One Year to Live

In this moving new biography, Olivia Gentile profiles a frustrated housewife who was diagnosed with terminal cancer and threw herself into birding. In this exclusive excerpt, she first discovers her passion.

In the winter of 1965, [Pheobe Snetsinger’s husband] Dave was away on sabbatical.

Phoebe stayed behind with the kids, only one of whom—Penny—had started school and two of whom—Carol and Sue—were still in diapers. I don’t know a lot of details about how she managed, but it couldn’t have been easy. With Dave gone, she didn’t get many breaks. Since the weather was so bad, she couldn’t even go outside some days, which meant she saw no other adults. The little house would have been loud with children’s cries. By springtime, she wrote in her memoir many years later, she was “starving” to do something that didn’t involve kids. She “badly needed some mental and physical diversion,” she wrote elsewhere. Once, when a reporter asked her about this time in her life, she said that her kids had been making her “kind of crazy.”

It was as if she’d seen a “blinding white light.” When she got home, she couldn’t wait to put the kids down for a nap so she could see if there were birds in her own yard.

She probably started feeling frustrated well before that winter, even if it took the winter to bring things into focus. In high school, she’d gotten all A's and planned to be a psychologist. She’d gone to one of the best colleges in the country, Swarthmore, in Pennsylvania, where she got almost all A’s and was chosen for Phi Beta Kappa, the national honor society. By her sophomore year, she’d decided to be a chemist, and she took a lot of advanced math and science classes. But, like many women who went to college in the 1950s, she got engaged when she was a senior (she had her “ring by spring,” as the saying went) and put aside her plans for a career. She taught for a while before she and Dave had kids, but since 1958, when Penny was born, she’d been a housewife.

Life List: A Woman’s Quest for the World’s Most Amazing Birds. By Olivia Gentile. 352 pages. Bloomsbury. $26. Phoebe was shy and didn’t make friends easily, but she had one good friend in town, another shy, brainy housewife named Elisabeth Selden. Elisabeth and her husband, a journalist, lived nearby with their four kids. They were older than the Snetsinger kids, so Elisabeth had more freedom. She devoted a lot of her time to the civil-rights movement, the Senate campaigns of Hubert Humphrey, and other liberal causes, and she opened her house to foreign-exchange students at the University of Minnesota. In the spring and summer, when it was nice out, she watched birds.

One sunny morning in May 1965, after the snow had finally melted, Elisabeth had Phoebe over to her yard. According to Phoebe’s memoir, Elisabeth gave her some binoculars, pointed to a branch in an oak tree, and told her to look. What she saw “nearly knocked me over with astonishment”: a black and white bird, no bigger than a child’s hand, with a yellow head, shiny black eyes, and a throat the color of a ripe mango. “I thought, ‘My god, that is absolutely beautiful.’” The bird, Elisabeth said, was a Blackburnian warbler, and had come north from South America to breed. She must have told her that dozens of species of warbler—all little and bright, with voices like flutes—came north every spring. “Here was something that had been happening all my life, and I’d never paid any attention to it,” Phoebe said later.