An American Childhood

I couldn't finish this book...there is no plot...it is very randomly laid out and some of the things she writes about are so mundane and boring. There is nothing that pulls you into this book, and it doesn't build on itself either. I know it's considered a great work of literature but it just wasn't my kind of book.

The first time I read An American Childhood I was so thrilled I wanted everyone I knew to read it too. It is one of the handful of books that I will keep on the bookshelf by my bed for the rest of my life. (That shelf also includes Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.) An American Childhood was an eye opener for me and gave me pause to look back at my own childhood to see what I could see. I reread this periodically and enjoy the clarity with which Ms. Dillard writes about her memories of the start of life, the beginning of thought, the thrill of realizations when first made, and the excitement of knowing that life is ahead and it's up to the one who is living to get on with it. She sets up a scene and relates her feelings as she was living through it. A vivid memory for her is running with a friend through the backyards of her neighborhood chased by a man who was furious with them for thowing snowballs at his car. "It was an immense discovery, pounding into my hot head with every sliding, joyous step, that this ordinary adult evidently knew what I thought only children who trained at football knew: that you have to fling yourself at what you're doing, you have to point yourself, forget yourself, aim, dive." She seems to have learned lessons early that it takes many of us several decades to internalize. One day she ran down a busy sidewalk, arms flailing, pretending to herself she might just be able to take off into flight. "I was too aware to do this, and had done it anyway. What could touch me now? For what were the people on Penn Avenue to me, or what was I to myself, really, but a witness to any boldness I could muster..." Her use of language is unexpected and sparkling and her ability to listen to how others sound, most notably her parents, allows you to be there in the room with them all, listening too. She is able to capture a person's look with a few careful words. "Father snapped his fingers and wandered, tall and loose-limbed, over the house." And the chapter on learning to tell jokes is perfect at showing the private life of a single family - not to mention, it's just plain hilarious! "Our parents would sooner have left us out of Christmas than leave us out of a joke. They explained a joke to us while they were still laughing at it; they tore a still-kicking joke apart, so we could see how it worked...People who said, 'I can never remember jokes,' were like people who said, obliviously, 'I can never remember names,' or 'I don't bathe.'" This book takes you to a specific place at a specific time, and also into the heart of childhood at any place or time. You read it and you can, for a while, throw off the sentimentalized vision of "youth" that you have drawn over the past, and instead remember how it actually was to grow up as a human being.

These are sketches of the author's early life, until age 16 or so, that achieve a unity more by the enrichment of themes than by a strict chronology.[on boys] "... Their breathtaking lack of subtlety in every particular, we thought -- and then sometimes a gleam of consciousness in their eyes, as surprising as if you'd caught a complicit wink from a brick." (p90)This is a fine book, to be read in a gulp (it's not long), or sipped over weeks, taking the chapters -- or very paragraphs -- as funny, fizzy little drinks of description or story. Her style is, in this book of urban reminiscence, still that of the nature writer, that intoxicating blend of the particular and general, close observation and little riffs on the meaning of it all.Her milieu was of the working well-off; her father ran the successful family business and they lived in a Pittsburg that still was in the shadow of the Carnegies and Mellons. They had a housekeeper and a pretty, energetic mother. Annie and her sister attended dancing school and country-club functions, and collided with the boys in her "set", from whom she was expected to find her future husband. But she also played ball until it was too dark to see, and went compulsively to the woods to watch and to wonder. She collected rocks, and she read and read.Annie Doakes was born the same year I was, but is both older than me, having lived at greater speed, and younger, having, I think, maintained more youthful enthusiasm. What is essential in this life story is its total focus on the years of childhood. Most biography skimps this, perhaps planting a few useful images of the wide-open ranchland, or the repressive parents, or the early bereavement that later can do explanatory duty. Each person is a mystery, of course, but I feel I know Annie Dillard, at least somewhat, after reading the adult describe the child. After all, we must believe that the child we were is where the adult we are came from.

Though I have too little time for reading, I found this book so compelling I took baths instead of showers in the morning to have extra time to read, picked it up again when I got home, and as Annie describes herself doing, finished it and went straight back to the beginning to begin again. The second time was no less fresh, no less delightful, no less hilarious. I bought a copy and sent it to my brother. How did she do it? How did she remember in such painfully, exquisitely accurate detail what it was like -- what the emotions of every moment of childhood and adolescence were like, and what the obsessions were at each age? Possibly because I share her Pittsburgh childhood (though two decades later) and many of her passions (reading, drawing, science, nature, observation of detail) I felt I'd found a kindred spirit. Somehow, Annie managed make the most mundane events interesting, with a combination of wry humor and reverence. Obviously she learned something from the family joke-telling drills -- her delivery was beautiful. And her descriptions. There's something in common here with Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion -- both Dillard and Keillor seem to have begun adulthood as sharp critics of their social situations, yet when they moved away they found, despite some hypocrisies, something also loving and nurturing and solid about their places and people of origin.