The Birds That Fly Backwards: Volume I – Ouroboros is the first of four volumes that tell the harrowing, heartbreaking, but ultimately transcendent story of the Weddle family. In Ouroboros, author David Weddle traces his formative years, beginning with how he fell in love with movies as a young boy in the 1960s and culminating in his graduation from USC Cinema School in 1978.
But it is not David’s story alone. Spanning from 1926 to 1996, the journeys and personal struggles of his family members intersect and reflect off of each other, becoming a prism absent of any absolute truth. This complex memoir is told not in conventional prose, but in the form of a screenplay because the Weddle family worshipped movies and mythologized their own stories via the dramatic constructs and syntax of the cinema.
Through the microcosm of the Weddle family, The Birds That Fly Backwards tells the larger story of an American epoch that is now swiftly receding in the rearview mirror—an era that needs to be remembered if we are to find our way forward in these tumultuous times.