This is a series of stories under the title “My Storied Childhood“.
According to the American academic Ben Yagoda, a recent study in the U.S. reveals that between 2004 and 2008, there was a 400 per cent increase in the sales of books of autobiography, commonly if inaccurately referred to as memoir, a statistic that demonstrates the contemporary popularity of personal narrative accounts of the writer’s life as seen through his or her own eyes. Memoir, says Yagoda, is thus “the central form of the culture.” The first such memoir, or autobiography, is considered to have been St. Augustine’s Confessions, written between 397 and 400 A.D., his chronicle of his life from a memorable childhood and dissolute youth to his return to the Christian faith of his mother later in life. Early memoirs were often didactic, the memoirist’s purpose in telling his story being to inculcate in his readers a strong desire for improved personal morality, his own mistakes intended as a warning to his readers: don’t do as I did; learn from my experience. Modern memoirs, by contrast, avoid preaching, and tend to be characterized by frankness and honesty, emphasizing the inner life of the writer, particularly his or her emotions and preoccupations, invariably paying significant attention to childhood and youth for their formative influences, as we are each of us what we have been.
Some of these childhood memoirs emphasize early events in their authors’ dysfunctional family lives, while others less grim may bask in the nostalgia of a long-lost childhood paradise in the midst of a close family. They are all as varied as the lives they chronicle, or for that matter, as different as the personalities of their readers, the events described regarded by different readers as either dull or dramatic, convincing or exaggerated, as each case may be. A book’s enduring popularity is usually, but not always, a good indication of its merit.
Notable modern memoirs of childhood have been written by a number of well-known authors. I will cite some of these here. They include Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, about her family’s homesteading in the American Midwest, children’s writer and former wartime Spitfire pilot Roald Dahl’s Boy, and former President Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, which details his search for his father, who abandoned him. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is about the impact on her of life in Iran following the Islamic Revolution that overthrew the Shah. Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, recounts a dysfunctional childhood in rural Texas, while Ernest Hillen’s The Way of a Boy is a story of the author’s life in Dutch-ruled Java before and during the Japanese invasion of his birthplace. U.S. Senator J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is a memorable account of growing up poor in Appalachia. Penelope Lively’s Oleander, Jacaranda, is the fascinating account of her upbringing in the colonial Egypt of the 1930s and 1940s. South African writer J.M. Coetzee’s equally interesting Boyhood, is written, intriguingly, in the third person, about his childhood in the Karoo flatlands in the 1950s. Others are the early chapters of Tara Westover’s unconventional family life in rural Idaho in her compelling account Educated. Bestselling author of Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost is the account of her difficult childhood in postwar rural northern England, while Saroo Brierley’s unforgettable story of his separation from family and home in India, his eventual adoption by an Australian family, and his search for his biological mother, in Lion, was recently memorably filmed. One of my favourites is The Enchanted Places, the gentle memoir of Christopher Milne’s childhood, immortalized by his father A.A. Milne in his Winnie-The-Pooh books, in which his son Christopher Robin is a central figure, along with Pooh, Piglet, and Eeyore. Another is White Boy Running, Christopher Hope’s condemnation of the apartheid regime in South Africa, where he was born and spent his childhood before leaving the country in disgust in 1974. There are many more such.
