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A review by cais
A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews
challenging
dark
funny
fast-paced
4.75
"The world that circumscribed the people I come from had so little margin for error, for bad luck, that when something went wrong, it almost always brought something else down with it."
This is an incredible book because of Harry Crews' great writing and it is a horrible book because of what he writes about. Words like "poverty" or "deprivation" are accurate, but they don't begin to describe his childhood. Violence was normal, whether it was the violence of men settling scores with one another, men pointing shotguns at wives, children being whipped and beaten for bad behavior or sometimes just because; the everyday violence of farm life where animals exist to work hard or to be slaughtered; the sexual violence of little boys as young as five or six being told by slightly older boys that they need to "git some" and the little girls are where they get "it." This was all normal for Crews. That doesn't mean it wasn't often horribly hard. At the age of six he said, "it occurred to me for the first time that being alive was like being awake in a nightmare."
But Crews doesn't judge his people or the place he came from. In a few sentences he writes about an aunt he loved so much, who was so gentle, and who also, in such a quietly easy way, taught him not to refer to Black men as "Mister" but with a racial epithet. As an adult it's clear he recognizes the racism of this, but he never condemns his aunt. He doesn't condemn anyone, really.
Despite such often painful circumstances, this is not a miserable book. There is a lot of love and even humor, dark awful humor, in the storytelling. Crews views his childhood with zero self-pity, but with an equanimity that allows him to understand how growing up in such a place with such people shaped him in ways that could not be altered. Even though his life became quite a different one from that of the people he grew up with, the place of his childhood would always be at the core of his identity. His childhood was not lived so much as survived.
Both as an autobiography and as a document of a particular time in the U.S., this is a remarkable book. Crews' writing is honest, unaffected. He doesn't need to tell you "this was bad" because just describing reality tells you how bad something was. Nothing here rings false. This book is fairly brief, but powerful, sometimes difficult because of horrible things, but it is always compelling.
This is an incredible book because of Harry Crews' great writing and it is a horrible book because of what he writes about. Words like "poverty" or "deprivation" are accurate, but they don't begin to describe his childhood. Violence was normal, whether it was the violence of men settling scores with one another, men pointing shotguns at wives, children being whipped and beaten for bad behavior or sometimes just because; the everyday violence of farm life where animals exist to work hard or to be slaughtered; the sexual violence of little boys as young as five or six being told by slightly older boys that they need to "git some" and the little girls are where they get "it." This was all normal for Crews. That doesn't mean it wasn't often horribly hard. At the age of six he said, "it occurred to me for the first time that being alive was like being awake in a nightmare."
But Crews doesn't judge his people or the place he came from. In a few sentences he writes about an aunt he loved so much, who was so gentle, and who also, in such a quietly easy way, taught him not to refer to Black men as "Mister" but with a racial epithet. As an adult it's clear he recognizes the racism of this, but he never condemns his aunt. He doesn't condemn anyone, really.
Despite such often painful circumstances, this is not a miserable book. There is a lot of love and even humor, dark awful humor, in the storytelling. Crews views his childhood with zero self-pity, but with an equanimity that allows him to understand how growing up in such a place with such people shaped him in ways that could not be altered. Even though his life became quite a different one from that of the people he grew up with, the place of his childhood would always be at the core of his identity. His childhood was not lived so much as survived.
Both as an autobiography and as a document of a particular time in the U.S., this is a remarkable book. Crews' writing is honest, unaffected. He doesn't need to tell you "this was bad" because just describing reality tells you how bad something was. Nothing here rings false. This book is fairly brief, but powerful, sometimes difficult because of horrible things, but it is always compelling.