Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament by Evelyn I. Funda (review)

“The land is transformed into home as much by the stories we create there as by the crops we cultivate,” Evelyn Funda writes in her poignant Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament (274). Reflecting on her sense of exile after her parents’ death and the subsequent sale of their farm, Funda blends family memoir, personal narrative, allusions to other writers, and background on the history of farming in the arid American West as she explores the various “stories” that helped shape her Czech immigrant family’s life in twentiethcentury southern Idaho. Weeds is no pastoral: Funda is unabashedly frank in her accounts of family members’ foibles and in the information she presents about the broader, often vexed narratives of homesteading, agribusiness, and immigration. Still the book takes a lyrical tone even as it tells a sometimes painful story of loss and mutability, ultimately offering both a vivid elegy for rural dreams and an intimate account of a woman’s deepening understanding of her roots.

The book’s chapters are titled with the names of literal weeds that grow in the American West, suggesting the family’s hopeful colonization of a new land (and also, perhaps, implying the perceived value of these immigrant farmers in a larger culture). Each chapter is loosely centered around a particular family member whose life evokes characteristics of the weed in question (“Dodder” for Funda herself, “Wild Oats” for her mother, “Sage” for her grandfather) but also strays to expository background on matters as diverse as “terminator hybrids” developed by agribusiness, single women’s treatment at Ellis Island, and seventeenth-century Czech history. The tiny, idiosyncratic details of our individual lives, Funda implies by such juxtapositions, are inevitably rooted in broader cultural moments; no matter what stories we tell ourselves, how energetically we attempt to steer our lives, our circumstances are part of much larger patterns.

The general content of many passages in this book will come as no surprise to readers familiar with the rich and growing corpus of family farm literature or with the history of farming in the arid West. What makes the book memorable is the way that Funda brings these elements into conversation with each other in the context of her particular family. She is a fine writer, especially in drawing characters, and these individual farmers and their wives and children become complex, rounded people we care about, people capable of surprising us and of remaining, in some ways, mysterious and private still at the book’s end. The same refusal to settle for predictable, simple answers also informs the book’s larger musings: this book is about much more than just the betrayal of family farmers—an important theme, admittedly, but one that’s received such ample attention recently that, if simply repeated, it threatens to become a cliché. Instead, as she writes about the loss of her family’s land, Funda grapples with complicated questions of identity, imperfection, and the “fiction” of believing that we can find clear resolution.

“A lament isn’t just unrestrained sorrow or a wild wailing. At some point acceptance and understanding germinate in grief,” Funda remarks near the book’s end. Weeds itself fulfills that promise.