The Woman Who Watches Over the World – A Native Memoir Paperback – 21 May 2002

Linda Hogan's prose is simply beautiful. Her book of essays, Dwellings, is one I've read a number of times because it is wise and elegant, so when I saw that she'd written a memoir, I was eager to read it, but doubted it could rise to that level of excellence. It does. Not only do we receive her story, which honestly includes years drinking , a youthful love affair, current painful illness, and her devastating injury on a horse, but it is delivered in crafted language. The result is difficult stories carried in lovely phrases, evocative images, and profound reflections.

This memoir takes you on a frank and honest journey into the world of Linda Hogan. Her personal spirituality vis-a-vis her Chickasaw background is a foundation for much of her way of looking at the world. It has clearly been a source of strength and resilience for the difficult times she has faced and overcome. I was awestruck at the beauty of the language, yet found myself reading faster and faster just to find out how Hogan survived the many events. Brilliantly executed and crafted, this is a wonderful book by one of the country's leading writers.

I read this to inspire me to write my own memoir and find out how spirituality forms part of that. In fact, to find out what spirituality is. Linda Hogan finds spirituality in the beauty and danger of a glacier, the healing power of the ocean, even the brokenness of our world. She sees traditional native ways as spiritual. I'm still not sure what that is. But her story is one that will stay in my memory. The crimes committed against the Indians by my ancestors weighs heavily on my conscience and remind me that the attitudes that fueled these atrocities live on to a degree in me today. Hogan finds healing for her emotional and physical pain and in the process discovers love. Maybe this is spirituality? This book has flashes of brilliance and reacquainted me with my world. It reminds me that suffering contains the seeds of understanding and compassion for all peoples. Hogan taught me that. A must read for natives and non-natives alike.

Linda Hogan is one of the best authors I've read with her transcendent flowing stories of such beauty they bring tears to my eyes and leave me admiring her and her characters. Her novels make me want to be a better person. Interested to know about her life, and imagining her to be at least partly Navajo due to her last name, I breathlessly opened "The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir" to be deeply disappointed. The introduction was as lyrical and magical as one would expect. Having read in other places that she is one of the mixed bloods who grew up in the cities, I was horrified to read what she described as a love story, a "marriage" of living with an adult man while her father was stationed in Germany, from age 12 to 15. I'd call that child abuse. She implied earlier that she'd grown up in Oklahoma which almost felt like Wannabes exaggerated claims, as her time in Oklahoma seemed to have been brief visits, but I don't know the details of her life and have no right to decide her perceptions. Her father was mostly Chickasaw, his grandfather having obtained property by marrying an Indian woman; her mother "Pennsylvania Dutch" read German. The family was so strained with three wars isolating a young mother with children, that silences were strained and the kids were left acting out pain. Her mother sounds like she was clinically depressed. Linda Hogan describes how history caused the alcoholism that so many Indians suffer and calls her own drinking years "the lost years". Her own marriage gets a sentence or two, another mystery.Later, she adopted two sisters and described giving one up who had been too damaged by her life before adoption to keep. Didn't see that one coming. In constant physical pain since a fall riding horseback that she attributes to behaviors by men, either before or during the ride, she says she thought she was writing about pain, but was really writing about love. Family and friends surely did take care of her. She loves nature and animals clearly, but I wasn't convinced about the rest.Like all of us, the author sees herself responding to life in a relatively blameless manner while others have caused her pain and behaviors. It could be that historic pain, alienation, being left too much alone to cope with too much did cause each mistake and misstep she's made?Perhaps it is her writing style of mixing myth, history, and reality that left me struggling to understand who she is, more puzzled than ever. Perhaps the fault is me and my expectations. Think I'll read another novel she's written and give up trying to know the author.

She is one of the greatest writers that ever wrote on this world. I'm reading now his novel Power and can't believe the depth, subtlety and style of this master. The Woman... is a transforming book. If you are going to read a book in the rest of your life, make it this one.