“Adults were coming apart, but they neither noticed nor minded.”īoth of these charming people delight in language, Dillard’s mother speaking in a patois that suggests a one-woman vaudeville routine. Adults had misshapen, knuckly hands loose in their skin like bones in bags it was a wonder they could open jars.” Obvious as this is to Dillard, who hides her revulsion out of tact, the decrepitude is lost on the ancient ones. “We children had, for instance, proper hands our fluid, pliant fingers joined their skin. “Our parents and grandparents, and all their friends, seemed insensible to their own prominent defect, their limp, coarse skin. With the shrewdness of a forensic scientist, and with her sense of humor already well formed, she hits upon the most important difference between children and adults. The book begins when Dillard is 5 years old.

In “An American Childhood,” she demonstrates her gift of total recall and an eye that misses nothing, records everything.

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.Toward the end of this endearing account of growing up in Pittsburgh, Annie Dillard writes a sentence that sums up its astonishing richness of detail: “It all got noticed.” Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning naturalist, literary critic and writer of beautifully wrought prose. '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.

An american childhood