An American Childhood- Annie Dillard

An American Childhood is Annie Dillard's memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950's. I read this book because I had been rampant in thought and engrossed and emotionally invested in Catcher and its themes, and had loved the discussion- I didn't feel ready and simply did not want to leave Catcher in the dust. Here I found a novel that promised a complete and reliable account of growing up (she explores every phase- beginning at 5 and ending when she is getting ready to leave Pittsburgh at 17) that was sure to touch on Catcher ideas ( becoming awake, truth, illusion, leaving childhood etc.) and also come from a truly remarkable and insightful voice, as Annie Dillard's work has always seemed to me.

Dillard tells the story of her childhood "interior life" through a sharp and observant lens that combines her childhood personality and perspective of the time with ominous insight that comes from looking back as an adult. The experiences she recalls are perhaps universal and unremarkable in terms of what childhood is (filling the gaping holes of boredom with imagination: inventing games and ideas, playing in the woods, being with friends, being alone, reading and learning and exploring that knowledge in the real world- She was more intelligent than I am now in many ways at only 9 years old, reading books about insects and birds and rocks and butterflies and adventuring to explore them in the real world, identify them, collect them, explain them as an expert...) but she somehow takes the ordinary and turns all of her experiences into remarkable comments on life. Ultimately, (although it may sound cheesy or cliche) I think the novel celebrates just living life, curiosity, and the wonders of the world- what life has to offer- how we perceive those possibilities as we are young and when we become older, what nature and history and the world can be, the vastness of exploration. She is close to concluding the novel when she writes, "And still I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day" (250). The novel begins when she is 5 and bewildered and entranced by life, and I think it ends in the same way.

I love this book and I know I will revisit it frequently. I do think it is the kind of novel that you can read again and again and at different times discover something new and extraordinary in every read (I feel that I have only absorbed a mere fraction of the books depth in this week), or just purely enjoy it every time, if only to put it down marveling at Annie Dillard as an author herself. While the childhood stories she tells may seem light and unremarkable, the ideas and the insight that come with them seemed to me as profound and heavy, and at times I had to put it down in order to really absorb what she was saying and consider what I thought of it. If anything, her prose give you everything to think about.

Annie Dillard's language in this book is so beautiful and spirited that I found myself reading slower and slower as I went. Her story is the "American Childhood" and I think that most everyone will see a piece of their childhood reflected in hers, or a piece of her anywhere from innocence to adolescence inherent in themselves. The New York Times comments on this book, Annie Dillard is one of those people who seem to be more fully alive than most of us, more nearly wide awake than a human being generally gets to be". This is exactly what the book is like. If nothing else, I would genuinely want to read any and every book that entails being told a story from a like perspective.

Amazon Link: http://www.amazon.com/American-Childhood-Annie-Dillard/dp/0060915188