In our benighted age, which is as scornful of navel-gazing as it is desperate to find new avenues for its pursuit, memoirs and autobiographical writing proliferate and in proliferating incite bitterness. Long personal pieces on, for example, Salon or Slate are usually accompanied by several hundred comments, mostly variations on “I can’t believe someone got paid for this” or “I hate you.”
In many respects I’m as likely to be a hater as the next embittered internet user, but I think memoirs are nice. The Liars’ Club, Hons and Rebels, Goodbye to All That–I like me a memoir, you might say. The obvious caveat is if it is crappy. What I found so bewildering about the James Frey controversy was not that he had made things up, but that people had enjoyed his prose enough to feel personally betrayed upon learning of the author’s (rather transparent) perfidy. I would rather read forty-five leaked, unedited Twilights than one authentic, inauthentic Frey.
That said, I’d like to offer up a set of memoirs I feel that only a really first-class hater could malign. They are by Beverly Cleary, one of the architects of post-war American childhood, without whom we would have no Beezus or Ramona or Klickitat Street. In addition to being the hero of children (now grown-ups, although I hope children still read Ramona books), she’s also a fine memoirist. A Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet are my personal cure for winter blues or bad news or just generally feeling sort of droopy and dépaysé.
The first book, A Girl From Yamhill, documents Cleary’s childhood in Depression-era Oregon, from early years in a farm town, to schooldays in Portland, to her departure for junior college in California. In My Own Two Feet, Cleary goes to junior college, goes to Berkeley, falls in love, graduates library school, and starts a career that included a wartime stint in a barracks library. Yamhill is the better of the two, I think, but only by a minute measure. Perhaps it’s the influence of her long experience of writing for children, but there is something very immediate and compelling in the written memories of her own childhood.
Cleary maintains elegant balance on all fronts–she is warm without being sentimental, honest without being maudlin, probing without being neurotic, frank without being prurient. She writes about moving from small town to big city, the specter of pioneer ancestors, the pathos of only children, restless mothers, crooked teeth, perverted uncles, gloomy boyfriends, and tonsillitis. She writes about discovering the pleasure of reading and of writing. She writes about the uncertain times, her own uncertain future, and the miracle of California and junior college–begun with a solo trip on the Greyound bus, five dollars in her stockings.
It sounds appallingly smarmy, but when I read these books they give me a little national kick. I don’t get misty when I see a bald eagle on a gentleman’s tank top, but I have a soft spot for well-told narratives from across our geographic and cultural landscape. I like to read about the spunky women who went to college and made dresses out of old shirts and dreamed of writing children’s books.
Cleary writes on the familiar beauties of Mount Hood and the unique revelation of California, where avocados are eaten off the tree and Crab Louie abounds. She writes about San Francisco, which might be the most beautiful city in the world. She writes of driving over the Bay Bridge, newly opened to traffic, and of seeing the unfriendly scrub of Siskiyou County for the first time. These are books that make you feel the American West right in your bones.
I first read these when I had mostly outgrown Ramona but yearned for more Beverly Cleary. Maybe it’s because I was a young adult (as in Young Adult Fiction) before the advent of sixth-grade sexting, but I found these books meaningful even seventy years after the girlhood they described. I just read them again, and I’d like to think that they transcend time–that they’re just right for precocious little girls, ornery millenials, the young and old alike.
