from an american childhood annie dillard

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

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. Loosely organised by chronology, the individual sections each explore some aspect of childhood. 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. 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. 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. True, we are of an age, so much of her experience chimes with mine. Dillard’s inimitable prose makes this memoir one of the best I’ve ever read.

From an american childhood annie dillard