An American Childhood
The first time I encountered Annie Dillard was the summer between those middling high school years. My English teacher assigned An American Childhood and I dutifully purchased a copy that I don’t think I ever finished. Today my copy of the book looks brand new. There are some dents at the corners of the spine, but my history professor’s “spine test” would prove that I didn’t get far beyond the front cover. Everything is still in tact, waiting.
High school student that I was back then, I was inclined to write off anything that I didn’t enjoy as useless and boring. I couldn’t excuse it as bad because it’s “old” (the fate of many a pre-1900 author before a 16 year old) because what resonates more with a teenager in the suburbs than a story about growing up in the suburbs? Unfortunately, I was too impatient—or maybe just too young—to appreciate Dillard back then.
After a little bit of prodding from my English department advisor, I enrolled in a creative non-fiction class during my final semester in college. Susannah Mintz, professor of EN-280 on those Wednesday and Friday mornings, assigned a satiating variety of short pieces for us to read, study, analyze, imitate, (and probably butcher), and gnaw on throughout the course of the semester. Dillard came up, of course, and by this point in my academic life I knew that “Annie Dillard” meant something. We read “Living Like Weasels” for one of Mintz’s first classes and, much like everyone else, I loved it. Dillard has a way of describing those woods behind her house in a way that’s exciting and surprising without feeling overwrought, aggressive, or esoteric. I look forward to reading—nay, luxuriating in—An American Childhood, especially because I have a sense of what’s in store. The first sentence of the prologue is enough to remind me of that.
When everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capital, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.
At the end of last semester Mintz commented on a piece of my writing that it seemed I was most comfortable describing landscapes. She may be right and that may be why I’ve come around to Annie Dillard so completely… even before I’ve read An American Childhood in full. The land is a beautiful thing to bring to the page, and remembering the topology of our lives—not just the ground we stood on—is too.
