memoir

All You Can Ever Know, by Nicole Chung

by

Chung’s debut memoir explores several important themes. Her parents—Korean shopkeepers with two daughters already—were warned that the premature baby might not live and if she did, was likely to have expensive disabilities. They decided to offer her up for adoption, and a white couple who badly wanted children brought her home to Portland, Oregon.

She accepted the story her new parents told her, of the selflessness of her birth parents and that adoption had been the best thing for her. Her religious parents told her that she was a “divinely ordered” gift from God. However, they did not see the racist bullying that Chung encountered in Portland, one of the least racially diverse places in the U.S. Their parents’ colorblind insistence that they didn’t think of her as Asian also meant that she did not learn about Korean culture or language.

“Sometimes the adoption — the abandonment, as I could not help but think of it when I was very young — upset me more; sometimes my differences did; but mostly, it was both at once, race and adoption, linked parts of my identity that set me apart from everyone else in my orbit. I could neither change nor deny these facts, so I worked to reconcile myself to them.”

It was only as an adult, pregnant with her first child, that Chung began to question the legend and to begin discreetly searching for her birth parents. “It was time to lay down the burden of being ‘the good adoptee,’ the grateful little girl who’d been lost and then found.” At the same time she did not want to hurt the parents she loved and whom she would always call Mom and Dad.

I appreciated Chung’s openness in writing her journey and also her compassion toward all of the people involved. The themes of the search for identity, adoption in general, and interracial adoption in particular are important ones, and Chung provides much insight into one person’s experience of them.

However, I’m surprised by the awards and praise for this book It might have been better as an essay. Yes, it’s a super important topic, but there’s a lot of repetition and the narration is rather dry. She includes few scenes along with some scenelets (short snippets of scenes). Instead, Chung tells us this story, summarising the events and dwelling on her thoughts and emotions rather than showing us what happened.

Chung herself is an editor, first at The Toast magazine and then becoming editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine in 2016, whose book division published this memoir. In her Acknowledgments, she thanks her editor before anyone else, so I remain a bit baffled by the final product.

Still, Chung gets so much right with this book: genuine emotion, vulnerability and loving compassion for the parents who gave her away and those who raised her.

Have you read a book about adoption that made you think more deeply about the issues involved?

The Years, by Annie Ernaux

by

s-l300

Writing guru Donald Maass—writer, agent, and writing teacher—reminds us to include what’s going on in the world in our stories, partly because our characters will probably be thinking about current events and reacting to them. Mostly, though, because including specific details and big-picture events helps make the world of our story seem real to the reader.

In this book, Ernaux has gone further, focusing on the larger life of a society and placing the life of one woman within that.

. . . the idea had come to her to write “a kind of woman’s destiny” set between 1940 and 1986.

Ernaux’s genre-bending experiment adds a new dimension to the field of life writing. She goes beyond memoir—a subjective view of events in the author’s personal life—and autofiction—a reexamination and fictionalisation of those events—to create a new form that melds both of these with sociology and history. She has captured the sweep of the lifetime simultaneously with that of a person and a generation.

Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.

Time is the only narrative structure in this collage of private memories, public events, photos, songs, brand names, television, advertising, headlines. There’s no plot, no protagonist, no story question. Instead, we are given “abbreviated memories” spun together, some personal and some common.

It will be a slippery narrative, composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.

I especially like the way Ernaux, looking back on a long life, refers to the past as a series of “palimpsests.” It’s an effective way to describe the veils that layer over each other as we try to recall how we were.

At first, I felt overwhelmed by the flow of historical events, popular culture, and experiences. I could barely grasp each fragment before it was replaced by another, perhaps because I was listening to the audio version, beautifully performed by Anna Bentinck. Eventually, though, I began to recognise how artfully they had been assembled to create a continuous narrative.

More importantly, I came to feel a part of the story, engrossed in the passing decades and fascinated by the ways my own life interacted with this collective story, merging and sliding apart, only to merge again and again slip away. I began to feel as though she were telling me the story of my own life, with occasional diversions.

Perhaps I should have first mentioned the unique point of view. Unlike most life writing, there is no “I” in the book. Instead—and fittingly for the story of a generation—it is narrated by “we,” as though by a chorus of voices. Apparently, in the original French version, the pronoun used is “on” which is the generic he/she that English is lacking, though it could be translated as “one.” The translator, Alison L. Strayer, has chosen instead to use “we,” which works brilliantly to capture the voice of the collective sections.

Some parts are about a specific woman, spoken of as “she.” As she nears the end of life, she begins to write this book to defy death’s erasure.

By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History. This will not be a work of remembrance in the usual sense, aimed at putting a life into story, creating an explanation of self. She will go within herself only to retrieve the world, the memory and imagination of its bygone days, grasp the changes in ideas, beliefs, and sensibility, the transformation of people and the subjects that she has seen.

I plan to delve into other books by Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. I can see why this particular book was longlisted for the 2019 International Man Booker Prize. Without getting into the controversy over whether it qualifies as fiction (a requirement for the Booker), I have to rank it high on my list of best books ever. To reach into my own past: it blew my mind.

Have you read a book by Annie Ernaux? What did you think about it?

Circle of Quiet, by Madeleine L’Engle

by

circle

Memoirs come in many different forms. Some tell a chronological story, while others center around a theme. Some experiment with different structures. First published in 1972, this first in a series of memoirs by the author of A Wrinkle in Time and other beloved stories is more of a meditation, inviting us to explore with her, follow her thoughts, and see where they take us.

In the process, L’Engle gives us the kaleidoscope of her life at 51: spouse, parent, writer, teacher, choir director, member of communities large and small.

Many of her reflections are about writing in general, and specifically writing for children. She’s forthright about her years of rejections and how she felt about them. Invited to teach, she maintains that writing cannot be taught, but you can teach particular tools. Of course, she learns as much as she teaches, classroom discussions leading to new ideas.

She also defends children’s literature: its enduring appeal, its benefits for children and adults, and its literary quality.

L’Engle notes that “the concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline.” In those moments, we are not conscious of ourselves, not self-conscious. She goes on to say: “Detachment and involvement: The artist must have both. The link between them is compassion.”

At one point she says that “An author is responsible for his characters in much the same way that a parent is for his children, or a teacher for his students.” I think she means a moral responsibility, but it is still a concept that I’ve been turning over in my mind.

She speaks of her family’s years in New York City, and even more the years at Crosswicks, their rambling summer home in a small Connecticut town where at times four generations of her family live under one roof. There is much about community, and the peculiar interrelationship of people in such a small village, such as being suspicious of newcomers but still turning out to help them when they are in need.

Her portrait of the U.S. in the 1960s—the time period of this memoir—sometimes distracted me, sending my mind off into my own memories of those years. Hearing how someone the age of my parents viewed the happenings of that turbulent time sent me back to my own memories, turning them into new patterns.

She doesn’t shy away from the big subjects, such as faith, marriage, family, what might constitute a meaningful life. Still, it is her thoughts on writing that most resonate for me.

I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the “superconscious” has already shown me in a story or poem. Facing this does help to eradicate do-it-yourself hubris from an artist’s attitude towards his painting or music or writing. My characters pull me, push me, take me further than I want to go, fling open doors to rooms I don’t want to enter, throw me out into interstellar space, and all this long before my mind is ready for it.

The title comes from her need to retreat sometimes to her “circle of quiet,” a particular place at Crosswicks. We all need such a place, one where we can be our true selves. If you want a rest from the trauma Olympics of many memoirs on the market, try these reflections from a writer whose work you may know very well.

Do you have a “circle of quiet,” a place that is peculiarly your own?

Best Books I Read in 2022

by

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2022. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer
The narrator wakes from a nap to find herself alone. She’s visiting family members at their hunting lodge on the edge of the Alps, and they have gone into town, leaving her with their dog Lynx. She walks down the road to meet them, but both she and the dog run into an invisible wall that separates them from the rest of the world. This journal of her solitary life in the years that follow is stunning.

2. Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
O’Farrell’s tour de force focuses on Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, Shakespeare’s wife, and in so doing immerses us in the day-to-day experience of raising children and managing a household in Elizabethan England. What makes this novel so stunning is the author’s evocation of the details of each scene. It is a powerful reading experience that gives us insight into Shakespeare’s work, but even more into the lives of the many women who loved, married, and bore children in obscurity.

3. Generations: A Memoir, by Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton is one of my favorite poets and a huge influence on my writing. In this memoir, originally published in 1976 and now a new edition from New York Review Books, she brings a poet’s sensibility to crafting her story. The chapters, while prose, in their brevity exhibit the conciseness of poetry; anything not absolutely necessary is pared away, leaving the kernel. And you, the reader, bring your own understanding and experience to fill in the spaces.

4. Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey
Trethewey is another of my favorite poets, so I looked forward to reading her memoir. Not needing to know anything more than the author’s name, I plunged in, only to emerge finally, astonished and awed. With a poet’s concision and musicality, she conjures her rural Southern childhood. Trethewey’s voice is quiet—quiet as Black women’s voices have had to be. Yet with all that, her voice carries the emotions held in check by her composure, a tribute to the author’s exquisite use of language. She has created a moving exploration of memory and of how we manage, or fail to manage, our painful past.

5. Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy
Arriving in Greenland with only her research gear, Franny Stone is determined to study the last of the Arctic terns. She says that even though her expedition has been canceled, she intends to follow the terns on what will be their final migration to Antarctica. The book is set in the near future when climate change has wiped out most birds, fish, and animals. Although disapointing at times, this profound story is worth your attention.

6. The Tradition, by Jericho Brown
I am astonished by these poems, the power and sheer artistry of them. They are personal and political, specific and universal. Brown deploys the tools of poetry—enjambment, white space, personification—boldly. Some of the poems take up hardly any space, lines only two or three words long. Yet even with that limitation they are remarkable, the fragmentation creating a rhythm in counterpoint to and with the rhythm of the words. He also creates his own tools, complex forms that defy gravity.

7. The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser
This book of essays, anchored by the superb title essay, is about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and about who we are. Hauser balances personal stories with those of others, sometimes her friends, sometimes writers or their characters, sometimes the natural world.

8. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
From 1915 to 1970 almost six million Black citizens left the south for northern and western cities looking for better lives. For the first time Wilkerson’s monumental book gives us a history of the Great Migration. The book is long but eminently readable, due to Wilkerson’s approach. By closely following stories of three individuals, she captures the reader’s attention and sympathy and keeps us turning pages.

9. Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
This 1993 novel begins in the then-distant future of 2024, which startled me at first. Due to her mother’s drug abuse while pregnant, teenager Lauren Olamina actually feels all the sensations she witnesses in others. She calls it “sharing” and finds it a liability in her world, a dreadful world that is only too likely how things will turn out here, given the trends already present in the 1990s and only worse today. A brilliant story of one woman’s journey.

10. Miss Benson’s Beetle, by Rachel Joyce
London in 1950 is still recovering from World War II, with food rationed, ruined buildings being cleared, another generation of men wiped out, and women chucked out of their wartime jobs. Middle-aged spinster Margery Benson finally cracks and quits her job teaching domestic science in an elementary school with out-of-control children. She decides to set out on the adventure of a lifetime: an expedition to New Caledonia to find a mythical golden beetle. So much fun!

What were the best books you read in 2022?

Year of the Monkey, by Patti Smith

by

smith

Part memoir and part meditation, part travelogue and part dream journal: this book takes us into Smith’s world during the unsettling year 2016. Smith’s wanderings during that Chinese zodiac year certainly embody a monkey’s traits of cleverness, curiosity, and mischievousness.

The year starts for Smith with a series of concerts at San Francisco’s Fillmore Theatre, followed by a surreal visit to Santa Cruz. From there she takes off on solitary wanderings to places like New York, Arizona, Kentucky, as well as to imagined and remembered places. She talks to strangers, meeting real and imagined people. She keeps vigil at the bedside of a beloved friend in a coma and visits another near the end of his life.

But more than her physical journeys, it’s what happens when she brings her particular mindset to grapple with the small irritations of life like the flood in her apartment, the larger problems in the country careering toward a showdown between democracy and what we then thought was populism in the November election, and most of all the death of friends and lovers, as well as the sense of her own time on earth running out as she approaches her 70th birthday.

It is art that holds her steady, whether studying the Ghent altarpiece or discussing Roberto Bolano’s work or a classic film. In one of my favorite parts she visits Fernando Pessoa’s house in Lisbon, and examines his personal library. He was a fascinating poet who wrote under his own name and 75 others, which he called heteronyms, creating full lives for each alternate personality.

In my classes on story structure, I’ve begun including a section on experimental structures. I tend to prefer more linear stories when I’m reading, but Jane Alison‘s book Meander, Spiral, Explode has helped me better appreciate other patterns and also to recognise them in stories that I’ve loved.

This memoir is definitely a meander, perhaps one of the hardest structures because it still has to hold together even as it wanders in a seemingly random fashion. Smith makes the challenge even greater by moving in and out of dreams and memory. As in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, the margins are fluid. Smith moves deftly between the humorous, banal, or wrenching moments that make up her year, finds signs and portents in unexpected places, and stumbles upon strange happenings.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author. Her distinctive voice—the audible one—carried me even deeper into the experience than I believe her authorly voice alone would have. I mostly listened to it as I was falling asleep. Thus, with the membrane between sleep and waking so permeable, the surreal turns and dream logic seemed fitting.

I’d like to read it again and study more closely how she made it all work.

What book have you read recently that you immediately wanted to reread?

Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey

by

Memorial Drive

Trethewey is one of my favorite poets, so I looked forward to reading her memoir. Not needing to know anything more than the author’s name, I plunged in, only to emerge finally, astonished and awed.

With a poet’s concision and musicality, she conjures her rural Southern childhood, the move to Atlanta, and the terrible path to her mother’s murder when Trethewey was only 19. The girl’s response was to bury all memory of the years in Atlanta, the good and the bad. The woman’s self-appointed task is to unearth them and find again her lost mother.

And she does. With just a few deft strokes she summons her mother to life. I felt immediately that I knew this young woman, now divorced, leaving Mississippi for a new life with her young daughter. I felt the bond between mother and daughter, all the stronger for their separation from the close family and community back in Mississippi.

One way the author effects this revival is to include her mother’s own words, searched for and now recovered. Also, she gives us the context of the time: the early 1980s when the bitter segregation of her childhood is giving way finally to new opportunities for people of color and for women in particular, the excitement, the whiff of freedom in the air.

There’s no melodrama or sensationalism in this account. Trethewey’s voice is quiet—quiet as Black women’s voices have had to be. Yet with all that, her voice carries the emotions held in check by her composure, a tribute to the author’s exquisite use of language.

Trethewey weaves into her story the effects of being a child of a mixed marriage—her father White and her mother Black—and of growing up amid the racism of the South. She looks at how these experiences and the lasting trauma of her mother’s death have influenced her own growth as a writer.

In doing so, she has created a moving exploration of memory and of how we manage, or fail to manage, our painful past. My friend Susan Mills’s debut novel On the Wings of a Hummingbird also explores this theme: how do we an individuals, as a community recover from or at least deal with terrible suffering? So I’ve been thinking about it a lot, especially now when it seems nearly impossible to wrest reconciliation from sorrow.

In Atlanta, Trethewey and her mother lived on Memorial Drive. You can’t make these things up. This book is more than a memorial to her mother, more than a memoir, more than a masterclass in writing. It is a searing look at the lasting effects of racism and domestic abuse. And it is an invitation to think about our own losses and how they have shaped us.

Have you read a memoir that made you reflect on your own life?

What Comes Next and How to Like It? by Abigail Thomas

by

what-comes-next-and-how-to-like-it-9781476785059_hr

There are many ways to write a memoir. You can make it a mostly chronological narrative of a particular time in your life—a small, self-contained period—as I did in my memoir Innocent. Still working chronologically, you can hopscotch through the years following a particular object or relationship, as J. R. Moehringer did in The Tender Bar. You can concentrate on a particular incident and explore how it ripples through the rest of your life, as Marguerite Duras did in The Lover.

You can abandon chronology and narrative altogether and piece together small bits of memoir, as Marion Winik did in The Book of the Dead or Denise Levertov in Tesserae. This may seem easier to the novice memoirist since you only need to write little bits at a time. The difficulty comes in stitching them together. Whether you want them to create a pattern or simply be a crazy quilt, the pieces have to work together. They have to be set against each other such that they make smooth reading. It’s actually far more difficult than a traditional narrative.

This is the task Thomas has set herself here. She says, “I hate chronological order. Not only do I have zero memory for what happened when in what year, but it’s so boring.” These pieces, which range in length from a sentence to a page or two, do cohere into a satisfying whole, in part because of her consistent voice, but even more because they circle around a single theme: Timor mortis conturbat me—fear of death disturbs me—comes from the Catholic Office of the Dead. She explores what can sustain us in the face of our inevitable end.

This body of mine, the one in pink pajamas, the one hanging on to her pillow for dear life, these pleasant accommodations in which I have made my home for seventy years, it’s going to die. It will die, and the rest of me, homeless, will disappear into thin air.

Thomas tells us about her simple, everyday life, stitching together her love of painting on glass, being with her children and grandchildren, napping with her dogs, meeting up with old friends, and so on. One of the main threads in the pattern is her longstanding—over 30 years—platonic friendship with Chuck. These are the things that sustain us.

Unfortunately, this piecemeal format doesn’t allow us stay with any issue or situation long enough to care deeply about the characters. Another obstacle is that these people are leading privileged lives, although Thomas is open about her challenges: three marriages, life as a single mother, her husband’s brain injury and subsequent death, her daughter’s breast cancer, her own struggle with alcohol and nicotine.

For a memoir to move a reader, the author must make themselves vulnerable, which she does. At times, though, I felt she was sharing too much about her flaws; some pieces made my sympathy for her fade.

Then comes beautifully written insight such as the piece “Out of the Blue” where her daughter tells her of a disturbing memory. Thomas ends with “This is the kind of memory I have always thought needs to be remembered by someone else after the original owner is gone.”

Then a few pieces later, she talks about her childhood visits to her grandmother’s house and how the scent of privet flowers—one of my particular favorites—filled those days; the path to the beach was lined with privet bushes. She says to Catherine, “The smell of privet is the smell of summer for me.” Catherine responds, “Yes, Mom. I know. Your memories are my memories now.”

I love this idea. Thomas asks Chuck what happens when we die. He responds, “You live on only insofar as others continue to think about you. Then you fade and blink out.” As friends, as parents, as writers, we seed our memories and stories for others to carry forward.

What memoir have you read that has stayed with you?

This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, by Jacqueline Winspear

by

Winspear

I thoroughly enjoyed this engaging memoir from the author of the Maisie Dobbs mystery series. Some of the themes and settings will be familiar to readers of those novels. Here, Winspear deftly adds family stories to her own memories of growing up in a working-class family in post-war England.

It is the war, both wars, that color their lives. Her grandfather’s shellshock from the Great War makes him hard to live with, panicking at the sound of a dropped pan. Her father, who could never bear loud noises, was assigned to an explosives team during WWII, while her mother as a child was evacuated during the Blitz. Jacqueline grew up listening to her mother’s stories “of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing.”

Most fascinating for me are Jacqueline’s parents, colorful characters whose zest for life keeps them moving around, cash-poor but rich in love for family and the English countryside. Their mutual yearning for adventure prompts them to live with Romany travelers in between years-long forays out of London for life in rural Kent. The title comes from one of her endlessly optimistic father’s sayings.

As farmworkers, they are lucky to be given shacks to live in, which they make furniture for and fix up as best they can. Young Jacqueline joins them in picking hops and fruit when she is not exploring the fields and copses, often with her younger brother. The lessons of loving that she learns as a child from her hard-working parents—their patience with the shellshocked grandfather, their forgiveness of each other after the rare rows, their careful tending of the land—bear fruit in her own affectionate portrayal of them and their world in this book.

We learn about what inspired her to become a writer, a scene I recognised as similar to my own. And we learn a lot about her writing process as we perceive how she has made use of scenes from her life in her novels. She also shares the process of sorting through her memories, confirming some with research and finding others to be inaccurate.

This memoir doesn’t romanticise the sometimes harsh conditions and doesn’t shy away from the illnesses, accidents and other misfortunes that plague the family. Still, this is a charming read, even if you are not familiar with the novels. I was at times reminded of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, though that is from an earlier period, just after WWI and is more about village life than Winspear’s childhood on various farms.

I relished this vivid and evocative portrait of a writer’s life, a working-class life in a world far removed from today. I loved getting to know her parents and sharing, however briefly, in where their adventurous spirits led them.

Have you read Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs novels?

Generations: A Memoir, by Lucille Clifton

by

clifton

Lucille Clifton is one of my favorite poets and a huge influence on my writing. I was privileged to hear her read more than once. In this memoir, originally published in 1976 and now a new edition from New York Review Books, she brings a poet’s sensibility to crafting her story.

The chapters, while prose, in their brevity exhibit the conciseness of poetry; anything not absolutely necessary is pared away, leaving the kernel. And you, the reader, bring your own understanding and experience to fill in the spaces. Each anecdote, each sentence becomes something precious because you know it is there for a reason.

She begins with an anecdote of a White woman who, after seeing a notice in the paper, thinks they might be related and offers to send Clifton a history of the family that she has compiled. Yet she does not recognise the name of Clifton’s father. “Who remembers the names of slaves?” Clifton asks. “Only the children of slaves.”

Unlike autobiography which covers your entire life and is as objective as possible, memoir includes only a small piece of your experience, usually a limited time frame, sometimes restricted to a particular theme or relationship. It is more subjective, understood to be the author’s perceptions.

Clifton, writing just after her father’s death, intersperses fragments of the family gathering for the funeral with the stories he has told her about the family members who shaped him, especially Caroline Donald, who was “ ‘born free among the Dahomey people in 1822 and died free in Bedford Virginia in 1910.’”

“Mammy Ca’line raised me,” Daddy would say. “After my Grandma Lucy died, she took care of Genie and then took care of me. She was my great-grandmother, Lucy’s Mama, you know, but everybody called her Mammy like they did in them days. Oh she was tall and skinny and walked straight as a soldier, Lue. Straight like somebody marching wherever she went.”

You can hear the poet’s ear for the music of words, the way she captures the rhythm of a person’s voice, suggesting dialect without tortured punctuation.

Through traces as delicate as sumi-e, Clifton gives us other family members: Genie, her father’s father with his withered arm and success with the ladies; wild and headstrong Lucy who was hanged for killing a White man; Clifton’s mother Thelma, brother Sammy and half-sisters Jo and Punkin.

The details are what break your heart, such as a teenaged Caroline married off at to another slave, 45 years older than her. “ ‘Oh slavery, slavery,’ my Daddy would say. ‘It ain’t something in a book, Lue. Even the good parts were awful.’” There is much that is of the time: Clifton’s father came north to work in a steel mill during a strike, part of the Great Migration, and bought not only a house but also a dining room set, the first Black man in Depew to do so.

Clifton draws strength from her ancestors. It is Caroline’s clarion call that echoes through the generations: “ ‘Get what you want, you from Dahomey women.’” Clifton’s bold choices shape her adult life; she is the one to comfort her sisters and assure them that their daddy will not haunt them.

The quotes from Walt Whitman for each section help make this memoir a celebration of the lives intertwined through the centuries and going on. With this powerful memoir, we will remember their names: Caroline, Lucy, Samuel, Genie, Thelma, Lucille.

Have you read a memoir that seemed like poetry?

An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard

by

dillard

Dillard’s inimitable prose makes this memoir one of the best I’ve ever read. True, we are of an age, so much of her experience chimes with mine. I didn’t grow up in Pittsburgh where three huge rivers come together, but in another steel town, where rivers run into the bay and “old” money (much of it from Gilded Age robber barons) existed uneasily with a brawny, considerably immigrant working class.

Like Dillard, I was allowed to run free from a now-surprisingly young age, learning the neighborhood and later the city street by street, landmark by landmark. She captures the essence of the period in details and imagery, such as: “Every woman stayed alone in her house in those days, like a coin in a safe. “

Loosely organised by chronology, the individual sections each explore some aspect of childhood. There’s one about going to the library, one about summers at the lake with her grandparents, one about being afraid of the nuns at the Catholic school—“They had no bodies, and imitation faces.” She talks about her love of baseball and spending hours perfecting her overhand pitch only to find that as a girl she was only allowed to play softball.

Not uncommon occurrences, but the detail and the verve with which they come at us make reading this book a vivid and participatory experience. She writes of being five and terrified of going to bed because of the thing that enters her room at night, searching for her.

It was a transparent, luminous oblong. I could see the door whiten at its touch; I could see the blue wall turn pale where it raced over it, and see the maple headboard of Amy’s bed glow. It was a swift spirit; it was an awareness, it made noise. it had two joined parts, a head and a tail, like a Chinese dragon. it found the door, wall, and headboard; and it swiped, charging them with its luminous glance. After its fleet, searching passage, things looked the same, but weren’t.

I dared not blink or breathe; I tried to hush my whooping blood. If it found another awareness, it would destroy it.

Though she later figures out that it is a passing car reflecting a streetlight—the moment when she realises that reason is a tool to conquer fear—she still sometimes lets herself be afraid for the pleasurable frisson of terror.

The fragments work together to achieve a coherent narrative. One of the most astonishing threads has to with her becoming conscious of herself. She writes of lying on the kitchen floor, listening to the icebox motor, cars going by, the “unselfconscious trees.”

Time streamed in full flood beside me on the kitchen floor; time roared raging beside me down its swollen banks; and when I woke I was so startled I fell in.

Who could ever tire of this heart-stopping transition, of this breakthrough shift between seeing and knowing you see, between being and knowing you be? It drives you to a life of concentration, it does, a life in which effort draws you down so very deep that when you surface you twist up exhilarated with a yelp and a gasp.

Entering this book is like falling into flood that sweeps you away with a boundless enthusiastic drive to experience everything. We get not only these early years, but her exploratory middle years and frantic teens.

We see the beginnings of her interest in natural science that eventually flowered into the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. We follow her into the rock collection she was gifted by a neighbor, labeling her eventual 340 rocks, imagining the task of searching for rare rocks. We see not only her wonder, but her imagery and realistic humor. “When you pry open the landscape, you find wonders—gems made of corpses, even, and excrement.” Prying open the landscape seems like the essence of Pilgrim.

A continuing thread is about leaving, achieving escape velocity. She begins with her father’s decision—likely a result of his compulsive reading and rereading of Life on the Mississippi—to “quit the firm his great-grandfather had founded” and take his boat down the river all the way to New Orleans, “the source of the music he loved: Dixieland jazz.” She was 10 at the time. He did come back, but his adventure haunts her throughout the book, all the way to the end when she herself takes off for college.

She gives us full and vital portraits of her parents, both of them huge jokesters, practicing jokes before unleashing them at parties or at home. Her mother, given to practical jokes, “dearly loved to fluster people by throwing out a game’s rules at whim—when she was getting bored, losing in a dull sort of way, and when everybody else was taking it too seriously.” I envy Dillard some aspects of her parents: the jokes, the family dancing madly to records in the living room.

One aspect she doesn’t go into, which may speak to Pittsburgh’s population or to her being a little older than I, is race. For me, the increased pace of the Great Migration and the flight to the suburbs dramatically changed my home town. Dillard’s is a privileged childhood, more so than mine which was privileged enough. Privileged not only because it is a white childhood, not only because it is during a time of stability and prosperity, but also because it is a wealthy one.

While much of my enjoyment of this book was how much it recalled my own childhood, I imagine that people of all ages would enjoy it, not just for the portrait of a time now gone, but for the boundless energy of her amazing prose. I will be recommending it in the memoir classes I teach, for its structure, its detail, and its meditation on trying to connect the dots of your life, trying to find the connections that make them seem continuous.

What memoir have you read that took you back over your own life?