What do You think about An American Childhood (2013)?
She grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1950’s, in a house full of comedians, reading books. Annie Dillard tells us about the joy of growing up a book lover and nature worshiper in forested hills. Dillard is best known for her meditations on nature and spirituality in “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” which won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize, but in “An American Childhood,” Dillard chronicles her growth out of childhood selfishness into enlightenment. “I woke in bits…piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. Her parents were different. One day her father’s favorite books (“On the Road” and “Life on the Mississippi”) “went to his head,” and he quit the family business to journey down the Mississippi on a pilgrimage to New Orleans, home of Dixieland jazz. Her mother was also a role model in nonconformity: Torpid conformism was a kind of sin; it was stupidity itself, the mighty stream against which Mother would never cease to struggle. If you upheld no minority opinions, or if you failed to risk total ostracism for them daily, the world would be a better place without you.... Opposition emboldened Mother, and she would take on anybody on any issue. She would fly a him in a flurry of passion, as a songbird selflessly attacks a big hawk.(116-17)Books were instrumental to the formation of Dillard’s awakened conscience:What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized. This life could be found and joined, like the Resistance. I kept this exhilarating faith alive in myself. (183)Everywhere things snagged her in the lush green of Western Pennsylvania. She woke up to all that she had been overlooking--rocks, bugs, rain. She asked herself, “What else was I missing?” The visible world turned her to books; the books in turn propelled her to back to the world. Her favorite book was “The Field Book of Ponds and Streams,” which she compared to “The Book of Common Prayer.” In fact, the Bible was one of the books that fired Dillard’s moral imagination, but, rather than conformity, she found the Bible radical and misunderstood by the people who claimed to love it the most. Why did they spread this scandalous document before our eyes? If adults had read the Bible, I thought, they would have hid it. They did not recognize the vivid danger that we would, through repeated exposure, catch a case of its wild opposition to their world. (134) Dillard dropped out of the Presbyterian Church as a teenager, but a spiritual view of the world continued to fire her nature writing. In an epigraph to her memoir, she quotes Psalm 26: “I have loved O Lord the beauty of thy house and the place where dwelleth thy glory.” Geography was kind to Dillard. She believes that when everything else has gone from her brain, when she has forgotten the facts and the faces of family and friends, she will remember topology: “the dreaming memory of the land.” And her mind will return to the green sloping hills gathered around the Three Rivers. As a teen, I spent many summers with my older sister who lived near where Dillard lived, and I easily reconstruct the green world that young Dillard inhabited. I was struck by Dillard’s sense of place and her description of her bookish childhood as an erratic journey into enlightenment and the interior life—which she likens to dolphins bursting through the seas to continually submerge, leap, and dive again. I understand the turmoil caused by the collision of books, nature, and spirituality, and I am grateful for my kinship with her. June 29, 2013
—Steve Sckenda
With the 1987 publication of An American Childhood, Annie Dillard, novelist, critic and woman of all trades helped ushered in the age of the memoir. For this alone we should thank her.Non traditional in many ways, Dillard begins her work by claiming, "When everything else has gone from my brain...what will be left is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay." From this emerges a rich and generous history of Pittsburg, the landscape upon which Dillard's childhood is inscribed. She takes the reader on a journey through every rock she overturned with a popsicle stick in hopes of finding buried treasure, through the alleyways where childhood games were played with ferocity, to the hallowed halls of Junior League dances where children are manufactured to become the city's elite. Her personal history is so entwined with that of the city that they are artfully rendered one in the same.Unlike other memoirs, An American Childhood flouts the traditional coming of age trope. Instead, Dillard focuses on awakening from the self absorption of early childhood and entrance into the greater world. In a sense, she chronicles the Lacanian moment of self awareness, and does so lyrically and deftly.For me, her work most resonates when she speaks of the importance of books and reading in forming her malleable psyche and material interactions with the world. In her words, "The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world." For Dillard, reading becomes a love "most requited" (according to Wetherell's Post review). It is the medium through which boundaries are shattered, hopes are realized, and escapes are planned.In this memoir, Dillard's prowess as a poet shines through. Her lyrical recollections of the past seem as if they are memories from your own childhood. Even if you have not read any of her previous works, read An American Childhood in order to relieve the innocence and wonder of your own youth.
—Casey
I tried to read Annie Dillard when I was in college, but I just didn't get it. Last summer I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for the second time, and this time it made sense, not just intellectually- though it was intellectually gratifying-but this time somewhere in my soul.So I approached _An American Childhood_ with expectation, and I was not disappointed. Dillard manages to create a memoir at once both nostalgic and brutally honest, hazy but precise, idealized yet imperfect--as though this is what it means to be American.I read the book slowly and languorously over a number of months, picking it up when I wanted to chew on experience or savor language. Dillard makes the daily activities of growing up--dancing in the living room, riding your bike around town, sitting bored in church--the stuff of dreams. In her memory, Pittsburgh brims with stifled possibility, and the angst of adolescence is just the condition of "the child of the 20th century." We are all of us Dillard, and none of us Dillard. With her, we want our rough edges "to cut a hole in the world's surface."
—Melody
