{"id":3015,"date":"2015-06-14T11:03:59","date_gmt":"2015-06-14T15:03:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/tatar\/?p=3015"},"modified":"2015-06-14T11:14:50","modified_gmt":"2015-06-14T15:14:50","slug":"remembering-a-childhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/2015\/06\/14\/remembering-a-childhood\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering a Childhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"brown-girl-dreaming\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Yes, guilty as charged. \u00a0I admit that the idea of a novel in free verse stood as a barrier between me and\u00a0Brown Girl Dreaming. \u00a0<\/em>I had ordered the volume after reading about the flap with Daniel Handler at the National Book Awards, but let it languish until a transcontinental\u00a0plane ride inspired me to pack up\u00a0a few of the unread books I’d ordered over the past months–nothing like a plane ride for reading novels.<\/p>\n

This is the kind of book that makes you want to go back. \u00a0I found myself moving back and forth between reading as an adult and reading as a former child, and at times wishing that the book had been there when I was growing up. \u00a0“Memory is strange,” Woodson writes. \u00a0“When I first began to write\u00a0Brown Girl Dreaming<\/em>, my childhood memories of Greenville came flooding back to me–small moments and bigger ones, too. \u00a0Things I hadn’t thought about in years and other stuff I’ve never forgotten.” \u00a0What I love about this book is how the reader’s encounter with Woodson’s childhood memories mirrors\u00a0the author’s experience in writing the book. \u00a0Reading the book and writing it trigger repeated madeleine-like experiences.<\/p>\n

I’m reminded of how odd it is that we have this category called YA fiction–Christina Phillips Mattson has written a dissertation on the topic (Harvard 2015 Ph.D.)! This is a novel about a childhood, and it captures that childhood as powerfully as Proust or Rilke did in their time. \u00a0Today more than ever, writers of so-called YA fiction are challenging a category that was most likely coined by someone in the publishing industry. \u00a0I have not yet tracked down the origins of the term, but I suspect it emerged in the 1950s and 1960s by someone who decided that the coming-of-age novel was not “adult” reading. \u00a0Could the phenomenal commercial success of Salinger’s\u00a0Catcher in the Rye\u00a0<\/em>and Golding’s Lord of the Flies<\/i> have had something to do with it?<\/p>\n

On another note (I could go on and on about Woodson’s book), here’s what I posted on Facebook:<\/p>\n

I read Brown Girl Dreaming\u00a0<\/em>this afternoon and what should be in it but the Selfish Giant! Woodson describes hearing her teacher read the story and going to the library to borrow a copy of it. “I read the story again and again.” She memorizes the story and recites it to her classmates, who are deeply impressed. “But I just shrug, not knowing what to say. How can I explain to anyone that stories are like air to me, I breathe them in and let them out over and over again.” WOW
\nRemember Scout’s words in To Kill a Mockingbird: “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Yes, guilty as charged. \u00a0I admit that the idea of a novel in free verse stood as a barrier between me and\u00a0Brown Girl Dreaming. \u00a0I had ordered the volume after reading about the flap with Daniel Handler at the National Book Awards, but let it languish until a transcontinental\u00a0plane ride inspired me to pack […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2125,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2125"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3015"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3021,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015\/revisions\/3021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}