Collection 3: "The Clan of One-Breasted Women" by Terry Tempest Williams

I’ve had my own problems: two biopsies for breast cancer and a small tumor between my ribs diagnosed as a “borderline malignancy.”

Traditionally, as a group of people, Mormons have a low rate of cancer.
Is our family a cultural anomaly?

The women’s attitude was stoic. Cancer was part of life.

I told my father that for years, as long as I could remember, I saw this flash of light in the night in the desert—that this image had so permeated my being that I could not venture south without seeing it again, on the horizon, illuminating buttes and mesas.

I told my father that for years, as long as I could remember, I saw this flash of light in the night in the desert—that this image had so permeated my being that I could not venture south without seeing it again, on the horizon, illuminating buttes and mesas.

I told my father that for years, as long as I could remember, I saw this flash of light in the night in the desert—that this image had so permeated my being that I could not venture south without seeing it again, on the horizon, illuminating buttes and mesas.

The Korean War was raging. McCarthyism was rampant.

Assuaging public fears was simply a matter of public relations.

It took fourteen years, from 1957 to 1971, for cancer to manifest in my mother—the same time, Howard L. Andrews, an authority in radioactive fallout at the National Institutes of Health, says radiation cancer requires to become evident.

They spoke of change, how they hold the moon in their bellies and wax and wane with its phases.

They spoke of change, how they hold the moon in their bellies and wax and wane with its phases.

The residents finally awoke to these strange apparitions.