Kill All the Chickens: Grief and Memory on an Ozark Farm

As a philosopher, Amy Olberding is trained to wrestle with abstraction.But when she takes over her ancestral family farm in the Ozarks, her experience turns far more earthy.Her double life in philosophy and farming worked well enough, for a time.But then she tried to write a philosophy book about grief. Olberding's profession prepared her to write a scholarly book, but left her ill-equipped to do so among the haunting traces of her ancestors: the grandfather who could fix anything, the uncle who cautioned against letting your brains show, and the grandmother who once had all her chickens killed to conceal her hillbilly origins.Like her grandmother, Olberding was adept at killing chickens, at least metaphorically, taking on the marks of class and education expected of professors.But her efforts to write dispassionately about grief from a farm populated with family ghosts quickly foundered.Instead, Olberding presents a lyrical mosaic that refuses to shy away from the acute confusions tha