Breaking Clean is a memoir by Judy Blunt, published in 2002, after a decade in the writing. The book is about Blunt's life in the countryside of eastern Montana, in the United States. In the book the author describes her childhood, and how growing up on a ranch conditioned her whole life.
The memoir is regarded as Blunt's most notable work. It won the 1997 PEN/Jerard Fund Award for a work in progress and the 2001 Whiting Writers' Awards. The book appeared on the list of The New York Times Notable Books 2002.
Description The first edition of the book is a hardcover 371 pages long, containing an acknowledgments section consisting of an acclaim page, an introduction to the book, a photograph of the author with her two younger siblings, an information page about the edition, a Joan Didion quote, and a map of Phillips County, where the story is set. The content is divided into 14 chapters: "Breaking Clean": The opening chapter is a retelling and summary of Judy's life. "A Place of One's Own": This chapter describes Judy's parents move to their own ranch and the birth of the twins. "Salvage": This tells the story of the introduction of electricity at the ranch, and the changes it brought to their lives. "Church and State": This chapter is about when Judy starts school at South First Creek School, at the age of five. "Lessons in Silence": The chapter is about Judy's first encounter with outsiders, and the isolation created by ranch life. "Fighting Fire": The chapter summarizes a large fire that threatened the ranches, and the community joining together to fight it. "Ajax": This chapter contains several stories about how people on the ranches saw animals and their purpose. "The Year of the Horse": This chapter includes the story of when Gail, Judy's younger sister, entered a bull enclosure. "Learning Curves": This describes when Judy moved to Malta to start her freshman year in high school, and her difficulty fitting in. "The Reckoning": The chapter is about Judy's sophomore year of high school in Malta. "Learning the Ropes": In this chapter Judy describes her first months of being a ranch wife. "Winter Kill": This is about when her daughter got sick and the difficulties of getting to hospital due to heavy rains. "Night Shift": The chapter tells the story of calving on the ranch. "Afterword: Leaving Home": In the final chapter Judy describes leaving the ranch to start a new life.
The chapters "Breaking Clean" and "Lessons in Silence" and a portion of "Learning Curves" were originally published, in slightly different form, in Northern Lights magazine, while the chapter "Salvage" was originally published in Big Sky Journal magazine.
Plot The book narrates the author's story from before her birth, intertwining it with her current life, and explains how her life changed after she left the ranch.
The family and life before Judy's birth Judy's family is the fourth generation of a ranching family. The author describes the difficult moments that her parents had to deal with, when three years after they were married they decided to establish their own ranch. The main problems included lack of economic resources and the working of the land to make it viable. All the difficulties with starting their own place were interconnected with her birth in 1954, since Judy's mother was pregnant with her at the time.
Ranch life
The book describes the hardship of growing up as a girl on a ranch in Phillips County, in a social context in which boys were more valued. It was the male kittens that were kept, and the community applauded the birth of stud colts, bull calves and male babies. When Judy was young she played cowboys and Indians with her siblings, but there was a difference in what was expected from a girl and a boy. In the community, several women were capable of riding horses, herding cattle and harvesting, but they were always expected to return to their own chores. Although Judy acted like a boy, she still had to learn women’s chores and to develop as a woman, in order to find a good marriage prospect.
Between the ages of five and thirteen Judy went to South First Creek School. Her class consisted of students of many different ages, which resulted in difficulties for the teacher in controlling the class. Every morning the teacher did a health inspection. If they passed the inspection, they got a gold star.
Judy's little sister Gail was a very good storyteller and people would listen to her stories with excitement. Judy realized that she was not as good at telling stories but was better at writing them, so she secretly started to write poems and witty news on tablet paper to tell stories.
When starting high school, Judy had to move into the city, Malta. It was different from what she was used to and she had never seen girls look and behave the way they did. She lived on her own at this point, and got a job to be able to afford clothes and makeup in order to fit in. When the twins started high school, her mother decided to move with them to Malta and they all moved into Judy's grandmother's house, which made Judy's life more isolated. She got into a lot of trouble during this time, until she moved back to the ranch.
When Judy was 15 years old, John, a 27-year-old bachelor neighbor, started courting her, and a year and a half later he asked Judy's father for her hand and they were engaged. After Judy and John were married, they took over John's family's main ranch house. At the beginning of their marriage, Judy felt that John's father and stepmother were constantly controlling her every move. The period after their children were born is described as an exhausting time—taking care of the garden, three kids and three men, while still keeping up with the household work.
Life after the ranch In August 1986, Judy left Phillips County out of frustration, with a divorce and three children, and within days she started her freshman year at the University of Montana. It was difficult to find a job that fitted around classes and the family. Eventually she started working in construction, sanding floors to earn enough money to feed her children. It was around this time that she found her voice again and began to write.
The author explains how her children grew up differently than she or her parents did, as they did not have to face the hard work of country life and the strict education dictated by her parents.
Narrative structure The story is structured without a sequential time of events: the narrative is full of flashbacks (both internal and external analepses). There are several types of narrative sequences: narration, descriptions, dialogues, together with the author's thoughts, like internal monologues. The background continuously changes from one paragraph to another. The narrative is always characterized by the stream-of-consciousness voice.
For the narrative structure, the author uses a peculiar strategy, which creates two different stylistic and temporal dimensions. In fact, the narration itself follows a linear chronology of the events, so the plot is a straight line which respects the relation between story and plot. However, the author seasons the narration with flashbacks, personal comments and thoughts on the events, stopping the narration and zeroing time in the linear chronology.
Moving the attention onto the narrative structure of the main character, the author herself, reviewers refer to her as the "ego in the centre" character, which means that all of the narration develops around her and everything that happens must be seen and understood by her point of view. That's also known as "the model of the onion", as the narrative structure follows the stratifications of the main character. Moreover, this model affected the presentation and the role of the other characters who take part in the story; All their actions and physical descriptions depend on the view of the author/protagonist; They are one of the figurative stratifications of this "onion" who is Judy Blunt. Some critics also asserted that the narrative structure is continuously shaped in this production by a metaphysical presence or element that belongs to the liberal and old-feminists way of interpreting writing; in fact, as Judy Blunt says, writing was a way to escape the ranch sexist hierarchy and at the same time a concealed way to protest against a minor role of women in society. This critique was made because, according to the reviewers, the reader is almost forced to adapt their view to the writer's in relation to these social issues, making more genuine the core of the book.
This could be considered in every aspect a biographical production, however, the author has a wide freedom in the literal and stylistic choices, as it is a personal narration of her life that goes beyond the writing style, but all the canons of genre have been respected.
Characters
Main characters Judy: Judy is the author of the book. She was born in 1954 and the book recounts her life written from her perspective in first person. Judy's parents: The author describes her parents as very different from each other. When they married, her father was a 20-year-old cowboy, while her mother, Shirley, was a divorced 28-year-old woman with a four-year-old child, Margaret, born from her previous marriage. She describes her mother as a peculiar woman who attended college for two years, but who was also able to manage a house, a farm, and a family since youth. Judy describes their behaviour regarding her emotions that they did not approve of or did not understand as "blind", as they did not seem to even acknowledge it; for example, when Judy at 17 was home alone, she drank two glasses of her father's whiskey and repeatedly punched her left hand through a glass door, wearing her new engagement ring, and then smeared blood all over doors, mirrors and walls. After taking her to the hospital to treat her injured hand, her mother cleaned the house in silence, and neither of her parents ever wanted to know the gesture, not even after the publication of the book. John: John is her ex-husband, 12 years older than her and a Vietnam veteran. He started courting Judy when she was 15 and he was 27. Years after they married, Judy and John faced relationship issues and sought help from a marriage counselor. Judy depicts him in a nonjudgmental way as a fair and patient man, yet weak-willed when it came to taking a stand against the patriarchal monopoly.
Secondary characters Judy's children: Judy has three children; Jeanette, Jason and James. Jeanette was born two years after Judy's marriage to John. Seventeen months after Jeanette was born Judy gave birth to her first son Jason, and two and a half years later James was born. Margaret: Margaret is the author's stepsister, born from her mother's previous marriage and eight years older than the author. She started her studies at Malta High School at the age of 12 and graduated at 16. Even before she left home to study at college, or to work during the summer, she used to visit the family at the ranch only during weekends and holidays. Kenny: Kenny is Judy's brother and around 20 months older than Judy. The twins: The twins, Gary and Gail, are Judy's younger brother and sister.
Blunt, Judy: Breaking Clean
Background
The story is set in Phillips County on a remote ranch in northeastern Montana, where Judy was born: more than one hour's drive on difficult dirt roads to the nearest town, Malta. As the author herself wrote in the first pages of the book, the town was blessed by a wide community of writers and therefore she had the possibility to get in touch with this world early and frankly.