Dr aldean tartt biography samples

Capturing Childhood/Engaging the Adult Reader

The world of childhood is terrific material for writers, both memoirists and fiction writers and everyone in-between.  We all went through childhood, after all, so we can relate, and we know childhood to be intense, sensual, weighty.  Does anyone buy the myth of a happy childhood anymore?  Well, certainly some childhoods are happier than others, but regardless of how lucky we were in this regard, we usually can identify with children’s pain.  We “get” as adults how much things can hurt, how innocent or unprotected by our adult coping skills children can be.  We also can relish the freshness of experiences, the wonder of it all.  We seem drawn to see the world again through the eyes of children — and often that world, in writing, is more vivid than the one we experience through our own present weary vision.  Children are not “lesser” humans; they’re just at a different stage of the life experience.  They have the same ability to feel things (sometimes more intensely) and to have a whole consciousness, albeit not a particularly verbal one.  Therein lies the problem.  We didn’t have much language as young children; it was all sensation.  So the challenge for the writer of childhood stories is to capture the non-verbal felt experience of children while still appealing to the adult verbally sophisticated reader.

Begin to notice, as you read pieces about children, from a child’s point of view, how there is often (always?  I don’t know) the sense of the adult narrator, either overtly looking back (“I remember…”) or there as a kind of omniscient presence, setting the scene or providing the descriptive language that the child would not have had for herself at the time of the experience.  There seems always to be this dual or double voice in childhood stories.  It is hard to come up with a story in which there isn’t this adult intervention in the material at some leve

This is the time of year when just about every magazine and newspaper publishes a list of recommended summer reading. Some of these lists emphasize “beach books” — page-turners that don’t require much concentration. Others focus on the latest and greatest in literary fiction, while some provide an eclectic mix of new books for all kinds of readers. One list, in fact, suggests both Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy’s literary novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and  Sarah MacLean’s The Day of Duchess (#3 in the Scandal and Scoundrel romance series).

Some of the lists irk me with their guilt-inducing tone: “7 New Books You Need to Read This Summer” (Vulture); 22 Exciting New Books You Need to Read This Summer” (Buzzfeed); 24 Incredible New Books You Should Read This Summer” (Huffington Post); 10 Books You Have to Read This Summer” (Redbook) . . . well, you get the point. The fun of summer reading is to read whatever you want, with no sense of obligation.

The NewYork Times has a terrific list with a nice title: “Books to Breeze Through This Summer,” and Bill Gates recommends two of my favorites (Hillbilly Elegy and Born a Crime) in “5 Good Summer Reads.” I like his modest approach — just five well-chosen books, and they’re good. Not necessarily incredible or exciting, but solidly good.

In my online search for lists of recommended summer books, I came across a couple of quizzes designed to help readers find just the right book. One said my “reading personality” was “Big Kid”, which is pretty accurate; it also suggested I read an obscure book from 2011, “The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E.B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic by Michael Sims, which I absolutely loved. (I’m thinking this was a lucky guess because the other book it recommended was The