Annie Proulx is a great writer, but I would not want to have her over for a dinner party.

I'm not allergic to the memoirs of the privileged and entitled, necessarily, and I made it through Proulx's fits over speckles on the floor and disappointing light fixtures with only mild discomfort, but by the time I made it to her snippy take on her superior methods of birdwatching I wanted to launch this book out a window.

It's a bummer, because there are a lot of promising threads in the book, but they're never quite brought to fruition and the whole exercise seems disjointed and joyless.