The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly backup, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. “What does it feel like to be alive? Living, you stand under a waterfall.

I sincerely hope it inspires you to pick up this book or one of her many others. I can think of no other way to explain the breathtaking artistry of her writing than to include a short selection of her prose from An American Childhood. And so as Dillard recounts her younger days, we feel her longing to return to those selfless, free moments, and we hear in her voice the desire to foster the same unconsciousness that children so naturally possess. The unconsciousness of childhood allows a girl to throw herself, wildly, into the beating world around her. She guides the reader through her childhood with the sobering reminder that as one grows older, the ability to appreciate the world diminishes as we become more and more aware of the self. She stands amidst a world both beautiful and haunting, taking in the wonder of nature alongside the horror of human behavior.ĭillard’s prose captures both the inner and the outer marvels of being alive. As a young girl, Dillard devours the world around her becoming intrigued and obsessed by varying fascinations such as art and rocks, bugs and literature.

Her prose painlessly dissects the struggles and demands of childhood, of growing up. Steady yourself, I say, take this in slowly, and so I turn back and I leaf through pages I’ve already read, and I revel in the beauty of the written word.Īn American Childhood is a memoir, an autobiography about Dillard’s childhood in Pittsburg around the 1940’s and 1950’s. When it happens, my heart beats harder and my mind struggles to keep my eyes in check, to prevent me from flying through page after page. Pulling books from under my bed, from library shelves, from friends’ dusty collections, I hunger to find connection. Such an experience with an author or a novel is why I read with a voracious intensity. “Can I read you just one more passage?” I would ask Ryan because Dillard’s prose struck me, moved me to the point where I wanted to hear her words roll off of my tongue. I sat on my couch, with a Pottery Barn pillow in my lap, and I read, rapt, An American Childhood by Annie Dillard.

An american childhood