Slowly, the narrator Dillard says, she’s “waking up,” discovering the external world beyond her own mind, even as she also lives to a large extent within her own head.Īnnie’s parents are energetic and exuberant: they treat joke-telling as an almost professional process, and include the children as they tinker with ideas and performances. Before she learns to read, Annie wanders around the neighborhood, playing football with the boys and throwing snowballs-at least until a car stops and the driver chases her and her friend all around the neighborhood. Annie also fixes her attention on other images and sensations, from her parents’ skin (which she feels doesn’t fit their bodies) to her neighbor Jo Ann Sheehy skating through the frozen streets at night. She’s amazed to discover this, and it teaches her that she can use her imagination, but also master and direct it through reason when she needs to. At five years old in 1950, Annie is preoccupied by the monster in her room, which turns out to be a shadow cast by light from a passing car. In her privileged community, women stayed home rather than working, and Presbyterians and Catholics (not to mention Jews) remained very much apart from one another. At the time, Annie is reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure novel, Kidnapped, and she too feels like she is awakening into a world where she can both observe and be observed.ĭillard paints a portrait of Pittsburgh in the early 1950s, in the years after World War II when families seemed to want things to get back to normal. Annie Dillard begins her memoir by recalling her father’s decision to leave the family for awhile (with his wife’s permission) and take his boat down the Allegheny River to New Orleans-a goal he developed from reading about boat trips in a book.

Dillard an american childhood