When Judy Blunt moved to Missoula, Mont., in 1986 as a single mother of three small children, she didn’t know how to read a road map. And when she started classes as an undergraduate, she didn’t know that Room 306 was on the third floor.

The first 30 years of her life were spent in a place where there were no traffic lights and no buildings with multiple floors. Though only a few hours’ drive from Missoula, the place where Blunt grew up was in a different world, that of an isolated Montana cattle ranch near the town of Malta.

There, during the 1950s and 1960s of Blunt’s childhood, indoor plumbing meant there was a door on the outhouse, and women learned to seal their opinions and desires, like the canned vegetables and preserves, under a circle of hardened wax.

In her memoir “Breaking Clean” (Knopf, 320 pages, $24), Blunt takes the reader just about everywhere she went during those years in Malta from the time she tried to stop her imminent womanhood by lancing her budding breasts with a darning needle, to a seemingly endless winter of snow and wind and subzero temperatures, so cold that the extremities of some of the cattle froze off.

In the book’s 13 connected essays, Blunt doesn’t invite the reader into her world with a gentle beckon from an open window. Instead, she flings the doors open and reveals all.

Blunt peels back the romanticism of the cowboy myth and tells her story with relentless honesty, exquisite details and ferociously resurrected episodes. As a result, her tale of one woman’s isolation and desire for equality and a stronger sense of self becomes the story of many women. “Breaking Clean” is breathtaking. Blunt’s writing is visceral, yet never without humor and a raw, fierce honesty.