ANYTHING WILL BE EASY AFTER THIS

An essayist examines the meaning of her identity as a woman born, raised, and rooted in the mythologized lands of the American West.

Maile, a writing professor at Boise State University, left rural Idaho as a young woman to attend college in Boston and experience the urban life of her dreams. Instead, she writes, “the West found me in the East.” Inspired by a book about Montana ranch life, she returned home six months later. In this collection of essays, the latest in the publisher’s American Lives series, the author examines her lifelong connection to the West while probing the nature of Western identity. Many view the West as a land of romantic “escape,” but for the author, it is also a place where mythology and modernity collide, often with negative consequences. In “Anytown, USA,” Maile muses on how her hometown developed into a mecca for out-of-state developers and lost its identity. In the ensuing “land battles,” a distinctive rural culture was replaced by “the faceless homogeneity of suburbia.” A lifelong Westerner, Maile admits to living—and propagating—Western clichés: pickup truck, cowboy boots, etc. While she does not align with current conservative Idaho politics, she still professes an abiding affection for “dirty bars, pastel prairies, cracked boots, whiny singers…[and] rodeo queens.” Country music speaks to that love in the way it helps her “gain entry to an inaccessible world [the Western past].” Yet much as she would like to believe in Western stereotypes—e.g., the “tough-as-nails” pioneer woman portrayed in True Grit—Maile also knows that her vision of the West relies on a romanticism that overlooks how “depression, laudanum addiction [and] psychosis” were the lot of most female pioneers. Blending personal insight with sharp-eyed cultural analysis, the author celebrates the West and Western identity without ever losing sight of the myriad complexities that underlie both.

An eloquent and perceptive memoir in essays.