On April 20th, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, a BP operated oil rig, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven men died in the explosion. Before the well was capped, it spewed an estimated 210 million gallons of oil into the gulf. The spill directly impacted 68,000 miles of ocean, and oil washed ashore along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Connie May Fowler began that day as she had begun most days for the previous sixteen years, immersed in the natural world that was her home on Alligator Point on Florida's gulf coast, surrounded by dunes and water birds, watching dolphins play in the distance. Then began the nightmare from which she would not emerge for more than a year. In her memoir, A Million Fragile Bones , she details the beauty and peace she found on Alligator Point after years of heartbreak and loss, and the devastation and upheaval that followed the oil spill. It is, at its heart, a love song to the natural world and a cry of anger and grief at its ruin for the sake of corporate profits. It is also a cautionary tale - a clear-eyed look at the real cost of our seemingly insatiable appetite for fossil fuel. As the memoir points out, we will continue to abuse the natural world at our peril.
This eco-memoir is an important read and documentation of the tragic BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. Fowler's use of language is poetic and the imagery is both heart-breaking and insightful. The book is unique without chapters, which takes the reader through a continuous stream of consciousness narrative. It's also one of the first literary books where I encountered the narrator reflecting on their Facebook updates/posts, which helped the reader feel even closer to the situation. Highly recommended read for college English and environmental lit classes. The BP spill and the effects on the people and animals is a story we should remember and learn from.
Fowler does a masterful job of memoir writing and I encourage people to read it if you are trying to improve your memoir writing. I enjoyed the first half of the book best since she explores her personal life as part of her move to Alligator Point. But once Deepwater Horizon occurs, the horrible event basically consumes the author and the type of introspection found in the first half is mostly missing. A detailed chronology and analysis of the spill is included in the appendix, one that reveals a lot of missing pieces of which the general public was unaware.
Just an amazing read. When a colleague told me to read this autobiography, i was expecting something drier, but this tugged on every heart string and made me remember how deeply I felt when the Gulf was full of oil and corexit and I began the journey I am on today.
Beautiful beautiful beautiful...but it will absolutely break your freakin' heart. The appendix about the Deepwater Horizon disaster is full of excellent info as well.
In A Million Fragile Bones, Connie May Fowler has brought the beauty and lyricism of her fiction writing to the world of memoir. What is even better for this reader, she has done so in order to bring forward a topic of great importance that has been shoved to the background of the recent past – the effects of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Connie May Fowler was born and raised on the coasts of Florida, first in St. Augustine, and then, after the death of her father, in Tampa. In the mid 1980’s she returned to St. Augustine. Several years of living in Kansas made her yearn for Florida and the ocean, so she came back home. She was also looking for connections to her father, who had died when she was just 6 years old.
After several years in St. Augustine, Ms. Fowler was still feeling unsettled, and while driving across the northern Gulf Coast of Florida, she stumbled across a house for sale on a spit of land called Alligator Point. She knew immediately she had found her home.
The first two-thirds of A Million Fragile Bones are a wonderful and engaging description of Ms. Fowler’s life. She brings the full force of her fiction skills to bear. Whether it is describing her reaction to the abuse received at the hands of her mother; …No matter the violence or ridicule, write everything down because even at six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve, a child knows the power of words. Yes. Unending avalanche. Worlds spawned from consonants and vowels, syllables and phrases. Words upon words – prayers for the hopeless, prayers for the beaten, prayers for the poor, prayers for the fatherless, prayers for the two girls who wished their mother dead, prayers for a mother who Appalachian childhood had been so flamed with cruelty, rising from the ashes was never an option – piled up all around me, but I kept writing.
Or the peace and joy she achieved spending her days among the plants and animals that inhabit Alligator Point and her life:
Perhaps all of us exist in a perpetual migratory state. Our minds are wandering to where they need to be at any given moment – a happy memory, the right word, a daydream. Our hearts, too, surprise us with sudden love, sudden hate, needs and desires we did not know we possessed until we feel that telltale plumpness rise in our chests like fresh bread.
The beauty of prose that inhabits this book are a rare find in a memoir. It is worth reading A Million Fragile Bones for the feelings of love and joy written about in prose that just took me out of myself during these sections.
But that is not all Ms. Fowler has to offer. On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform, owned by BP, exploded and caught fire. This began what is probably the worst ecological disaster in U.S. history. For almost 90 days the well spewed close to 1 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day.
It is in this last third of A Million Fragile Bones that Ms. Fowler’s writing truly amazes. She conveys the initial fear of listening to news reports as it becomes clear that everyone has been lied to about the seriousness of the situation. Lied to by BP and by the federal government. She writes through the anger that develops as it becomes harder and harder to get real information from BP or the authorities. The anger that grows as she realized that there is a huge coverup going on. She presents the utter devastation as living on the Gulf harder and then impossible. The number of dead animals begins to grow exponentially, while her own health suffers due to the presence of oil and dispersant in the environment.
A Million Fragile Bones is a must read. In this new political age, it has become easy to forget or ignore the disasters of the past, even as they continue to affect us today.
I received an Advance Reader Copy of this book, to be released April 20, 2017. Once I started reading I was mesmerized. Although classified as a memoir, this book defies simple categorization. It is also: a meditation on poverty, loss, and violence; a frank exploration and offering of nature’s solace; the story of a love affair between kindred spirits; and an expose of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Connie May Fowler is an award-winning memoirist, novelist, essayist, and teacher who directs the Yucatan Writing Conference and Vermont College of Fine Arts Novel Retreat. Her writing is always raw and heartfelt, but with A Million Fragile Bones she has brought us a work of transcendent beauty and truth.
In 2010, Ms. Fowler was living on Alligator Point, a small community on the Florida Gulf Coast. Settled there with her husband, she found myriad ways to connect with nature—through gardening, protecting turtle eggs, and watching dolphins. She kept peace among a raucous bevy of birds, received visits from a bobcat and bear, and hosted migrating Monarch butterflies, supplying them with the milkweed they sought for nourishment. On endless beach forays, she observed the cycles of life, collecting fragile bones that told stories of their own.
But after the 2010 oil spill her joy over communing with nature turned to despair and a wild groping for control—for some way to save the multitude of threatened sea and shore life. She became an expert on the twists, turns, lies, and misdirection foisted on the people and conservationists who rushed to the scene. In A Million Fragile Bones she gives witness to all that and more. This book reveals what so many know in their hearts—that it will take courageous truth tellers to expose the dangers of unregulated greed. As she herself says, maybe her role in life is to be “witness-bearer, chronicler, storyteller, truthsayer.” She is a model for all of us: Only by speaking up can we challenge the powers that be and make change.
I have read every book Connie May Fowler has written and this one is wonderful. It is non-fiction, a memoir. Fowler recounts her life on Alligator Point, and how the beauty of the place heals her. Then the Deepwater Horizon explodes in the Gulf of Mexico and threatens her little bit of heaven. A moving read.
Loss of a place can break your heart as sharply as loss of a loved one. Connie May's elegy to a place she lived for two decades is both a meditation on the healing power of nature and a reminder of the damage that we cause through our decisions to constantly bend the landscape to our will and extract what we can out of it. Her experience of the BP disaster is searing and heartbreaking, a reminder that every environmental crisis is the loss of an interconnected world of animals, people, and locations. Her writing is full of rich details of the names of plants, birds, and sea life, all to create a world that feels complete and three-dimensional as if you can smell the air and hear the call of birds. This contrasts dramatically with the latter half of the book as the BP oil spill takes away this place and an ecological nightmare submerged in the ocean's depths expands to the surface. This is a very personal and real account of what it feels like to finally find home, only to have it ripped away.
A writer’s past brings weight and significance to their writing, and Connie May Fowler demonstrates this in the world she creates in A Million Fragile Bones. Here we witness her personal journey through losses and the psychological damage that returns when facing yet another loss, as man’s greed falls upon her doorstep. Connie May writes beautifully and honestly of the natural world around her—allowing those of us who are not as perceptible, a glimpse of what we are missing. Her observations and sensitivity to nature cause her great pain and frustration when it bumps up against men’s materialistic, crude, world. She bears witness to the environment and absorbs each detail like it were her own child. I cannot recommend this book enough.
This book is about loss on so many levels. It is a wonderfully lyrical memoir bringing an ecological nightmare to a very personal level. Connie May Fowler gives us the landscape and wild life of the Florida coast line as they become integral parts of her life, giving meaning to her personal losses over the years. The book is a testament to the author's writing skills that the flora and fauna of the area vibrate with lives of their own so that when the oil spill happens, I (a confirmed urbanite) experienced the devastation and loss as if it was my own. This is memoir writing at its best, written with the authority and sensitivity of a novelist who uses her considerable narrative skills to gift us the tenderest parts of her heart and soul.
From word one Connie May Fowler reached out from the page and grabbed my full attention. Her love of nature on the Gulf's paradisal coast is beautifully painted while her past hurts are healing. I felt her pain and enjoyed her pleasures of getting deeply in touch with life among God's creatures flying swimming and crawling. Then heartbreak enters by the hands of greedy big businessmen without souls. I could not put down the book. Brilliant on many levels. Read it and your eyes and hearts will open wide to an eye witness's account to life's injustices and nature's gifts.
A Million Fragile Bones is a marriage of truth-telling and story: it is a love letter to the natural world, and a grief-stricken wail at its destruction, as the book jacket says, "for the sake of corporate profits." But it is her examination of the connection between humans and the natural world that keeps the book from sinking into sorrow. The composition Fowler creates from this connection—her exploration of our shared DNA—is nothing less than a love song of molecules. Because of this, her fury is righteous, and her pen is mighty.
This well-written and heartfelt memoir about the 2010 BP Oil Spill by Connie May Fowler is a necessary read. We should not forget such crimes committed by large companies against our environment. Connie ties her own tragic and difficult backstory to the powerless feelings she feels living on Alligator Point in Florida both during the time of the spill and the months that follow. Connie's is a unique perspective.
A heart breaking read about the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Connie Fowler lived on the Gulf for many years and reveled in the wildlife, beauty, natural world, seasons and more. What the Horizon disaster did to the Gulf eventually forced her to move because of the toxicity of the chemicals, the death of the wildlife, and the sadness she could not get away from. BP's handling of the situation was disgusting.
A poignant memoir about family dysfunction and environmental disaster. Connie May Fowler at her best! She draws you into her life, and her Florida haven of healing. Then, an environmental catastrophe washes up at her doorstep, and threatens her path to healing.
This is a book I will return to time and time again. It will be a “shadow book” for my memoir and also a portal to a unique time and place where I ca. Lose myself among sand and pounding waves, local lore, and sea life. I know Connie May Fowler and I have visited her at Alligator Point, as well as taken workshops with her, and I suppose that should be a caution to take my words with a pinch of possible bias. But what I want to tell you about that place and this writer is that this memoir opened my eyes to many things I had not given enough weight. No one writes about the aftermath of abuse with as much depth and clarity as Connie May, but even I loved learning more about how the place of this memoir, a small spit of land in West Florida, helped her heal with its teeming life and abundant solitude. She writes of Florida with so much passion that one sinks into this book like a garden of peace and plenty. She details how she healed, how she found new love, how she and her husband built a new life with dear friends and students and animal companions, including flamingoes, turtles, herons, dogs, and more. So when all except the husband and her pets are lost at the hands of the oil companies, the reader is as devastated as she. Yet this is not only a tale of loss. It is a clear-eyed, detailed look at the cost of environmental exploitation, and a plea to pay attention before it is too late for so many more beloved places. It’s poetry will long recall a Florida that is threatened and all but gone.
If you haven't already, add Connie May Fowler to your to-read list. It would be a boon of epic proportions. In a world of electronic digitry and faceless texting, Ms. Fowler explores her personal anguish within her unjust and ill-advised world. She also shares with the reader the third lining of being: the part of her that can get hurt, that hurts, and that heals in her own way. It's rough sailing in parts. Don't get me wrong. When Ms. Fowler finally found an idyll she could carve out of the chaos of mistakes, self-made as well as undeserved but no less painful, fate came along in the form of a global corporation blinder than greed and less intelligent than the simplest sea tern and destroyed more than just the environment in a greedy grab of cash and profit at the cost of lives and safety. The thing was, in "A Million Fragile Bones," the terror was invisible and offshore while still affecting life in tangible ways. A nightmare she couldn't escape, Ms. Fowler describes the depths she descended in the aftermath of the worst Gulf of Mexico oil rig disaster to date. She gives her soul to her readers with honesty and without guile, shame, or guilt. It was what it was, and Ms. Fowler reports her days-to-day with equal parts aplomb, sorrow, and horror at what she helplessly witnessed. However, like her kayak gear that disappeared after a violent squall interrupted an adventure, she returns to her roots, stronger and more solid than ever before.
Loved it. Adding power to a powerful book, read it as Hurricane Irma approached. Loved the attachment to place, love of solitude in natural places, struggle to find ways to fight climate disaster.
For almost twenty years the novelist Connie May Fowler lived in Paradise, in a beach cottage at Alligator Point iin the Florida panhandle. Then the British Petroleum oil rig, the “Deepwater Horizon”, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, and she found herself living in an oily Hell. Fowler recounts the nightmare as she lived it, one day at a time. BP lies; the government lies. For five days they deny there is a leak. They assure everyone that the eleven missing oil rig workers will be rescued, until on the fourth day they abandon the search. A Million Fragile Bones is a vivid and moving picture of a woman’s love affair with nature, and the horror as she watches the destruction of her special paradise. Fowler has given us the gift of her memory of this place. Perhaps such writings are all that will remain to us as we relentlessly destroy our world.