An American Childhood

Part One begins when Dillard is 5 years old. She describes her suburban neighborhood where the men empty out in the morning, leaving the women and the children to their separate lives. She describes both the incredible silence and the sudden noises of the neighborhood. Dillard also depicts the passage of time: “Time streamed in full flood beside me on the kitchen floor; time roared raging beside me down its swollen banks; and when I woke I was so startled I fell in” (17).

Furthermore, Dillard describes a nightly terror. An oblong of light races around the top of her bedroom walls, accompanied by a fiendish sound, and vanishes into the corner by her bed. She is certain that if she tells anyone about this entity that it will kill her. Her sister, Amy, sleeps in her own bed across the room. Amy sleeps through the entire ordeal, every night. Finally, Dillard realizes that a car generates the light and noise: the racing oblong is a reflection of a streetlight on the windshield of a car.

Dillard next details her revulsion for the aging skin of adults, coming loose from its bones and muscles—even on her mother’s knuckles when her mother was about 27.