And one would be mistaken to call the energy Dillard exhibits in An American Childhood merely youthful "still I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day," she writes, "as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive."įirst let me praise the audiobook narration by Alexandra O'Karma. "The visible world turned me curious to books the books propelled me reeling back to the world." From her parents she inherited a love of language-her mother's speech was "an endlessly interesting, swerving path"-and the understanding that "you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself," not for anyone else's approval or desire.
"Everywhere, things snagged me," she writes.
The voracious young Dillard embraces headlong one fascination after another-from drawing to rocks and bugs to the French symbolists. In this intoxicating account of her childhood, Dillard climbs back inside her 5-, 10-, and 15-year-old selves with apparent effortlessness. She remembers playing with the skin on her mother's knuckles, which "didn't snap back it lay dead across her knuckle in a yellowish ridge." She remembers the compulsion to spend a whole afternoon (or many whole afternoons) endlessly pitching a ball at a target. She remembers the exhilaration of whipping a snowball at a car and having it hit straight on.
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