Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2015
256 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
"One month into our stay, we'd managed to dispatch most of our charges. We executed the chickens. One of the cats disappeared, clearly disgusted with our urban ways. And Lucky [the cow] was escaping almost daily. It seemed we didn't have much of a talent for farming. And we still had eleven months to go."
Antonia Murphy, you might say, is an unlikely farmer. Born and bred in San Francisco, she spent much of her life as a liberal urban cliché, and her interactions with the animal kingdom rarely extended past dinner.
But then she became a mother. And when her eldest son was born with a rare, mysterious genetic condition, she and her husband, Peter, decided it was time to slow down and find a supportive community. So the Murphys moved to Purua, New Zealand - a rural area where most residents maintained private farms, complete with chickens, goats, and (this being New Zealand) sheep. The result was a comic disaster, and when one day their son had a medical crisis, it was also a little bit terrifying.
Dirty Chick chronicles Antonia's first year of life as an artisan farmer. Having bought into the myth that farming is a peaceful, fulfilling endeavor that allows one to commune with nature and live the way humans were meant to live, Antonia soon realized that the reality is far dirtier and way more disgusting than she ever imagined. Among the things she learned the hard way: Cows are prone to a number of serious bowel ailments, goat mating involves an astounding amount of urine, and roosters are complete and unredeemable assholes.
But for all its traumas, Antonia quickly embraced farm life, getting drunk on homemade wine (it doesn't cause hangovers!), making cheese (except for the cat hair, it's a tremendously satisfying hobby), and raising a baby lamb (which was addictively cute until it grew into a sheep). Along the way, she met locals as colorful as the New Zealand countryside, including a seasoned farmer who took a dim view of Antonia's novice attempts, a Maori man so handy he could survive a zombie apocalypse, and a woman proficient in sculpting alpaca heads made from their own wool.
Part family drama, part cultural study, and part cautionary tale, Dirty Chick will leave you laughing, cringing, and rooting for an unconventional heroine.
"Murphy's book presents an unsentimental, at times unapologetically graphic, treatment of farm life. At the same time, it offers a comic yet thoroughly wise perspective on what it means to start over in a new country and live close to a natural world that is anything but romantic. Warm, funny and touching." - Kirkus
Antonia Murphy is a writer of great charm and appeal. She's kind of impossible to resist."
- Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of The Signature of All Things and Eat, Pray, Love
"Dirty Chick has it all. And by all I mean homemade booze, arson, a heavy hand of insanity and a magic place called Love Mountain. It's the dirtiest, most delightful book I've ever read. I f*cking loved it, laughed my ass off, and got so grossed out I couldn't wait to go back and visit Antonia and her very brave family on her raucous New Zealand farm." - Laurie Notaro, New York Times bestselling author of The Idiot Girls' Action Adventure Club and The Potty Mouth at the Table
"Dirty Chick perfectly captures the chaotic balance of hilarity, hardship, triumph, tragedy, romance, pornography and general grossness that makes up farm life. In this crowded world of hipster farmers, Antonia Murphy proves herself to be the real thing." - Josh Kilmer-Purcell, bestselling author of I Am Not Myself These Days and The Bucolic Plague and star of The Fabulous Beekman Boys
"Nearly every page of Antonia Murphy's big, boisterous, hilarious tale of how not to start a farm in New Zealand bristles with jaw-droppingly outrageous livestock encounters and visceral details that would have made Rabelais blush. Wallowing in this filthy, funny, and unexpectedly sweet tale of self-inflected misery is the perfect cure for the next time you're feeling too sorry for yourself." - Bob Tarte, author of Enslaved by Ducks and Kitty Cornered
This information about Dirty Chick was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Raised in San Francisco, Antonia Murphy is a graduate of Columbia University who has lived and worked in cities from New York to Rome, Villefranche-sur-Mer, France, to Invercargill, New Zealand. She now lives and writes in Purua, New Zealand, with her husband and their two children.
The Flower Sisters
by Michelle Collins Anderson
From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.
The House on Biscayne Bay
by Chanel Cleeton
As death stalks a gothic mansion in Miami, the lives of two women intertwine as the past and present collide.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
