| Summary: | Lundblad focuses on two memoirs by Terry Tempest Williams for the ways they represent an attempt in contemporary nature writing and illness memoirs to come to terms with terminal illness and the end of life. Animality is invoked in the texts as a model for constructing supposedly the right way to approach a diagnosis of cancer, suggesting what kind of death could be seen as a good one, if that might ever be possible. Williams’s two memoirs are linked by the ways they use birds and the discourse of what should be considered “natural” to explain when or how to resist not only death, but also patriarchal gender norms, imperialist U.S. aggression in the “War on Terror”, atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site, and the destruction of environments from Utah to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Lundblad’s emphasis is on how constructions of birds can naturalize problematic human discourses, but the chapter also points toward the ways that these essentialized constructions are limiting for nonhuman animals as well.
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