Terry Tempest Williams
The protagonist, author and the narrator of the book is Terry Tempest Williams. She is renowned and hugely awarded conservationist as well as an author, teacher, and social activist. The book is primarily a kind of internal chamber drama about the relationship between a daughter and a mother in the wake of the mother’s recent death. Heavily autobiographical, but presented in almost an Impressionist manner through the 54 short chapters comprising the book, one gets a sense of the writer’s life, but through somewhat fractured, prismatic approach.
Diane Dixon Tempest
The conceit of this book is that simple but extraordinarily profound: the author’s mother leaves behind a collection of journals which she has made her daughter promise not to look until after her death and once this promise is fulfilled, she realizes the journals are blank. Those three shelves of blank journals, the author realizes, were left behind by her unbelievably imaginative mother for her to fill in herself with the maternal precognition that the result would be memories of herself which would keep her connected to her daughter long after her death. Over the course of the book, journal entries reveal the history of Diane Dixon Tempest through the eyes of her daughter.
John Henry Tempest, III
The author’s father served in the Air Force, but is described by his daughter as being first and foremost, above all else, “a storyteller.” But that image is which naturally conveys a sedentary existence often spent in isolation and this stands in direct opposition to the other direct and explicitly stated description of John, III: “father was our action figure.”
