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Bound Like Grass: A Memoir from the Western High Plains
At the start of this haunting memoir, Ruth McLaughlin returns to the site of her childhood home in rural eastern Montana. In place of her family's house, she finds only rubble and a blackened chimney. A fire has taken the old farmstead and with it ninety-seven years of hard-luck memories. Amidst the ruins, a lone tree survives, reminding her of her family's stubborn will to survive despite hardships that included droughts, hunger, and mental illness. Bound Like Grass is McLaughlin's account of her own — and her family's — struggle to survive on their isolated wheat and cattle farm. With acute observation, she explores her roots as a descendant of Swedish American grandparents who settled in Montana at the turn of the twentieth century with high ambitions, and of parents who barely managed to eke out a living on their own neighboring farm. In unvarnished prose, McLaughlin reveals the costs of homesteading on such unforgiving land, including emotional impoverishment and a necessary thrift bordering on deprivation. Yet in this bleak world, poverty also inspired ingenuity. Ruth learned to self-administer a fashionable razor haircut, ignoring slashes to her hands; her brother taught himself to repair junk cars until at last he built one to carry him far away. Ruth also longs for a richer, brighter life, but when she finally departs, she finds herself an alien in a modern world of relative abundance. While leaving behind a life of hardship and hard luck, she remains bound — like the long, intertwining roots of prairie grass — to the land and to the memories that tie her to it.
200 pages, Hardcover
First published October 8, 2010
2 people are currently reading
86 people want to read
About the author
Ruth McLaughlin
3 books4 followersPress Release February 2011:
Bound Like Grass has received the Montana Book Award! Librarians from across the state choose their favorite among Montana books published in 2010.
August Update: BLG is a finalist in the creative nonfiction category of the WILLA Awards, sponsored by Women Writing the West.
October 15, 2011:
Bound Like Grass received the High Plains Book Award in "Best First Book" category, open to nominees from seven states and three provinces.
Bound Like Grass has received the Montana Book Award! Librarians from across the state choose their favorite among Montana books published in 2010.
August Update: BLG is a finalist in the creative nonfiction category of the WILLA Awards, sponsored by Women Writing the West.
October 15, 2011:
Bound Like Grass received the High Plains Book Award in "Best First Book" category, open to nominees from seven states and three provinces.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
February 16, 2021
Ruth Grew up in the town of Mona, Montana in Eastern Montana.
As she comes back to the home site, with ninety-seen years of hard luck, she remembers her grandparents homestead as well as their parents home. there is nothing left but memories she cannot forget.
She has a brother Dwight, who left the farm and two little sisters who were disabled. The farm prices were not good. The real thing that sustained them was money from the cow cream and eggs from the chickens.
Her parents were not just poor financially but poor in giving praises, love and attention. The disabled girls were eventually put into a home where they could succeed a little.
Ruth cared for her parents when they could no longer do for themselves.
The memoir focuses on the second and third generation, those who inherit the chance to make something of the land.
As she comes back to the home site, with ninety-seen years of hard luck, she remembers her grandparents homestead as well as their parents home. there is nothing left but memories she cannot forget.
She has a brother Dwight, who left the farm and two little sisters who were disabled. The farm prices were not good. The real thing that sustained them was money from the cow cream and eggs from the chickens.
Her parents were not just poor financially but poor in giving praises, love and attention. The disabled girls were eventually put into a home where they could succeed a little.
Ruth cared for her parents when they could no longer do for themselves.
The memoir focuses on the second and third generation, those who inherit the chance to make something of the land.
September 4, 2013
It was interesting to read how homestead families lived in this area of Montana. There didn't seem to be a "flow" to the story; I thought it was a bit more like short stories strung together.
The author wrote of a interesting family dynamic.......not one I admired.
The author wrote of a interesting family dynamic.......not one I admired.
February 9, 2011
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A family history eloquently records a grim upbringing in eastern Montana.
By Jenny Shank, 2-07-11
Bound Like Grass: A Memoir from the Western High Plains
By Ruth McLaughlin
University of Oklahoma Press, 184 pages,
In her tough and moving memoir Bound Like Grass, Ruth McLaughlin records her family’s history of farming wheat and cattle in Culbertson, Montana, near the North Dakota border. This book serves as an elegy and a monument—without it, there would be no remaining sign of the family’s Montana existence, and few, if anyone, would remember McLaughlin’s two deceased sisters. McLaughlin’s grandparents homesteaded in eastern Montana, her parents continued farming in a mode of spectacular frugality and grim defeat, and McLaughlin and her three siblings grew up there in the ‘50s and ‘60s, only to put as much ground between them and Culbertson as possible.
McLaughlin’s single surviving sibling, Dwight, headed to California the first chance he got, but Ruth, who now lives in Great Falls, was more bound to the land, visiting regularly even after her parents died, until someone bought the property and burned down all the structures, effectively erasing all signs that their family had ever been there. As McLaughlin puts it, “Our family had a ninety-seven-year fling here; now we are gone. Ten have been left behind, including six children, planted in two cemeteries.”
You may think that you’ve heard this story before, but you haven’t, not the way McLaughlin tells it, with crystalline recall of sensory details and startling revelations in every chapter. She writes in clear, sharp prose with tremendous insight, and with such a degree of self-criticism that you wish you could pat her on the back and tell her she did the best anyone could as a daughter, granddaughter, and sister. Judy Blunt praised Bound Like Grass, and in its subject matter, unstinting honesty, and lack of sentimentality, McLaughlin’s book has much in common with Blunt’s remarkable 2002 memoir, Breaking Clean.
McLaughlin’s parents “clung to a Depression-era frugality. Neighbors heated with propane; our parents stayed with coal, even cooking on a coal range.” Their fear of spending money and engaging with the larger world kept them and their children isolated. “My subdued parents,” McLaughlin writes, “who were adequate to each day’s chores but without ambition, and who adequately fed and clothed their children, but little more—were a generation trapped between adventurous parents and discontented children. Their generation’s job was to hold on to the idea that hail-battered, drought-struck small farms could support a family. They awaited the next big experiment on the northern plains: the advent of large-scale farming.”
McLaughlin’s upbringing was hardscrabble in every way, devoid even of some of the perks of farm life, chiefly fresh food—instead of eating what they raised, her parents sold it to others. “Noon and night we ate what my glass-half-empty brother called peasant food: mashed potatoes, canned vegetables, and processed meat.” The parents didn’t show their children much affection or supervise them to the extent that other parents did. After he left home Dwight was ashamed to admit he “had never thrown a football or even held one.” McLaughlin’s parents wouldn’t spend money on a haircut, so she cut her own hair with a razor, ending up with a set of slashed fingers.
Their parents were not bad people, just unequal to the task of farming in harsh conditions and raising two disabled daughters. McLaughlin’s childhood isolation was so complete, her early experience so limited, that in writing this memoir she has drawn on diaries, research, and doctors and psychologist’s reports to reconstruct what the members of her family were thinking and feeling.
The most moving sections of the book address McLaughlin’s older sister Rosemary and her younger sister Ginny. Rosemary was always odd, prone to bursts of anger, speaking in precise diction but unable to complete simple math problems. At school, boys taunted her relentlessly, and McLaughlin rebukes herself for never having intervened out of fear that she would also become a target. Through her research, McLaughlin learned that Rosemary suffered brain damage at birth. The psychologist reports McLaughlin unearthed are heartbreaking. One psychologist wrote of Rosemary, “She feels that her life has not been too meaningful up to this point…She stated that others do not like her because she is ‘different.’” Rosemary “is the most frustrated person I’ve ever met,’ her workshop counselor wrote in his evaluation.”
Isolated and frugal as they were, McLaughlin’s parents did not have Rosemary evaluated until she was an adult. McLaughlin shares her anger over their neglect of Rosemary’s profound needs: “I felt cheated: my sister had been stolen from me. Had we lived somewhere else—not hundreds of miles from specialized doctors and psychologists—and without boys’ bullying, teachers’ scoldings, and my parents’ blind neglect—might I have had that sister? ‘Few youngsters whom I have tested have been able to demonstrate learning ability in the area of general information that Rosemary has shown,’ the psychologist noted. ‘She has a very good chance of becoming a productive individual.’” Sadly, his prediction did not come true.
When McLaughlin was a teenager, her mother had a fourth child, Ginny. “I prayed that the baby wouldn’t have polio or be born dead,” McLaughlin writes. “I didn’t bother to pray against another Rosemary; I doubted there could be someone else like her. I wasn’t really worried about the baby. I thought that the misfortune of Rosemary would ward off more bad luck: God wouldn’t give us a second damaged child.” But Ginny is born with Down Syndrome in a time and place where there was nothing to do with such people other than keep them home in childhood and then send them away when they were adults. Ginny eventually leaves home for treatment: “I didn’t visit her but heard the news from Mother’s weekly letters: she’d eaten pizza and gone bowling and camping; she’d learned to tread water in a pool. None of which my parents had ever done.”
McLaughlin bookends Bound Like Grass with descriptions of the empty land on which her family lived out its dramas, the house burned away, the people now dead or scattered. But with Bound Like Grass McLaughlin has preserved these lives and this vanished lifestyle, stating eloquently through her memoir that although all traces of her family are now erased, they lived, farmed, and struggled on this land, and they were not nothing.
Ruth McLaughlin will read at Chapter One Books in Hamilton, Mont. on March 30.
A family history eloquently records a grim upbringing in eastern Montana.
By Jenny Shank, 2-07-11
Bound Like Grass: A Memoir from the Western High Plains
By Ruth McLaughlin
University of Oklahoma Press, 184 pages,
In her tough and moving memoir Bound Like Grass, Ruth McLaughlin records her family’s history of farming wheat and cattle in Culbertson, Montana, near the North Dakota border. This book serves as an elegy and a monument—without it, there would be no remaining sign of the family’s Montana existence, and few, if anyone, would remember McLaughlin’s two deceased sisters. McLaughlin’s grandparents homesteaded in eastern Montana, her parents continued farming in a mode of spectacular frugality and grim defeat, and McLaughlin and her three siblings grew up there in the ‘50s and ‘60s, only to put as much ground between them and Culbertson as possible.
McLaughlin’s single surviving sibling, Dwight, headed to California the first chance he got, but Ruth, who now lives in Great Falls, was more bound to the land, visiting regularly even after her parents died, until someone bought the property and burned down all the structures, effectively erasing all signs that their family had ever been there. As McLaughlin puts it, “Our family had a ninety-seven-year fling here; now we are gone. Ten have been left behind, including six children, planted in two cemeteries.”
You may think that you’ve heard this story before, but you haven’t, not the way McLaughlin tells it, with crystalline recall of sensory details and startling revelations in every chapter. She writes in clear, sharp prose with tremendous insight, and with such a degree of self-criticism that you wish you could pat her on the back and tell her she did the best anyone could as a daughter, granddaughter, and sister. Judy Blunt praised Bound Like Grass, and in its subject matter, unstinting honesty, and lack of sentimentality, McLaughlin’s book has much in common with Blunt’s remarkable 2002 memoir, Breaking Clean.
McLaughlin’s parents “clung to a Depression-era frugality. Neighbors heated with propane; our parents stayed with coal, even cooking on a coal range.” Their fear of spending money and engaging with the larger world kept them and their children isolated. “My subdued parents,” McLaughlin writes, “who were adequate to each day’s chores but without ambition, and who adequately fed and clothed their children, but little more—were a generation trapped between adventurous parents and discontented children. Their generation’s job was to hold on to the idea that hail-battered, drought-struck small farms could support a family. They awaited the next big experiment on the northern plains: the advent of large-scale farming.”
McLaughlin’s upbringing was hardscrabble in every way, devoid even of some of the perks of farm life, chiefly fresh food—instead of eating what they raised, her parents sold it to others. “Noon and night we ate what my glass-half-empty brother called peasant food: mashed potatoes, canned vegetables, and processed meat.” The parents didn’t show their children much affection or supervise them to the extent that other parents did. After he left home Dwight was ashamed to admit he “had never thrown a football or even held one.” McLaughlin’s parents wouldn’t spend money on a haircut, so she cut her own hair with a razor, ending up with a set of slashed fingers.
Their parents were not bad people, just unequal to the task of farming in harsh conditions and raising two disabled daughters. McLaughlin’s childhood isolation was so complete, her early experience so limited, that in writing this memoir she has drawn on diaries, research, and doctors and psychologist’s reports to reconstruct what the members of her family were thinking and feeling.
The most moving sections of the book address McLaughlin’s older sister Rosemary and her younger sister Ginny. Rosemary was always odd, prone to bursts of anger, speaking in precise diction but unable to complete simple math problems. At school, boys taunted her relentlessly, and McLaughlin rebukes herself for never having intervened out of fear that she would also become a target. Through her research, McLaughlin learned that Rosemary suffered brain damage at birth. The psychologist reports McLaughlin unearthed are heartbreaking. One psychologist wrote of Rosemary, “She feels that her life has not been too meaningful up to this point…She stated that others do not like her because she is ‘different.’” Rosemary “is the most frustrated person I’ve ever met,’ her workshop counselor wrote in his evaluation.”
Isolated and frugal as they were, McLaughlin’s parents did not have Rosemary evaluated until she was an adult. McLaughlin shares her anger over their neglect of Rosemary’s profound needs: “I felt cheated: my sister had been stolen from me. Had we lived somewhere else—not hundreds of miles from specialized doctors and psychologists—and without boys’ bullying, teachers’ scoldings, and my parents’ blind neglect—might I have had that sister? ‘Few youngsters whom I have tested have been able to demonstrate learning ability in the area of general information that Rosemary has shown,’ the psychologist noted. ‘She has a very good chance of becoming a productive individual.’” Sadly, his prediction did not come true.
When McLaughlin was a teenager, her mother had a fourth child, Ginny. “I prayed that the baby wouldn’t have polio or be born dead,” McLaughlin writes. “I didn’t bother to pray against another Rosemary; I doubted there could be someone else like her. I wasn’t really worried about the baby. I thought that the misfortune of Rosemary would ward off more bad luck: God wouldn’t give us a second damaged child.” But Ginny is born with Down Syndrome in a time and place where there was nothing to do with such people other than keep them home in childhood and then send them away when they were adults. Ginny eventually leaves home for treatment: “I didn’t visit her but heard the news from Mother’s weekly letters: she’d eaten pizza and gone bowling and camping; she’d learned to tread water in a pool. None of which my parents had ever done.”
McLaughlin bookends Bound Like Grass with descriptions of the empty land on which her family lived out its dramas, the house burned away, the people now dead or scattered. But with Bound Like Grass McLaughlin has preserved these lives and this vanished lifestyle, stating eloquently through her memoir that although all traces of her family are now erased, they lived, farmed, and struggled on this land, and they were not nothing.
Ruth McLaughlin will read at Chapter One Books in Hamilton, Mont. on March 30.
July 26, 2025
I’m so disappointed in this book. I really wanted to like it, but found it so difficult to read. There was little to no flow, the chapters just dragged on and on for me, and it was just poorly written.
Also, I consider myself an incredibly empathetic person and understand a lot about trauma and mental health and how it can lead people to be, well, not great to others. But, Ruth (the author) and others made so many questionable and unkind and inconsiderate choices in this book that I feel can’t be excused by trauma or mental health. While I recognize the struggles endured by her entire lineage, her family is not admirable.
Also, I consider myself an incredibly empathetic person and understand a lot about trauma and mental health and how it can lead people to be, well, not great to others. But, Ruth (the author) and others made so many questionable and unkind and inconsiderate choices in this book that I feel can’t be excused by trauma or mental health. While I recognize the struggles endured by her entire lineage, her family is not admirable.
December 31, 2011
A quite enjoyable read. McLaughlin describes her life growing up in eastern Montana. Her story is the story of many Montana kids. Her grandparents homesteaded in the prairies, her parents followed in their footsteps and her generation fled the land they grew up on. She has a first hand look at the transition farming in Montana has taken, from homesteads to corporate farming. As a fifth generation Montanan that left the state this book was very relatable. Her writing reminds me of Ivan Doig. Any kid from the big sky state should pick this up, especially if you are from eastern Montana.
May 12, 2011
McLaughlin grew up poor on an isolated Eastern Montana wheat farm, from which she and her brother fled as soon as they could. They are 3rd generation immigrants, and we read how different generations handled their life on the plains. This is a poignant story, and includes the author's unsatisfactory relationship with her brain-damaged older sister. A well-written, absorbing account which has won this year's Montana Book Award.
August 6, 2011
This is a story about Ruth's growing up years near Culbertson, MT. I loved reading about a Montana family that was growing up near the same time I did. I thought she was a little harsh describing her parents ways. I read between the lines and thought that in ways her parents were much like mine. She is very resentful about how simple a life her parents were happy to live. They seemed to me to just be doing the best they could. No one hands us a manual on how to raise kids.
September 19, 2011
This is a beautifully written memoir about growing up on a Montana farm in the 1950s-60s as a grand-daughter of Swedish immigrants. For those with a romantic vision of farm life, this is far more than a tale of locusts and living off the land. The title aptly describes the author's ties to the land despite her inevitable departure from it. I thought about this story long after finishing the last page.
December 31, 2015
I've been meaning to read this book since it came out. I'd seen a number of good reviews, and that interest was only compounded after its wins at the High Plains Book Awards and Montana Book Awards. I'm only sorry I waited so long. This is an unflinching memoir of a hard life growing up in northeastern Montana. McLaughlin is by turns wistful, angry and nostalgic for a family life that was never as supportive or affectionate as she hoped it might be. This was a great read.
November 7, 2011
This is a moving book capturing a family's multi-generational struggle of hammering out a living from the land in eastern Montana. The author recounts her financially and emotionally poor upbringing...her return to the place hunting answers to her family' saga. Heartbreaking but real...many family's have disfunctional chapters in their tales. This one will resonate with many readers. Excellent.
January 13, 2015
Well written. I kept looking for something that would distinguish this memoir from others but didn't really find it. Ruth's parents did not outwardly show their children love and affection but this is true for many of that generation. They were poor, but so were a lot of us.
May 25, 2011
Really nicely done memoir. Heartbreaking and honest. Fast read.
August 9, 2011
This memoir hits home to those of us who have grown up in a remote rural area and how it affects your life even as an adult. The book skips around a bit, but is very well written and interesting.
July 11, 2014
good story
May 31, 2016
A very engrossing book, from beginning to end.
November 9, 2011
Brutally honest about her own emotions and shortcomings.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews