An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [105]
I write this at a wide desk in a pine shed as I always do these recent years, in this life I pray will last, while the summer sun closes the sky to Orion and to all the other winter stars over my roof. The young oaks growing just outside my windows wave in the light, so that concentrating, lost in the past, I see the pale leaves wag and think as my blood leaps: Is someone coming?
Is it Mother coming for me, to carry me home? Could it be my own young, my own glorious Mother, coming across the grass for me, the morning light on her skin, to get me and bring me back? Back to where I last knew all I needed, the way to her two strong arms?
And I wake a little more and reason, No, it is the oak leaves in the sun, pale as a face. I am here now, with this my own dear family, up here at this high latitude, out here at the farthest exploratory tip of this my present bewildering age. And still I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANNIE DILLARD is the author of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as well as An American Childhood, The Living, and Mornings Like This. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Dillard attended Hollins College in Virginia. After living for five years in the Pacific Northwest, she returned to the East Coast, where she lives with her family.
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Praise
“Casts a golden glow on family life…Reading [Annie Dillard] can be as exciting as reading a thriller—though the only ‘plot’ lies in her unfolding of a child’s entry into consciousness…. Her book is a celebration of being alive.”
—New Woman
“This sunny memoir…reminds one of an Impressionist painting, her memories shimmer on the page.”
—Cyra McFadden, Los Angeles Times
“[Annie Dillard] is one of those people who seem to be more fully alive than most of us, more nearly wide-awake than human beings generally get to be.”
—Noel Perrin, New York Times
“As I read An American Childhood, I [had] the astonishing experience of seeing my neighborhood, my very childhood, unroll before my eyes in the pages of someone else’s book.”
—USA Today
“Annie Dillard has been twice-blessed—by literate and prosperous parents, who gave her unconditional love and freedom of mind and person, and by her own extraordinary gifts of observation and language. The reader of An American Childhood reaps the fruit of these blessings.”
—Hilma Wolitzer, Newsday
“A catalogue of loves lovingly told…This delighted exploration of the world of books is by far the most enjoyable thing in An American Childhood and, in its modest way, a classic love story.”
—Washington Post
“Marvelous.”
—Kansas City Star
“An American Childhood might be described as a metaphysical memoir—closer in spirit to Rousseau or St. Augustine than to most contemporary memoirists…. Her writing celebrates and revels in its surprising loops and leaps of insight the value of the scrupulously examined life.”
—Providence Journal
“Dillard is a natural stylist with a flair and keen love for words. We’ve seen it in her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Living by Fiction, and now this, her most luminous work…. An American Childhood’s penultimate chapter is literature on high beam. Her memories rush and bubble up, a kind of waterfall of language and feeling, in summation…. Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood is a glorious, exultant book. You must read it.”
—Columbus Dispatch
“A rare treat, an autobiography you’ll want to read more than once…When she…reawaken[s] your own joy, you can’t help but be grateful.”
—San Jose Mercury-News