![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() If a memoir is a record of events as filtered through the author’s memory, it’s safe to call this a memoir, but its narrative intelligence doesn’t feel like an ego testifying to its adventures. We grow egos in order to save ourselves from upheavals like this.Īn American Childhood (originally published in 1987, when Dillard was 42) is about the coming-into-being of consciousness. Twenty-four years later I see that the teenager who felt at one with this book understood it only obscurely all the same, he was alive to it in a way the adult mind can never replicate. I kept walking, stopped, thought, and read the page again. I stopped on the sidewalk and reread a page while the cars passed. The book told of a deeper world inside the atoms of anything the mind perceived. I felt both exhilarated and irrelevant, awake, free of self, present with my surroundings. I couldn’t understand the effect it had on me. I first read it as a teenager in Cleveland, Ohio: sitting on a concrete wharf by Lake Erie with the interstate at my back sitting on a bench in the hardwood forest of a county park walking on suburban sidewalks by pizza joints and strip malls. ![]()
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