Proulx's early life -- born in 1935, she moved with her family incessantly while her father, a French Canadian, searched for better jobs in his quest for respectability. Proulx delves into her family genealogy, the most interesting aspect of which is the conclusion a reader can draw from it: Through her success, Proulx has completed her father's journey out of generations of poverty toward wealth and cultural prestige. After a peripatetic childhood and adulthood, Proulx has earned the grand, expensive house that she sets out to build in the next part of the book. Whether this is of interest probably depends on how well the reader is faring in the current economy.

The blow-by-blow of the building of Proulx's house is the most entertaining part. In her fiction, Proulx writes incisively about distinctive local characters, and the workmen in Bird Cloud are vivid. There's Harry Teague, the Aspen-based architect she hires to design the house, and "the James gang," a group of brothers Proulx finds after trial and error with less reliable workmen, who are tireless perfectionists and come as close to achieving Proulx's dream as anybody could.

Although Proulx's sympathies in her fiction usually lie with Wyoming natives like the James gang, we learn that Proulx, in her quest for the perfect Japanese soak tub, solar panels and Brazilian floor tiles, might be more like the outsiders she poked fun at in her story Man Crawling Out of Trees, in which a New York couple buys a home in Wyoming, one of the many pine-log "estates" that resulted when ranch widows "dumped the cows and called up the real estate brokers, who sketched out thirty-five-acre ranchettes." The couple proceed to lavishly outfit their new home, as does Proulx.

Proulx must move into the house before the work is completed, which aggravates her and disrupts her writing. Gradually the construction finishes, but she realizes the problems of the site she selected. She concludes, "I had to face the fact that no matter how much I loved the place it was not, and never could be, the final home of which I had dreamed."

But wait -- did Proulx sell the house after all this? (She told the Los Angeles Times in 2008 that she was moving to New Mexico.) Will she set any more fiction in Wyoming? And how exactly does she write her fiction? Although Proulx's memoir preserves her mystery on these and other points, fans of her prose and nature descriptions will find much to savor in Bird Cloud, at least until Proulx's next work of fiction appears.

Read more: http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/01/...

[Sheila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cross Bill Bryson’s At Home with Jane Kirkpatrick’s Homestead and you’ll have something like Annie Proulx’s memoir, Bird Cloud. The Bird Cloud of the title is a beautiful home in a beautiful location, but the book investigates the whole concept of home and home-building, starting with the many places the author has lived and ending, nicely, with the many migratory homes of birds.

A similar parallelism continues throughout the book. The author’s quest for her family’s roots, searching through family trees and ancient documents, is mirrored at the end of the book with a search through rocks and stones for the history of her land and the ancestral people who shaped it. Her longing for a wonderful floorplan is paired with an engineer’s longing for room to work. And her quest to find ultimate perfection is proven as flawed as the quest of others to create it.

Filled with detail about the construction of walls and floors, and balanced with glorious prose describing the wonders of nature’s construction, Bird Cloud felt like it should have been more fun to read. Maybe it just didn't resonate with me—I'm not that keen on the search for perfection. But it is a rich slow read, not entirely satisfying, not entirely frustrating, but definitely interesting.



Disclosure: Our book club decided to read this book.

[Betty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended for readers of the past and present American western states, this memoir is more freewheeling than conventional biography, lengthily covering subjects she had studied and experienced during the first decade of the twenty-first century, quickly covering her ancestors, and entirely missing her fabulous literary career, though she mentions cataloguing her vast library, storing her heaps of manuscripts, and still writing (truly having the scenic solitude to do so once the worrisome attention to building was finished). She does best with the details of Wyoming's geographical, archeological, meteorological, societal history--the past's traces still evident on the slowly changing land should one trek/ski/ride to discover artifacts and bones. The resettlement of lands and by whom and how and how that affected the vast native population and the wildlife give the idea of her having deeply studied that historical subject on paper and experienced herself the windswept, temperature extremes at an elevation of seven-thousand-feet and the rare natural habitat for birds, sunsets, and seasonal change.

[Alan Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

Autobiographical non-fiction, describing the author's attempt to build her dream home on a Section (600+ acres) in Wyoming. She searches for property for the first couple of chapters, falls in love with this plot of land, finds an architect (not local) who designs a dream home, and (after several missteps) finds a local master builder who can build her home.....and the. The problems start.

The bulk of the book is the story of the year between first starting construction and her finally moving inundation of her surviving the winter. There isn't much narrative tension, and it quickly becomes clear that this will not be the house of her dreams.

Bottom line: if you want to read beautifully written prose, and learn a little something about construction, birds, and Wyoming history, you will enjoy this book. If you are looking for a "page turner"--look elsewhere.

[Men D. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh my God she is so tiresome and unlikeable. I have loved Annie Proulx's work. Close Range. Heart Songs. But WTF is this? An old lady complaining that she blew too much money on a ridiculously sited mansion on a remote Wyoming cliff. OF COURSE your stupid expensive Brazilian tile isn't going to be the reddish earth-tone that you want! Call your architect in the middle of the night and complain! Cry me a fucking river!

[Maggi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kind of a snoozer. I think she wanted to pay for her expensive house.

[Dbvdb · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a good book club book in that it generates much discussion. It is trying to present many things - family history, the story of building (in the middle of nowhere), and history of the area in Wyoming. It is not smoothly done - where was the editor? Our book group members did not agree on which aspects were best / worst and we had a ton of fun talking about it.

If you are a fan of Annie Proulx like we were, the insight it brings to her character is an incredible let-down. Privileged white woman builds house were maybe none should be built and complains at every step and does not INCLUDE ANY PICTURES! Then after she drags us through her nonsense, we find that she does not even live there very long! It is currently listed for sale $5,500,000. (2022)

For me the family history was torture reading. Sometimes the history stories would be interesting but that would be followed by much that we just had-to-get-through like a school assignment. If it was not a bookclub book there is no way we would have finished it.

For some reason, some workmen were loyal supporters of her endeavor and actually we think if they wrote a book about it, we would find it more interesting.

What is entertaining? The ** reviews here on Goodreads. Here's one I agreed with

"...First of all, it is boring. Deathly boring. Autobiographies, of course, use the first person a lot, but Proulx writes as if every detail is precious. Every floor tile as she builds her house. Every mistake she made in choosing other houses. ... On the whole, Bird Cloud isn't smooth, it isn't informative, it isn't engaging, but there are parts which catch the attention. A method of journaling is to write everything that is on your mind when you first wake. This takes away all the busy thoughts, the worries, the distractions, the negatives, like skimming the foam from a pot of soup." - Diane

lol -

"...I would not want to have her over for a dinner party.
I'm not allergic to the memoirs of the privileged and entitled, necessarily, and I made it through Proulx's fits over speckles on the floor and disappointing light fixtures with only mild discomfort, but by the time I made it to her snippy take on her superior methods of birdwatching I wanted to launch this book out a window.." - Kim G

[David Robertson · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Bird Cloud” is a strange, idiosyncratic and, ultimately, unsatisfying book--part memoir, part history, part natural history, and, mostly, an account of Proulx’s building an ill-advised house (Bird Cloud) in an inaccessible and inhospitable part of south-central Wyoming. Two sections in particular, an account of Proulx’s family lineage in the second chapter, and a short history of the ownership of the land where the house was located in the ninth chapter, are especially confusing and perplexing. Proulx comes across as headstrong, opinionated, privileged, a bit arrogant, and not particularly sympathetic. In addition, Proulx only spent one full year at Bird Cloud (because of the challenges imposed by winter on the Wyoming prairie) and then returned for several subsequent years during the milder months, but she never explains what happened after she decided to leave permanently; as a result, the book feels unfinished.

[Alastair · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read some of the reviews of this book. Described as a memoir of place but also some biography and architecture criticism thrown in. I really liked this book. In Proulx’s novels the landscape is a supporting character, in this book it is the main character. I’m not sure I was reading the same book as other reviewers. Other people’s main gripe seems to be that Proulx built this house and realised she couldn’t live in it and that that typifies the writer flash with cash from novel sales. Proulx makes it clear that she hoped to live in the house through the year and makes a good stab at it, only resigning herself to leaving when the prospect of being snowed in becomes too real. As for the “rich people and their flights of fancy and homes all over the place.” Proulx didn’t just, on a whim decide to buy a chunk of Wyoming out of the change in her back pocket, she had to sell her existing house and worried she would run out of money to build her dream house.
Anyway less of my gripes about the reviews. The sense of atmosphere at the place especially the sun off the cliffs, the wildlife the history both native and ranching was explored with the eye for detail you would expect from Proulx. The last chapter on bird life was nature writing at its finest.
This isn’t a book on the trials and tribulations of the building of one woman’s house in Wyoming, it’s a book about how the natural world dictates everything even if it is not apparent immediately. The bits about antler door handles, Japanese shoji screens , worktops and baths did annoy me a bit.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about Annie Proulx in Wyoming and how she goes about building a house there. Her trials and tribulations in building the home were interesting and well documented. Of secondary interest in the book are birds: bald eagles, golden eagles and many other birds that have found a home on this Wyoming property. I enjoyed this book and would give it a 3.5 if that were available.

[Maren Pekruhl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Das Buch hat eine ruhige Atmosphäre. Jedes Kapitel beleuchtet ein eigenes Thema in Zusammenhang mit dem Hausbau auf einem riesigen einsamen Grundstück in Wyoming, USA. Ich habe Dinge über den Hausbau, die Geschichte amerikanischer Ureinwohner, die heimische Flora und Fauna, besonders Vögel, und die weißen Einwanderer nach Amerika gelernt. Es bietet sich an das Buch immer wieder kapitelweise in die Hand zu nehmen, um jede Erinnerung auf sich wirken zu lassen.

[Melanie Chatten · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this memoir. It was a good mix of the trials and tribulations of building a house in rural Wyoming, history, nature and some fun characters

[Karan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoying memoirs right now, this one centres on her building a house in Wyoming at age 68-70. But packed with info on environment, birds, wildlife, birds, history of range lands, indigenous history, archaeology, friendship, family, and of course - house construction.

[Miriam Jacobs · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was my traveling companion for a 29-day trip across the American southwest and back via a northern route through South Dakota. One of the ways you query yourself when you venture out concerns whether or not you would somehow be happier if you lived in the places you are visiting. The landscapes of Proulx's Wyoming resemble those of the neighboring states I travelled. As I drove along I saw huge land parcels for sale, most off grid. Her remarks kept me persuaded I can't afford to live there, impossible! despite the beauty, or whatever else might motivate me. The writing is good - spectacular in its brevity and unfailingly correct. The structure is rather like a letter - backstory, conflict, action - a section that grounds us in her characteristic mobility, a central portion concerning construction of the home and its difficulties, and a final section, living it, living the dream (mostly bird-watching, fighting the weather, and writing, one assumes, although she does not talk about it) and how that worked out for her. However, she lacks a certain commitment to this piece and it shows everywhere. The central thread, herself, is barely present; the characters are stick figures; our questions about how she achieves being Annie Proulx the writer are the elephant in the room, the box that remains unopened, the major concern left lying for us to trip on again and again, the feeling that the work is nowhere near finished. It's a sketch, pre-writing even, not ready.
In the end, I feel grateful for what the book is but disappointed about what it is not. One of the problems with celebrity is that it does not protect you from hearing the wrong voices, which must arise in that circumstance in even greater profusion than for other mortals. What bugs me is the privilege that got it to the shelves in the first place. It's publication looks a little score-card-y to me, perfunctory dot-filling. She got something produced that year. No blank spaces in the calendar. I think she was too exhausted to try but published the book for another reason, anyway, not a literary one, maybe to give herself energy for a project she cared more about. So she is human. And /Bird Cloud/is not her best.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Annie Proulx's Bird Cloud is a memoir in which she recounts her experience buying property in Wyoming, building a house on the property, and moving in.

There are reasons to dislike this book. For one, who has that kind of money? And if you don't, reading about someone who does worrying over a bath is a little annoying. She kicks a bunch of cattle off her land, which irritates people except when it doesn't. The ending is almost laughably ironic. Lots of people have bought property, moved, or even built houses. So how exciting can Bird Cloud be? Well, although your mileage may vary, for some reason Proulx's memoir tended to sit just right with me.

In all honesty, there are chapters that I skimmed, such as the opening account of her father's career (which involves many moves) and some of the history of the land, too. I nevertheless found her detailed reflection on whether or not to hire an architect, her attempts to find contractors, set up heating, or rid her land of cattle interesting throughout.

Should you hire an architect? It seems a bit like getting a tattoo: one can either hire a professional and see how it turns out or else one can insist on more of a cookie cutter pattern. In this case, Proulx does hire an architect, ends up with a unique house, but at times not the house she wanted. Then again, she also sometimes gets what she wanted and wishes she'd trusted someone else's judgement. Houses are more complicated than you might think.

I do wish this memoir had photographs, but they can be found online.

Should we try to do things that are unique? The land she buys, which is adjacent to a cliff and a river, is indeed beautiful. The house that she builds is also fantastic and one of a kind. Sadly, the moral of the story for some readers may be that a house built more predictably and in a less unusual location would have been easier -- and maybe homier.