LOOSE OF EARTH

Environmental advocacy meets family history and devout Christianity in this memoir from the little-chronicled Llano Estacado.

In this gimlet-eyed debut, Blackburn, a creative writing teacher at the University of Chicago, surveys an oft-overlooked region of America: West Texas. A prevailing thread throughout the narrative is the wasting illness of her father, an Air Force and aviation industry veteran whom we meet with his five children arrayed before him: “Eyes fill with watery hope, as though the very thought of fatherless children harkens God’s intervention.” Marked by home schooling, tent revivals, and a mother who, though trained as a doctor, harbored a fundamentalist mistrust of science, Blackburn had to become her own best counsel. She is an apt observer of small but telling details, writing of her hard-put-upon mother, “Each gesture is a countdown to the finish line of her patience.” Mother tried, and so did her father. Chronicling one climacteric moment, the author writes, “I credit him for being able to elevate his personal code over dogma.” One difficult concept to comprehend is the thought that throughout their lives, over generations, the people of the backwater High Plains, especially near military outposts, have been subjected to the wantonly incautious disposal of hazardous waste, including compounds in firefighting foams that have leached into the water supply. Evangelists barked demands that Satan let go of her father, a victim of such poisoning, even as Blackburn becomes ever more committed to an “intensified search to understand the causes of my father’s cancer.” The author’s exploration of toxic chemicals sometimes takes textbook-ish turns that don’t mesh well with her account of the personal world surrounding her family, but the book contains plenty of memorable, poignant scenes, including a moment when a dying grandmother sees “the Air Force insignia spread like wings above her.”

A thoughtful coming-of-age memoir from an American hinterland.