I Am A Stranger Here Myself . . . blends history and memoir in a fascinating rumination on western womanhood.--Sue Staats, Stories on Stage Sacramento

Gwartney narrates with such detail, richness in description, and thoughtful reflection.--Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction

Gwartney narrates with such detail, richness in description, and thoughtful reflection.--Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction

Its strength lies in the author's honest appraisal of her early life as a lonely girl, a misfit who yearns to belong. Complicating her search for herself is a deep attachment to the landscape of home--the mountains, the rivers, the valleys, a place she knows 'about as well as the lines of my face.'--Inlander

An absorbing, skillfully crafted, thoughtful and thought-provoking read.--Midwest Book Review

Gwartney is an empathetic writer. She resurrects Narcissa as a human being, enduring a flood of homesickness, fretting about middle-age weight gain. But Gwartney is unblinking in her assessment of the Whitmans' blunders and what they portended for the history of the American West.--Seattle Times

This prize-winning, beautifully crafted, deeply involving, and astute historical chronicle and anatomy of estrangement pulses with dramatic tales of hubris, risk, and bloodshed, repressed feelings and hard-tested bonds.--Booklist

Award-winning author and writing instructor Debra Gwartney's new memoir, I Am a Stranger Here Myself, is a fascinating examination of her struggle to recognize and accept her identity and role as a woman in the American West.--The Bulletin, Bend, Oregon

The narratives braid into a meditation on belonging and identity, an exploration of the history that women played in settling the Northwest territories, and an elegy to the places that shape our selves.--The Rumpus

Contains a sense of the modern-day ambiguous feeling of loving the West but seeing ourselves as interlopers.--Eugene Weekly