In a sense, she chronicles the Lacanian moment of self awareness, and does so lyrically and deftly.For me, her work most resonates when she speaks of the importance of books and reading in forming her malleable psyche and material interactions with the world. Instead, Dillard focuses on awakening from the self absorption of early childhood and entrance into the greater world. Her personal history is so entwined with that of the city that they are artfully rendered one in the same.Unlike other memoirs, An American Childhood flouts the traditional coming of age trope. She takes the reader on a journey through every rock she overturned with a popsicle stick in hopes of finding buried treasure, through the alleyways where childhood games were played with ferocity, to the hallowed halls of Junior League dances where children are manufactured to become the city's elite. For this alone we should thank her.Non traditional in many ways, Dillard begins her work by claiming, 'When everything else has gone from my brain.what will be left is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay.' From this emerges a rich and generous history of Pittsburg, the landscape upon which Dillard's childhood is inscribed.

With the 1987 publication of An American Childhood, Annie Dillard, novelist, critic and woman of all trades helped ushered in the age of the memoir.

From an american childhood