"..the accumulated violences of modernity are no longer deniable, which is another definition of postmodernity. Terry Tempest Williams tells a story of breast cancer, not her own but throughout her family. Because so many women are affected in a fairly short peroid of time, she seeks some environmental cause. Part of any story of illness is genesis: what caused the disease; why did it happen to me? But in Williams's case the question is why cancer is happening all around her.
Near the end of her book Williams tells her father about a recurring dream of a bright light. He tells her that this is actually a memory of the family stopping their car by the Utah roadside to watch an atomic bomb test in the 1950s. "The sky seemed to vibrate with an eerie pink glow", he tels her. "Within a few minutes, a light ash was raining on the car." She stares at him as the question of genesis suddenly becomes clear: "It was at this moment that I realised the deceit I had been living under". [..] When all these complications have been explored, a final mystery of genesis remains: why, among all the women who suffered from the fallout of that and other explosions, does Williams alone survive? [..]
The postmodernism of her story lies in all these qualities, as well as in the anachronism of the atomic testing that seems part of another world, yet has such real effects here and now. "When the Atomic Energy Commission described the country north of the Nevada Test Site as "virtually uninhabited desert terrain", Williams wrotes, "my family and the birds at Great Salt lake were some of the "virtual uninhabitants""."

//A. Frank, illness as a call for stories, p.72-73